She pulled Nathan down the hill towards the lake, and there, thank you God, a flash of high-gloss red.
Mom, hauling the camouflage tarp off the Toyota 4Runner, dropped the tarp and ran to hug her children, babbling OMG my babies, until Isabel interrupted, “Where’s Dad?”
Bethany Ziegler’s mouth squared. “Honey, he went back to look for you.”
Cold horror gripped Isabel’s heart. She started back uphill. Nathan wailed in raw panic, “Izzy!” She turned around.
“Did he say to wait for him here?”
Her mother shook her head. Tears spilled from her eyes.”They shot Doug and Greg. Did you see?”
“You’re scaring Nate.” Isabel snatched the keys from her mother’s hand. She didn’t have her license. They had moved here a few months before she was due to retake her test. She’d messed up her three-point turns the first time around. But technically, she could drive.
She shoved her mother and brother into the back seat. Delaying, praying her father would appear at any minute, she checked the way-back. Their bags were there. Isabel and Dad had packed them after the bad guys came the first time. They’d rocked up at the yurts with some tall tale about how their truck broke down on the way to Canada, and when Doug went to have a look at their truck, they’d taken him hostage. Turned out they had like twenty little kids with them. All they wanted was food. No one had got hurt that time, but after that the adults had stepped up patrols, made sure there was always someone with a gun in the hide overlooking the access road, and Isabel and Dad had packed their bug-out bags again, because they knew they weren’t going to be safe here forever.
These bad guys, though. They were something else. Not refugees on their way to Canada. They’d hadn’t come up the road. They’d come through the forest. Isabel had recognized that one man from Robert’s place but she hadn’t recognized any of the others, because their faces were all camo-creamed, like soldiers or something.
Another burst of gunfire echoed through the forest.
Isabel jumped into the driver’s seat and twisted the keys in the ignition. She maneuvered the SUV out from under the trees, onto the dirt road that ran around the lake. Ease off on the brake, gently press the gas pedal, she reminded herself.
“We have to wait for Dad!” Nathan howled.
Isabel felt the same way. But she knew Dad would want her to save Nathan and Mom. She didn’t know what to do. She met her mother’s eyes in the rearview. No help there.
What would Aunt Hannah do?
Answer: she’d burn rubber. That’s what she actually had done, after all. She’d left Earth, left her favorite and only niece, to go chasing aliens in space, without even saying goodbye properly.
So, whatever Hannah would do, Isabel was going to do the opposite.
She took her foot off the gas, pulled up on the handbrake. “OK, Nate. We’ll wait for Dad.”
Silence in the car.
More gunfire. It sounded closer this time.
Mom cried quietly.
Two men sprinted along the road, running so fast they looked like cartoon characters. One of them was Dad and the one behind him was catching up.
“Dad!” Isabel shrieked. She rolled the SUV out onto the dirt road, swinging the nose in the other direction. Reached over and flung the door open.
A bullet smashed the window of the open door, turning it into a white spiderweb.
Dad toppled into the car.
Isabel floored the gas.
Purple in the face, wheezing, David Ziegler grabbed the door shut. “Fasten your seatbelt, Izzy,” were his first words when he got his breath back.
“Dad, are you OK?”
“Fine,” David gritted. He was clutching his side. He’d been shot. Isabel couldn’t take her eyes off the road for a better look. The SUV bounded over the unpaved road. Another bullet spiderwebbed the rear windshield.
“Which way?” she screamed. It was a pointless question. She was going the only way possible. Away. Deeper into the mountains.
“Up towards Granite Peak,” Dad wheezed. “We’ll head for the Adams compound.”
“Dad, one of those guys was from Robert’s place!” She meant: We can’t trust anyone anymore. The mountains of Montana were crawling with refugees from California. The adults used to make jokes about Little L.A. But everything was real now. Just because someone used to attend the same synagogue in Pacific Heights, it didn’t mean he would not try to murder you for your chickens and your solar oven and your sacks of rice.
“That asshole was just their local guide,” Dad said. “The others .. honey, I don’t think they were from around—WATCH OUT!”
Another car surged around the bend in front of them. It was black and big and that was all Isabel saw before she pulled a three-point turn that would have made her driver’s ed instructor rub his eyes in disbelief. She didn’t think about it, just did it. Like swimming.
The other car bumped into them, actually hit the SUV’s rear bumper, jolting it forward.
Mom and Nathan slithered down onto the floor.
“Go!” Dad yelled. “Floor it!”
Isabel stamped on the gas.
Dad dived into the footwell. He came up with a gun that Isabel had never seen before. It was folded in half. He unfolded it and powered the window down, twisting in his seat to aim at the car behind them.
Blam! And crack! crack! as bullets destroyed the already-useless rear windshield.
A sudden chilling yelp came from the back seat.
“Oh my God, Nate!” Mom screamed.
Dad’s gun roared rage.
Isabel gripped the wheel with white knuckles, barely keeping control of the SUV. They rocketed back the way they’d come, past their parking place.
The guy who’d been chasing Dad stood in the middle of the road, talking on a cell phone.
Isabel screamed. There was no time to stop, no room to swerve. At the last minute the guy hurled himself out of the way, into the trees. His face stayed printed on her eyeballs: dark-skinned, bearded, pop-eyed with shock.
“Just keep going,” Dad shouted, reloading.
The friends and associates of David Ziegler, seven-figure corporate lawyer, would not have recognized the wild-eyed, red-faced man shooting backwards out of the SUV. At some point the other car stopped following them. Dad said he thought he’d shot out one of their front tires. That’s what he’d been trying to do, anyway.
The dirt road merged into Route 212. Isabel stopped. “Nate?!”
He lay on the back seat, face white, eyes huge. Mom was tying a t-shirt around his arm. Blood soaked it. “He’s gonna be OK,” Mom said, in a low voice that nevertheless sounded like a scream. “Aren’t you, baby? It was just a graze. Right?”
“Right,” Nate said weakly.
“That makes two of us, buddy,” David said. “They winged me, too. Through-fer.” When he opened his door to get out, Isabel saw a splotch of blood on his seat. “Move over, Izzy.”
She swallowed. “No, Dad. You’re hurt. I’ll drive.”
“OK,” he said after a moment. There was something new in the way he looked at her. Like she was an adult.
“But which way?” They now had a choice of two directions. Isabel started the engine..
Dad said, “Fasten your seatbelt,” and then he said, “I don’t know. We could head up to Billings …”
Mom argued that these bad guys might actually have come from Billings. Dad said Yeah but. Mom said No really. Isabel sat holding Dad’s gun. She met poor Nathan’s eyes. Despite the pain he must be in, he rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue. Their parents were sitting here arguing over which way to go, while the bad guys might be catching up with them!
Isabel said, “We’re going this way.” She turned the car south. Away from Billings. She stepped on the gas.
Somewhat to her astonishment, Dad said, “OK, honey.”
Isabel glanced at the gas indicator. The tank was almost full. But the SUV only got 17 miles to the gallon. “We’ll have to get gas,” she
said.
Mom said, “Where are we going?”
They were actually letting her make this decision. It felt unfair. “We’re going back to California.”
“That’s a long drive,” Dad said.
“That’s why I said we’ll have to get gas. Dad, Mom, those bad guys were Feds.”
Doug and Greg, back at the yurts, used to think everyone was a Fed. Then a bunch of actual Feds had killed them.
“That guy had a phone. A phone? No one has a phone anymore.”
“It might have been fake,” Nathan piped up.
“Oh, Nate. It wasn’t. They were Feds, and that means we have to get out of America.”
“We need to get help for Nate,” Dad said, not mentioning his own wound. “Might be easier to find meds and first aid in California.”
“Honey, California’s a disaster zone!” Mom said. “The aliens hit the Oroville Dam. They hit all the military facilities on the coast.”
This information came from the ham radio network, which was probably how the Feds had located them. Since the Lightbringer’s arrival, the radio had seethed with reports of carnage, floods, plagues, basically the whole megillah including locusts. Isabel didn’t believe any of it. In her mind, California was home. It was their big house with the pool in the backyard, where she used to swim a hundred lengths every morning, training for the 2024 Olympics, which would never be held now.
“It’s funny,” she said.
“What’s funny, Izzy?”
“Everyone’s scared of the aliens. But it wasn’t aliens that nearly murdered us back there. It was human beings.”
CHAPTER 10
The bright spot in the sky turned into a delta-winged silhouette.
“That’s the Dealbreaker,” Ripstiggr shouted. He had to shout because Hannah couldn’t even hear the inside of her own head. Every time one of the Lightbringer’s shuttles took off or landed, they could probably hear it in Zambia. Noise pollution was a non-issue to the designers of Imfi spacecraft.
The Dealbreaker screamed down at a steep angle. Lightning sparkled in its water-plasma contrail. It flattened out its dive, using its auxiliary thrusters as air-brakes, and sank behind the trees. The thunder of its engines abated.
Hannah unclamped her hands from her ears. Ripstiggr was talking on his field radio, a compact unit that amplified his bio-radio signals. She couldn’t follow the rapid-fire Rristigul.
“What’s going on?”
“I was just telling that schleerp of a day-shift sentry to hurry up.”
This was obviously not the truth, but a few moments later the day-shift sentry did indeed climb onto the platform. Ripstiggr gave him a clout and hurtled down the ladder. Hannah followed just in time to jump on the back of the bike. As Ripstiggr gunned it downhill, she clung to the pillion handle, keeping quiet. He wanted to defend his silo from her, she thought. Or tidy it up before she got a good look at it. So why had he let her come? Maybe he just didn’t want to leave her alone in the forest.
Hydrazine decomposition products surrounded the Dealbreaker in an invisible haze of poison. Hannah borrowed Ripstiggr’s bio-hazard suit before getting off the bike. He jogged to the shuttle ahead of her, coat over his head. The rriksti feared sunlight but they didn’t give a hoot about toxic chemicals. Just one more reason their standard m.o. wasn’t going to work here.
“Shiplord,” the Dealbreaker’s pilot greeted her, respectfully.
Hannah unsealed the hood of the bio-hazard suit and smelled burning. The cockpit was a cave with a low-slung roof, like the inside of a black eggshell, its forward end crammed with consoles. She’d never actually been on board one of the shuttles before. As Shiplord, she did not control them directly. The pilots did that. In theory, she controlled the pilots. In practice, Ripstiggr did.
“What’s your name?” she asked the pilot. He had pomegranate-red bio-antennas, and an indefinable aura of douchiness.
“Hobo, Shiplord.”
“Is that English or Rristigul?”
“Can be both.” The pilot laughed. The chip rendered it as a horror-movie wheeze.
“OK, Hobo. I want your mission report. Video footage, targets, results, munitions expended, all that stuff.”
Hobo’s hair twitched. “Might take a few minutes to put that together.”
“I’ll wait.”
She descended the ladder into the crew area. Total man-cave. This was the nerve center of Ripstiggr’s campaign to batter Earth into submission with sheer naked aggression. One of four—but all the shuttles were identical. Uniformed crew tossed her salutes as they hastily tidied up their mess. Empty munitions crates littered the floor.
Not all the crates were empty. Some held ring binders, laptops, and clear plastic folders stuffed with printouts.
Hannah frowned. This was human stuff. And it was singed, half-burnt. She picked up a ring binder and flipped it open …
Seconds later, she was back in the cockpit, binder in hand.
Ripstiggr was nowhere to be seen. Hobo, shutting down the shuttle’s systems, slewed a guilty glance at her.
“Just wondering where you got this?” Hannah held up the binder.
LH2 / LOX TANKAGE CAPACITY AND CHARACTERISTICS
SKY STATION MAINTENANCE GROUP
CELL
“Aha,” Hobo said. “Was going to put that in my report.”
“Bet you weren’t.”
“Got me,” Hobo said, hair dancing.
Hannah stalked over to him and slapped him in the face. It was not a hard blow. Nothing like the sledgehammer punches Ripstiggr doled out to anyone who pissed him off. It was a calculated risk. She was counting on Hobo to respond to this show of authority.
The pilot cringed, and glanced at the autorip at the back of the cockpit. It stayed closed.
“No, Ripstiggr isn’t here,” Hannah said. “While he’s off powdering his nose, why don’t you go ahead and tell me where this came from?”
Hobo touched his cheek thoughtfully. “Well, CELL refers to Camp Eternal Light, Limited. That’s what the humans call their colony on the moon. It was established by a group of companies headquartered in this place called Florida …”
“I know that.” Hannah put two and two together. “Jeepers creepers. You landed, didn’t you? You landed at freaking Cape Canaveral and salvaged this stuff from CELL’s offices.”
“Yep,” Hobo admitted.
“Was there anything left? We hit Cape Canaveral with the railgun on our way down.” Hannah shook her head. She held evidence in her hands that the destruction had not been total. “What’s so important about this stuff that you had to land in enemy territory?”
“Well,” Hobo said, “this Sky Station is the biggest asset in Earth orbit. We HERFed it, but it should be repairable.”
Hannah nodded, lips tight. She had unwittingly HERFed Earth’s space stations, along with all the satellites. She spared an agonized thought for the astronauts who had died on Sky Station and the ISS.
“So we wanted to find out what exactly’s up there. Sensing instruments, hab modules …” Hobo gestured at the binder Hannah held. “Tankage.”
“OK. So we’re going to fix Sky Station up?” It was humiliating that she had to get this information from some random pilot. “For what?”
Hobo glanced at the autorip again. Then he said, “Shiplord, let me tell you a story.” Hannah rolled her eyes. “No, it’s a good one, I promise. Once upon a time on Imf, there were nine hundred and forty Krijistal academies. Each of them had a different specialty. Everything from supply chain analysis to ceremonial cuisine, there was an academy for that. But the best, most prestigious of them all was the pilots’ academy.”
“Of course it was.”
“I’m not just saying that. Everyone and their half-brother’s step-cousin wanted to get in. Well, the month after the last war but two started, competition was especially stiff.” Imfi months were two hundred-some days long, in contrast to their years, which were only 11 days long. “A young candidate
called Hobo was over the moon to get his acceptance letter. But it turned out that getting in was the hard part. Once you were in, all you had to do was learn to fly one of these babies. And most of us, coming from military families, already knew how to fly. So we had plenty of time to goof off.”
“I guess young people are the same everywhere.”
“Do young people on Earth go glacier-surfing?”
“Um. No. How do you surf a glacier?”
“Well, when the atmosphere circulates to the Darkside, water falls out of the sky and freezes. But ice expands, right? It pushes out of the ravines, back to the twilight zone, and turns into rivers. So the trick is to surf along to the melting point, and hang-glide off the end before it crumbles under you.”
“Oooo… kay.”
“If you leave it too late, your glider gets wet and you end up in the drink.”
“Do the glaciers, like, crumble into huge waterfalls?”
“Icefalls! I really miss Imf. Anyway, Ystyggr help you if you go into the river. People would usually wash up downstream on someone’s estate. We would have to retrieve them and fix them up so our instructors wouldn’t know what happened.”
“You’d heal them using extroversion.”
“Correct. Strong extroversion is a requirement for the Krijistal. I’m a fourth-level lay cleric. But you can’t do extroversion on yourself. So one day I go into the falls. I just manage to cut my straps before the glider drags me under. I wake up on this miserable little stony beach with a herd of zlok sniffing me. My leg is fucked up. I’m in agony. I shout for help, and eventually this guy comes strolling through the trees. I know him slightly. His dad is an admiral. He’s the oldest person in our class. I ask him to fix me up, but he doesn’t do it! He calls an ambulance, which is the last thing I want, and until it gets there, he sits beside me, just out of punching range, talking about how pain is a gift from Ystyggr. What the fuck ever.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“I came this close to getting expelled. All this guy’s fault. So when I’m back on my feet, I ask around, and it turns out other people have problems with him, too. He shouldn’t even be at the academy. He’s not extroverted.”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 8
