Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  Ellsworth had been thinking about it. “If they do, we will have to engage them,” he said. It was ironic; the Rockrats had been on the verge of forming an independent civilisation, something that worried him… and Ian. He’d discussed the matter at length with the bartender; the source of the Rockrat culture lay in the fact that the Rockrats could not afford to develop a sophisticated culture, something that could cost lives and ships. Their few laws covered matters such as personal rights and salvage laws; they didn’t touch upon anything else. If the culture grew bigger, they would need more laws, and more laws, and the voluntarist simplicity would be gone. Everyone knew where they stood with Kyle Short; lawyers, a product of a sophisticated culture, would ensure that no one knew where they stood.

  He shook his head. “There would be no choice about it,” he continued. “Our only hope is to build up the fleet here, in secrecy, and if they start probing through this area of space, they will realise what we’re doing and then they’ll try to stamp on us.”

  “They might succeed,” Cindy said. “Your men are good, but they lack spit and polish.”

  “You don’t need spit and polish to become a Rockrat,” Ellsworth said. “You need courage, experience, knowledge and a certain amount of bloody-mindedness. You don’t need to be…haughty, or racist, or unpleasant, but you need to be able to cooperate with some people on a minimal level.”

  He smiled. The belt might not have been the haven for arse-bandits that the gutter press claimed, but there was certainly a fair amount of interracial breeding…if that term could be used any longer, with very real aliens around. His own heritage was a strange mixture; ever since refugee women had been invited to the belt to marry Rockrats, the Belt had been the most equal-opportunity place in the solar system, not least because it was so hard to work out what someone wanted to discriminate against. The only people who were discriminated against in the belt were the incompetents, those who survived their encounter with Mother Nature, red of tooth and claw in the black vacuum. No one would condemn him for rejecting known incompetents for the fleet; one of the rejected Rockrats had gone out in a small ship and somehow gotten himself killed.

  “I know that,” Cindy said. “The question is simple; how long will it take to complete the fleet?”

  “Roughly another month,” Ellsworth said. He ran the projections daily, basing them on the information Cindy had provided from her mysterious base… which couldn’t be that far from Freeport One, not if they weren’t using fusion drives. He had set up a private observation program of his own, looking in the general direction he suspected Area 51 to be based… although so far he had found nothing. It was quite easy to hide things in the belt with a little effort. “That should give us enough firepower to be fairly confident of a victory.”

  “Good,” Short said. He leaned forward. “What about the crewmen?”

  Ellsworth winced. There was an undertone of deep meaning in his voice. “They don’t know the source of the warships, not yet,” he said. “They have guessed that they are being produced by the industrial plants that had been launched out here by the Great Powers, but so far they don’t know anything about Area 51. Once they do find out…”

  “They won’t be happy,” Short said. “I will take all of the blame on myself.”

  He paused. “Are you still here?”

  “Come on,” Ellsworth said, to Cindy. The blatant hint had been easy to understand; Short would be contemplating the end of his career, perhaps even the end of his existence as a Rockrat. His people would forgive him a great deal, but they would never forgive him lying to them, whatever the reason. “I owe you a drink.”

  Ian waved to them as they entered the bar, passing them both drinks without being asked. Cindy pursed her lips as she glazed around the bar; Ellsworth could almost read her thoughts. The women who sold their bodies to live, the crewmen who spent most of their time on the asteroid alternating between the bar and the brothel, the DOWN WITH EARTH poster that someone had put up on one wall… she didn’t approve. A set of nude photographs of a Chinese girl had been placed on the notice board; the girl was literally selling herself to a Rockrat who was prepared to take care of her, and her children. Cindy really didn’t approve…

  “That poor girl,” she said, her voice, for once, compassionate. “Does she really hope to find a sugar daddy out here?”

  “There’s little room for the weak out here,” Ellsworth said softly. There were times when he realised just how cold the belt could be; a hard environment had bred hard people. “She would have come here as one of the mail order brides, met a Rockrat she thought she could live with, had his children, cooked his meals… and then the bastard died on her. She’s being honest, and there will always be room for a permanent girl in someone’s life…”

  Cindy scowled at him. “Never thought about it yourself?”

  “I have considered it,” Ellsworth admitted. “It’s not like it was fifty-odd years ago, back when the entire practice began; back then, the Rockrats had problems because there were no whores, just wives. Some women put out for other men with their husband’s consent; others broke the martial agreement and found themselves dumped by their husbands. We can’t really make life easier for people out here; we can feed her – we can feed the entire population – without problems, almost for free, but anything past that? Not without committing more resources than anyone would feel comfortable with to taking care of the helpless.”

  “Barbaric,” Cindy commented. Ellsworth supposed she was right, at least to some degree, but it was life. “What’s going to happen to her?”

  “If she finds a man, she’ll marry him,” Ellsworth said. “If not…”

  “Fat chance,” Cindy interrupted. She smiled a droll, twisted smile. “She’s got… four squalling children, three boys and a girl. Who’s going to want her?”

  Ellsworth laughed. “This is the Belt,” he reminded her. “Social mores are different here. Those children will spend time learning with their new father and working with him; they may even remain with his ship permanently as new Rockrats. You’d be surprised just how many families there are out here, on their own ships and earning money for the entire family.” He paused to study the picture, noting the firm breasts and neat, pretty face. “The deal might be quite… advantageous.”

  He paused, taking a moment to lecture her; he knew it would get on her nerves. “It’s a question of economics and everyone on the belt knows in their bones how economics work on such a scale,” he said. “On Earth, children like that are a drain on someone’s finances that can never be repaid, particularly, I might add, as they are a reminder that someone else fucked your wife. Here, children are an asset to whoever has them, and they will certainly take up an apprenticeship with the new father, whoever he is.”

  “Heartless,” Cindy said. There was a note of very real disgust in her voice. “Is there no room for love in the belt?”

  Ellsworth shook his head. “Not really, no,” he said. He spoke without regret. “What about you? What happened to your family anyway?”

  Cindy’s face twisted. “There’s not much to the story,” she said, simply. “They had a falling out around forty years ago and my branch of the family moved back to New Jamestown on the moon. There really is nothing else.”

  Ellsworth didn’t believe her, but knew better than to pry further; privacy was respected in the Belt. Moving back to the moon, particularly back then, would have cost a great deal of money, more, perhaps, than a large Rockrat family could afford. If something had happened that had caused them to go to such an expense, what could it have been? If they hadn’t paid for it, then who had… and why?

  He dismissed it with a shake of his head. He would probably never find out.

  Cindy glanced down at her watch. “There’s four hours to go until the next exercise,” she said. She looked up at him, her face as inscrutable as a cat’s face. “What do you want to do until then?”

  Ellsworth leered at her, trying to hide his thoughts. �
��Would you like to jump into bed with me?”

  Cindy drew back her fist for a mock blow. “Not unless you save my life,” she said. Her voice became mocking and mischievous. “And, until then, not fuck you.”

  Ellsworth laughed at the pun. “You’d fit in well here,” he said. The first female Rockrats had been as tough as nails as well, not least because some of them had been crammed in with horny and sweaty males far from any symbols of law and order. “You have just the right attitude.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” Cindy said. She finished her drink in one long, unladylike swallow. “I’m going to get some rest, Jake; I suggest that you do the same.”

  She stood up and walked out of the bar, her swaying walk an incitement to riot. “She’s putting it on for you,” Ian said, materialising behind him somehow. The bartender’s face was carefully bland. “That’s one interesting lady.”

  “Yes,” Ellsworth agreed, feeling wistful for the first time in years. He couldn’t remember feeling this way during his last romance, years ago. “That she is, indeed.”

  * * *

  The days became a week and then two weeks, mostly spent drilling on the new ships and the simulators, which had been supplied directly from Area 51. The handful of hackers among the Rockrats had reported that the systems had been sealed with some of the most tricky and fiendish encryption they’d ever encountered; the source code alone seemed almost impenetrable.

  Ellsworth hadn’t been surprised; there were so few programs that were really restricted to only a few users that they were almost certain to be protected with the most powerful security that the designer could invent. The USSF wouldn’t want Rockrats powering around the Belt with their latest designs… although that particular cat had already gotten out of the bag. Enough Rockrats had studied the USSF ships, even under the impression that they had been designed by other Rockrats, to incorporate most of their design improvements into their own designs.

  But that, Ellsworth reflected, was how the Belt worked. Ideas, particularly ones that could save lives or maximise the potential of the belt’s limited manpower, were always stolen and duplicated. It was just a reflection of how the Belt had become more pragmatic than Earth, or even the moon; when it was possible to produce a million knock-off copies, perfect in every detail, of an item, it lost its value. Singers, movie stars and producers had all discovered that their products were duplicated and placed for free on the internet; the smart ones had adapted and concentrated on live performances and more dues for the actors or singers. The stupid ones had gone the way of the dinosaurs. It wouldn’t be that long before technology changed the shape of the belt, again, but until then, the Rockrats would survive and adapt. Those who didn’t adapt tended to fall by the wayside.

  He watched as a group of crewmen went through a simulation, working together as a team, despite Cindy’s objections. Rockrats could work together and often did; the problem was in convincing them that they had to work together and that there was no room for democracy on a warship. Most of the convincing had already been done when the Welcome Fleet had been blown out of space; the only task had been to train them to actually fight as a group, and then as a fleet – as soldiers rather than warriors. The largest Rockrat force, before the aliens had arrived, had been five ships; the USSF was talking about over three hundred warships in total. It was chaotic; he could only hope that they would work out all the kinks before the aliens decided to come knocking.

  The swarm of missiles was closing in rapidly on the simulated ship, simulated point defences working busily to try to knock all the missiles down before it was too late. Cindy had told him that the missiles in the simulators were actually thirty percent faster and more dangerous than the missiles the Oghaldzon had actually deployed; if the pilots could live though that, or at least achieve a good kill ratio, they would have a better than even chance against the aliens. Ellsworth hoped she was right; training was a persistent problem, not least because everyone wanted their simulated equipment to be perfect, not damaged… or for them to have no handicaps during training. The Rockrats understood the value of training and experience, but sometimes they just took gambles, secure in the knowledge that only their lives rested upon their decisions. A USSF officer had no such luxury.

  His communicator buzzed. “Jake, its Kyle,” Short’s voice said. There was a grim note in his voice. “Can you come to my office, at once?”

  Now what have I done? Ellsworth thought dryly. He left the simulators and walked quickly through the corridors, wondering what he was being called for, even as he passed though the security door and entered the office of the Chairman. Kyle Short didn’t look up at him as he passed; he was studying a display that had formed in front of him, a hologram displaying a series of tactical icons. Cindy was sitting next to him; her expression was, if anything, full of dark anticipation.

  “We have a problem,” Short said. He tapped the display and it expanded rapidly. A line of icons were heading out from Earth. He traced the line mentally; surely that couldn’t be right? “The enemy have decided to come knocking. They’re heading directly towards Freeport One.”

  Ellsworth felt his blood run cold.

  Chapter Forty-Seven: Action Stations, Take Two

  Seeker for Truth, Earth Orbit

  “They’re domesticating us!”

  Samra said nothing as Reynolds spoke, his body quivering with all the energy of a man who wanted – desperately – to pace, but that was impossible in zero-gravity. Her body ached, as it had after they had suddenly been reintroduced to gravity in the habitation starship, but she pushed the pain aside; there was a more important problem for her to deal with. She didn’t understand why the aliens – the Oghaldzon – hadn’t simply disposed of Reynolds by now, but there was no point in taking chances. They had to consider him dangerous; his miraculous survival in vacuum must have warned them that there was something special about him.

  And, just like a man, he wanted to find a way of hitting back at the Oghaldzon.

  “You heard what they were saying on that space station,” Reynolds continued, for once heedless of the possible microphones in their quarters. The Oghaldzon had relented slightly, to the point where they had been given a larger apartment for their own, but they were still very definitely prisoners. “They’ve started to bring people up from Earth!”

  They’ve done more than that, Samra thought, but didn’t say. She’d had a private conversation with Carola Eichwurzel, a girl-to-girl chat, and Carola had told her that she’d had period pains for the first time in ten years. The thought made Samra wince; almost every girl on Earth used a contraceptive implant that had the additional benefit of reducing the menstrual cycle to almost nothing; now, there would be nothing to stop the girls from becoming pregnant. She tried to remember the lessons she’d had to take, along with the other girls in her colony, on the implant, but could remember little; she cursed herself silently for spending too much time giggling at the pictures of male privates. There would be a month’s grace, right?

  They’d figured out, from Carola and her boyfriend, that they’d been on the Seeker for Truth around three months and the aliens had invaded Earth roughly two weeks after their capture, along with the dissection of the Welcome Fleet. The pain refused to face; she liked Oolane, but her race had committed an atrocity against the entire human race, several atrocities. The impact of the asteroids had chilled her; logically, if one of them had gone down in the Indian Ocean or even in parts of the Pacific, they would have created a tidal wave that would have wiped out the heartland of the Caliphate. Samra had never been on haji, never visited Mecca; the thought of waves crashing over featureless sand and smashing everything in their path made her tremble with rage and helpless fury. There was nothing they could do; how could they hope to do more than irritate the Oghaldzon enough to make them swat the pair of them like bugs?

  “They want us to get used to them,” she said, trying to look on the bright side. She had the grim feeling that the light at the
end of the tunnel was an oncoming train. They’d figured out just how the Oghaldzon mated; despite cold logic, both of them had taken to covering their mouths – and Samra her genitals – when alien sperm floated by in the air. She’d seen some children – pre-sentient Oghaldzon – growing on Oolane’s back, before…they’d vanished one day, dropping off to make their own way in the spacecraft’s corridors and components. The Oghaldzon didn’t seem to care about them, something Samra found very alien, but it terrified her. What would they do to human children when they were born… without ever realising that they were doing anything even slightly objectionable? “If we convince them that we can be trusted…”

  “They attacked the Welcome Fleet,” Reynolds reminded her, as if she had needed the reminder. “I can’t see them risking dealing with us from anything but a position of strength now; the odds of some human trying to take a little revenge would be too high. They keep asking us about how humans react to some situations, or how they would react; they’re trying to split the human race apart.”

  Samra nodded grimly. It wasn't as if the Oghaldzon were stupid, just alien; some human concepts made no sense to them. They could have found a dozen little human factions, particularly in the more recidivist regions of Afghanistan, that would probably have signed up with them for a chance to practice barbarities on their fellow humans. They weren’t interested; they wanted good governance and that was much harder, particularly if they wanted active collaboration as well. If half of what Carola and her boyfriend had told them was true, there were parts of the world in a desperate state; they might agree to follow the Oghaldzon lead in exchange for fuel and support, maybe even some guarantees of future benefits. It wouldn’t be easy – the entire pre-Caliphate history of the Middle East was littered with the remains of attempts to build a working system of good governance, or at least one that was loyal to a particular outside power – but the Oghaldzon were patient. They had decades to play with…