Crystal Rain

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Dihana stood up. “How are they of any use to us in this coming battle?”

  Haidan pushed his chair away and stood up as well. “Who the enemy? The Loa who withdraw and lay low when we get insistent, or the Tetol, who command in fear and blood and don’t care how many die by them?”

  “Okay.” Dihana stood in the doorway. “I know you’re right. I just don’t like it.” Haidan pushed past her into the corridor. “Haidan … if the Azteca come, we don’t have much of a chance surviving, do we?”

  “I been waiting for something like these maps for a long, long time. Going to the northland a long shot. Might be the only one we got, come soon enough.”

  “I don’t know what else I could have done, Haidan.”

  “I going now. Plenty to take care of.” Not just the planning for an airship expedition, but the large unnamed steamship sitting in the harbor needed some retrofitting with some ideas Haidan had. Another of his side projects, it was already being changed as he thought about the oncoming Azteca. “And, Dihana. About moving me mongoose-men into Tolteca-town. You should have talk to me first.”

  “You taught me well enough how to take command, a long time ago, when I first took this job and riots started on the street.”

  “Don’t make it a habit.” Haidan paused with her near the hurricane doors at the end of the corridor. “This could still blow up in we face.”

  “You want them back out?”

  “No. But pay careful attention to thing down there.” He left her by the doors, walking out onto the steps toward a patient Gordon.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Three days later, and Brungstun still burned. The black pillars of smoke rose day in and day out, floating up until the wind caught them and took them down into the forest during the day. During the night the pillars drifted far out over the ocean toward Frenchtown.

  Jerome stood on the beach and, like a scab that he couldn’t resist picking at, watched the pillars of smoke. He dug his toes into the sand, dimly aware of the water gurgling as it settled in around his feet.

  Several boats set sail from the beach. Troy ran along the shoreline yelling at people with a piece of paper in his hands. “Make sure you done get enough saltfish too,” he admonished a departing boat, heavy with burlap bags stacked up to the rail. He walked over to the coconut tree by Jerome. “And you, you little pickney-child, I have something definite for you.”

  “I don’t want help with nothing,” Jerome said.

  “You go need keep you-self busy. This moping about here ain’t go help you none. Come follow me.” Troy walked away. Jerome stood still. “Now,” Troy said. “Or I tie you up and drag you me-self.”

  Jerome sighed. He pulled his feet out of the sand and followed.

  Troy led him around to a small bay hidden by an overhang of rocks and fallen boulders. Nets and bamboo gates cut the bay off from the ocean around the island. Several Frenchi Jerome’s age paused, chest-high in the turquoise water. Some looked surprised, others sad.

  He didn’t want their damn pity. Jerome stood still. “What this?”

  Troy waded out until the water came to his neck. He put his mouth underwater and bubbled a rhythm. One of the kids laughed and pointed as a pair of fins broke the surface and circled Troy.

  “Scudder-fish,” Troy explained. He put out a hand and the creature came to a stop. A pair of funny tails wiggled from behind the scudder-fish: a smooth, fast-looking creature with a yellowish beak.

  It was the strangest sea creature Jerome had ever seen. He waded into the water and the scudder-fish turned to look at the disturbance—a twisting motion so graceful and quick Jerome almost couldn’t believe it happened—and it faced Jerome. It bubbled the water with its beak and moved toward him, then rubbed against his outstretched hands.

  Up close Jerome realized that the scudder-fish stretched out longer than Troy, six feet long. And strong. He could feel the iron-hard muscles under the smooth skin.

  “It feel like smooth cotton,” Jerome said. Someone giggled.

  “Look at this.” Troy took the scudder-fish’s two fins in his hands. It swam, and Troy’s chest pushed through the water. “If you’s real nice to them, they help pull you around the reef them. And you can train them to help you find stuff in the water.”

  Troy made a full circuit of the small bay, even diving with the scudder-fish under the surface several feet, then breaking back up through the water in front of Jerome. He let go and floated over. “I want you to join me niece and nephew them here and learn how to make friends with the scudder-fish, and dive deep. Very deep.”

  “But why?” Jerome asked. What was the use of all this if they were going to die when the Azteca got out here to the islands?

  Troy pointed out past the bay at one of the ships sailing with supplies. “We Frenchi been breeding scudder-fish a long time. We use them to dive. If you want to stay with us, you have to learn how ride. So learn quick. There hardly much time this, you understand?”

  The children all looked at each other, as if they were in on some secret. “Look,” said a girl next to him, her brown hair matted to the back of her pink neck. “When you go deep, you just hold you nose like this.” She demonstrated, pinching her nose. “And blow. Then you ear feel better.”

  “Okay.” Jerome pushed off his feet toward the scudder-fish. It flicked around him and bubbled.

  “We go teach you everything,” someone else said.

  Jerome smiled. He floated out with the scudder-fish. There was a friendliness in the scudder-fish that made his soul fly a little lighter. The gentle crash of the waves against the shore didn’t jar him as much. It seemed to soothe.

  He set about learning how to dive with the scudder-fish.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Haidan sat in the study in his home perched on the left edge of Capitol Harbor, where the great amphitheater of Capitol City left the jagged peninsula to dip in the water The city’s great walls created a large protected semicircle of water where boats anchored.

  The porthole windows in his study looked out over the black water of the harbor, with the breakwater side of the city wall visible from them. A gentle fog was rolling in, though.

  Haidan leaned back in his chair. Stutter slips littered the Hoor. A large map on his wall bristled with colored pins, a quick and dirty theater map of Nanagada with his best estimates of where Azteca were coming and where the mongoose-men retreated.

  He’d spent hours earlier moving around Capitol City, scouting for a better operations center than this temporary setup in his house. They’d settled on an unused warehouse on the waterfront. Mongoose-men were in the middle of moving stuff over. And now Haidan could snatch some time to pore over the rest of the briefcase’s contents. The proof he’d talked to Dihana about lay inside.

  They were typewritten entries with handwritten comments in the margins. A Preservationist had found them in a security box that had taken a full day to break open. It had been inside an excavated compound office deep beneath the ground, hidden away in a secretary’s desk. The box was hidden inside a secret panel that had rotted away.

  He’d shown Dihana the map. These he wanted for himself.

  Haidan blinked scratchy eyes. The clock in his study gonged that it was morning. He coughed and dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief lying on the desk, then picked up one of the yellowing pieces of paper.

  There were handwritten entries:

  April 5: 1,500 moved from Starport to Center Staging. 17 dead. Haidan read the following seventeen names.

  April 7: Fourth air strike. Battle-Town. 500 dead. For this entry there were no lists of names, the author of this manuscript having decided there wasn’t enough paper.

  April 15: Orbital 2. Nuclear strike? 2,000 dead.

  May 3: Orbital I and 3 destroyed. Unknown how. Unknown casualties.

  There were several reams of administrative records. A dry account of the original settlers of Nanagada being moved to safer areas, or being caught in the cross fire of
the wars of long ago, when Nanagadan people had great powers. Haidan had a feeling that if he looked in these records long enough, he would recognize surnames that still existed in Capitol City.

  He set these aside. He would study them later, match them to the history books he had, then turn them back over to the Preservationists before Dihana found out about his little indiscretion.

  The real gem lay under the administrative records.

  Haidan pulled it out.

  He’d read it once already at the start of the train ride back up. It had fired the proposal he’d given Dihana for the trip north.

  He carefully set the piece of paper on the desk in front of him.

  Imagine, he told himself, imagine yourself an old-father. You been fighting the Tetol, high in the sky, looking down on this world, or even under the sea. Imagine that all your knowledge, technology, all the machines you use to fight the Tetol, died in a single day.

  Everyone would be scattered all over. Some would have fallen out of the sky, drowned at sea, or been stranded. You could hear some of that reflected in the old tales still told out in the bush about those days.

  Here was this letter, scratched in fading pen that Haidan’s s tired eyes fought to focus on, written during this time.

  “Jesus, Stucky, I can’t believe someone did this,” Haidan read to himself.

  Jesus, Stucky, I can’t believe someone did this.

  It hit at noon. Everything died. All my implants suddenly blipped and I couldn’t get messages, hunt info, nothing. I’m using pen and paper. I’ve never even heard of an electromagnetic pulse like that. Who did it? Us or them? I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, right?

  I used Sadie’s telescope last night but it’s not powerful enough to see if the wormhole home still exists. We can’t see any light from the orbitals so we’re sure they’re all dead. I wrote it down on the admin sheets. Tens of thousands, gone.

  If we did this, we killed ourselves as well. The pulse killed almost everything with a microchip in it. A few hardened things work here and there but not enough. Civilization is going to die here, and there are going to be a lot of hungry people soon, and a lot of people getting cancer as a side effect, I wouldn’t doubt. We watched the supply ships in orbit burn up like meteors last night. The lab people are saying the terraforming mirrors will fall too, so we’re lucky to be near the equator. When it gets cold up north, they’re going to suffer worse.

  This is our home planet, now, I guess.

  Corporal Bradson thinks no more aliens landed on the planet besides the one ship we spotted right before the pulse. But I still wake up at night wondering if more might have gotten through.

  We don’t have much to defend ourselves with down here. Personal firearms mostly. The aliens won’t have much either, but after they have their next generation of pupa, they’ll be ready, just like at Gatrai. We’re lucky we survived them this long, I guess, even if we are killing ourselves to kill them.

  Bradson’s leaving us unguarded here in the middle of the forest to go north. He claims the Ma Wi Jung is up there and should still be working. We cooperated with aliens to build it for that sort of thing.

  It’s a mess here, Stucky. People are dying without meds, or medic-bots. I never realized how dependent on tech we were until this happened. Would they have killed us all if we surrendered? The xeno-psychologists didn’t think so, but we’re talking about aliens. Who knows what they really think? All we know is they don’t value human life very much.

  The aid agency we came in with left enough food to cover the camp for the next few months (poor bastards were climbing back to orbit when the pulse hit), but we feel we should start making roots. Particularly since all the soldiers inside the compound are packing to go north.

  Did you meet any of these refugees who came down the gravity well? A lot of them are from Earth and are engaged in small-scale farming here. I know you’re from Earth too. Have you ever heard of a place called the Caribbean? They all have funny accents, I can hardly understand half of them, but they’re helping us build towns. Even then, I know we’re going to be decimated, and starve, and there are so few of us to begin with. Right now the only thing we can afford to worry about is feeding ourselves. I feel like we just stepped back into the stone age.

  Hope you get this, hon. We’re leaving for one of the fishing villages on the coast near the mountains. “Brun’s Town.” I know you’ll want to join up with Bradson. He gave me the coordinates to the Ma Wi Jung. And maybe if you all succeed, maybe we stand a chance.

  No matter what you choose, please return. I miss you.

  It was signed Irene. Irene and Stucky, two ancient, anonymous, long-dead ancestor,. Old-fathers. Haidan wondered what had become of them as he looked at the figures scrawled at the bottom. Coordinates to the Ma Wi Jung. It had to be a weapon. An ancient weapon. And even after the catastrophe his ancestors had thought it would still work.

  This was something that could be used against the Azteca and the Tetol. Haidan had hinted at this earlier to Dihana. But she didn’t know that he had, in his hands, the location to one of the old-father’s ancient machines. One that could help them.

  Yes, there were problems. Would it still work? Would they be able to control it? Sometimes machines were found that still worked, and this machine had been designed to do exactly that. On the second, he had doubts. It could take months, or years, to control the machine.

  Did they have that time? Probably not.

  This long-dead ancestor had called the Tetol “aliens.” It wasn’t the first time Haidan had seen the Azteca’s masters called that. Other documents and letters collected in the museum used that old term. Haidan wondered if she made it through the jungle from Batellton to Brungstun, and if she was one of his distant relatives.

  Ma Wi Jung. The name rolled back in his mind.

  If they could get north across the ocean to Starport, Haidan realized, they could find it, whatever it was. This could be a useful advantage. If they could manage to get to it and figure out how to use it before the Azteca broke the city’s walls.

  An explosion echoed through the air, and the panes in the porthole windows rattled. Haidan ran from his study, down the stairs. The sudden motion made him dizzy, though, and he started coughing. Blood speckled his lips, and he wiped it clear before anyone noticed. A pair of guards stood at the door, their rifles up and pointed into the street around the open door.

  “Bomb?” they suggested in unison.

  “It Tolteca? Maybe it were one of the airship shops?”

  Haidan looked out at the dark street.

  “Azteca out in Tolteca-town causing trouble,” the other mongoose-man said. “They don’t like mongoose-men sleeping in their street.”

  “No.” Haidan shook his head. “We need airship too bad. The Azteca coming know it and telling their spy to aim for that first.” Airships might allow him to see how many Azteca marched against them, airships might allow him to drop bombs on them from the air, or put mongoose-men of his own behind their lines. Airships might allow them to escape. And damn it, airships might, a bold and dangerous flight though it might be, allow Haidan to find out what the ancient device in the icy north was, and whether it could be used against the Azteca. “Get any extra men to guard the airship shop. All day, all night.”

  But it might be too late already. Dihana would know they needed the airships for defense. She wouldn’t let him send a small group of them north if airships were in scant supply.

  Haidan bit his lip and looked out down the street toward the harbor

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  To dive deep into the water Jerome followed the Frenchi girl’s directions. After several feet his ears hurt, but by holding his nose and blowing hard, his ears went ‘pop,’ and he could try to dive deeper.

  He wanted to try riding the scudder-fish, but everyone insisted on showing him how to hold his breath and drop to the sand in the deep part of the bay. It took almost a day to conquer his desire for air, and his fear
of letting the water close off over his head.

  Jerome didn’t relax until the girl came back up to him and showed him how to breath slowly to ready himself for the dive, and to let out his breath to sink to the bottom.

  “My name Sandy,” she said. “You Jerome, right?”

  “How you know?” Jerome asked, surprised.

  “Everyone know you: only one who make it out Brungstun.”

  Jerome turned away from her and bit his lip. He’d been keeping his mind away from those memories by spending the day splashing about with them. That was what Troy had intended, no doubt. Now he thought about his mom, and Swagga, and Schmitti …

  “But I also remember you from the time when you had visit here with you dad.” Sandy saw that Jerome didn’t want to talk about any of that, so she said, “Why don’t you try and dive again?”

  Jerome nodded. The wind blew over his ears as he took several deep breaths, then sank beneath the water. The world fell quiet, and water bubbled out his nose until his body became heavy enough to fall.

  It felt wrong to blow out all the air in his lungs, but Jerome sank to the bottom. Calm descended on him as his feet and hands kissed the sand. He opened his eyes and could only make out blurry shapes around him.

  Jerome listened to a steady cacophony of croaks and grunts from the ocean’s far distance. The heavy rhythmic sound of the small waves lapping against the beach stirred at him. Even the indistinct voices of the splashing swimmers ten feet above him filtered down.

  It felt peaceful. Time played tricks with him. It seemed as if only a minute had passed, or a long hour.

  Okay, he thought, maybe not even a minute. His lungs burned. Jerome pushed off the sand and swam to the surface. For a brief moment he could see his reflection off the underside of the mirrorlike border between ocean and air, then he broke the surface next to Sandy.