by Nick Webb
She had ordered missions before that claimed lives. Lone scouts had died on the asteroids and moons that housed Telestine weaponry. Soldiers had gone and never returned. It was part of the cost. She had always known that.
It was a different thing to see it: to watch them stare death in the face and continue on, regardless. Her fingers were white where she clutched the desk. Two more red blips disappeared, and then three more.
Even Larsen wasn’t counting any longer.
She could see Earth in the view screen. The Rocky Mountains rose like a spine from the flat plain as the ships hurtled down. The ground was rushing up—
“Drop ship….” He trailed off. “Hit. Drop ship has been hit.”
Her body jerked reflexively at the sound of his words.
Larsen’s shoulders slumped with relief. “Capsule intact. And falling in the planned trajectory.”
She swallowed hard. The video screen wheeled as the remaining ships in the formation arced back up toward the distant bulk of the Valiant. A single dot showed the capsule falling, falling, and Walker had time to wonder what Pike must have thought as he watched the debris streak past him and the capsule jolt loose from the ship.
Did he know the drop ship had been destroyed?
The ships were accelerating as fast as their engines could go. She saw the Valiant began to move to intercept them.
“Valiant’s accelerating to match fighters’ speed.” Delaney murmured.
The carrier was growing closer in the view screen. All but one fighter bay was closed, a grim acknowledgement of the loss. The remaining ships were still putting on speed as they left Earth’s gravity well behind them.
One more dot blinked out of existence, and the gaping maw of the fighter bay grew to enclose the whole of the screen. The video bounced as the ship hit the deck and slid, two more ships coming in behind, and the doors began to come down—
“Message from the captain of the Valiant, ma’am: mission successful, capsule intact on impact.”
Walker let out her breath slowly. “And the Valiant?”
“Heading for the nearest dark space in the Telestine sensor array before resetting their course for Venus.”
“And confirmation from Pike?”
“Waiting on that, ma’am.” Larsen’s fingers were tapping at the feeds. It seemed like an eternity before he nodded. “Yes, ma’am. He’s alive and on the surface.”
“We did it.” Delaney nodded at her.
Walker said nothing. Relief made her weak at the knees, and yet—
This was only the beginning, and if Pike failed, they did not have the resources to try such a thing again.
Chapter Seven
Earth
Mountains Near Denver, North American Continent
The capsule came loose from the drop ship with a terrifying sideways jolt and Pike felt the tiny sphere blow sideways into the sky. He was thrown against the web of restraints with bruising force.
He hated this. He hadn’t thought about it much on the two-week journey aboard the Valiant, and then they’d brought him out to see the capsule and he’d had a moment of pure horror. It was tiny. It was unguided. And in the horror of the battle, watching the debris of the escort fighters streak past the tiny window as the drop ship wove through the air, he’d learned just how much he hated having no control at all over his fate.
He hated the thought of falling without guidance, trusting that the parachute and webbing would cushion him against impact and that the Telestines wouldn’t bother to shoot him out of the sky. He hated watching the Valiant recede in his view screen.
And then he was cut loose with a jerk and something that felt very much like a blast. The capsule went into a tumble so quick that even the stabilizing gyroscopes on the webbing failed, turning him over and over in a slow arc. The window spun around him in a blur, first showing the spine of the leading edge of the Rockies rushing up far too quickly for comfort, then showing the receding chaos of the battle. The fighters were protecting his fall. He made out one quicksilver dart of a ship, and then the vision was gone and the next time his eyes tracked the sky, he could see nothing at all.
The viewport swung into view of the ground again, and he realized that he had never expected to fear this return. The briefings had all started with, once you’re on the surface....
On the surface and not a bloody smear, presumably. If he lived through this, he promised himself desperately, he was going to be a changed man. He would—
Impact knocked the wind out of him before he could think of something to promise god. The webbing stretched down to allow him to slam against the floor of the capsule and started to fling him back up, and his body mercifully decided to lose consciousness before he could find out if he was going to hit the roof, too.
He came to still hooked in. Everything ached. There was the taste of blood in his mouth and a low droning in his ears. He clicked his teeth three times over the tiny pad at the back of his mouth to trigger the signal back to the Valiant. Was the ship still alive?
The droning was getting louder.
Droning.
Oh my god, the droning.
It had been twenty-four years, but there was no mistaking that sound.
Telestine engines.
He thrashed, looking around himself. He had to get out, but when he thought about releasing the webbing and painfully dropping onto the floor of the capsule, he flinched.
Ok, don’t think about it. There was hardly time, in any case. He rocked himself forward in the webbing and stretched his feet to hit the bar at the back of the swing; they had wanted to give him something he couldn’t press by accident on the way down, but he was fairly sure no one had thought about how painful swinging in the webbing would be after impact. It worked though: there was a mechanical hiss, and the webbing dropped him onto the ground.
Panic kept him moving as he peered out the least obstructed viewport of the three hatches. He cursed softly. If only he could see out, to know if they had a clear shot, see how close they were....
He knew they had the weaponry to vaporize the capsule where it sat, and that they very well might. Running was still his best bet. He punched the button for the hatch and hauled himself out.
The ships were behind him, still just specks in his view. There were two of them. Could they see him?
Just pick the best choice and run with it, Walker’s voice in his head. Just keep picking the best choice.
That’s all you can do: the best choice.
And in this case, the only thing that qualified his choice as best was that it was the least bad.
He took a breath of unfiltered air for the first time in two and a half decades, and then he took off. Pebbles slid under his boots, the wind added a strange sense of vertigo, and he forced himself not to look at the sky or the greenery as he ran, not to mark the shape of the peaks to his right.
There was no time for homecoming now. There was only the chase.
Did his sister Christina have time to run, all those years ago? Did she lie in the burning forest, still alive after the first bombs? Suffering, in dread fear? If only he’d just started running when he first saw the ship all those years ago, to warn her, to save her—
He’d long since buried those questions. He fixed his eyes on a shadow ahead, an outcropping of rock flanked by brambles, and prayed he could run faster, harder.
He dove and rolled. His body slammed against the back of the makeshift cave and pain burst across the bruises that were already there. A deafening droning sound was blotting out everything else now. Pike curled his head down and forced himself to stillness. If they weren’t shooting yet....
The air was screaming, and he felt the hiss of gravel and dust across his skin. They were setting down nearby.
Moving as slowly as he could, Pike uncurled himself and peered out from under the rock. The ships hovered over the ground—the Telestine anti-grav tech was a closely-guarded secret. They were sleek silver wedges, metal layered to look almost
like feathers.
Everything the Telestines did had that sort of beauty. And there, getting out of the ships....
Pike’s jaw clenched. He’d never seen a Telestine up close before, but the figures emerging from the ships were clearly not human. They were close though, and that was the most horrific thing. They walked with an eerily smooth gait. Their skin was so pale that it was a wonder they weren’t burned in seconds by the strong morning sun. Slits lay along their necks that looked almost raw, and they had no noses to speak of. Where hair should be, the skin over their skull rippled. It was like a child’s drawing, utterly grotesque, and yet, at the same time, vaguely graceful and beautiful.
And deadly. Utterly, chillingly, deadly.
What had he expected? They took Earth, didn’t they? With hardly a fight. He should have expected them to look something like the animals here. Maybe under those suits, they had feathers like their ships.
The two of them fanned out. They couldn’t seem to see his footprints, but they were swinging their heads, unmistakably intelligent. They had broken up the area around the ships into two halves and they were both circling. It wouldn’t be too long before the nearest one reached the outcropping, and then....
Pike went still. From the way their heads bulged in the back, it seemed certain that their brains were in their heads. They might not be human, but severing the connection between brain and body seemed like a good bet for killing them. He’d have to move quickly, do his utmost to kill the one before the other heard. His fingers flexed, and then clenched into fists. Quiet, he had to be quiet. Who knew what they could hear?
And would he be able to overpower even one of them? By all accounts, they were at least twice as strong as the average human.
But he was more than twice as angry as the average human.
The roar of a gunshot startled him, but he didn’t care who was shooting—he was just glad someone was. He saw the nearest Telestine jerk around, searching for the source of the sound. He didn’t have to be Telestine to see the look of surprise—or shocked betrayal.
Rage filled him. How dare they look surprised? How dare this alien look around as if it hadn’t been expecting someone to take a shot, when it wasn’t even their planet to start with? How dare there be even the start of anger on the alien’s face? They had killed, and killed, and killed, and they had the gall to look surprised that someone was taking revenge on them for all the killing.
He had to focus—he was never going to get a better shot than this. Pike launched himself through the brambles and into the alien’s body with a primal yell. His fist shot out and connected, and there was the satisfying crunch of cartilage and bone under his knuckles. The Telestine went down and he was on top of it a second later, chest heaving as his fist slammed down over and over again. He didn’t stop until the grotesque face stopped wincing—just a bloody pulp beneath him. He panted, and slowly stood up.
The body lay still.
Chapter Eight
Earth
Mountains Near Denver, North American Continent
“Hey.” The voice was light, jolting Pike out of his reverie. He’d been looking down at his blood-covered hands. He didn’t know what color he’d expected Telestine blood to be. Certainly not red. Red blood—that was a human color. It seemed profane that the alien bled the same as his mother and Christina.
He looked up. The man picking his way down out of the spires of rock nearby was probably only a little older than Pike himself. Brown hair with the first few streaks of grey fell long over the forehead, and the man’s work-weathered fingers held the shotgun easily.
Confidently.
After the endemic ill health of the space stations, this man looked all at once weathered and hearty: skin with the pink no Martian or even Venetian could match. Thin yet muscular, not like the billion or so Jovian humans clinging to life out on Jupiter’s Snowballs, living on carefully formulated protein supplements and minuscule gravity. And yet he moved with an easy grace that only an Earther could truly have in a gravity well, and only Natives at that, not Drones—not the Telestines’ slaves. He didn’t seem at all winded despite the altitude. He stuck out one hand with a ready grin.
“Charlie Boyd. Are you Bill Pike?”
“I ... yes.” Pike looked around himself at the bleeding Telestine bodies and the scrub brush bending delicately in the wind, and wiped his hand off before reaching out.
And then he saw the mountains, and the breath left him entirely.
There was no sight like this in the solar system, no hologram that made it real. Even Olympus Mons on Mars, though far taller, was a pale shadow to these. The peaks were impossibly sharp against the sky. He tried to orient himself, remember east and west. It was morning; the sun was still rising. A hawk soared high above as it hunted for breakfast, and the air....
The air was fresh. Alive. Pike felt something in him unknot. He wanted to cry.
He clenched his fingers and turned slowly. Plains, sky, mountains. There were animals moving below them, not stock animals, not animals in carefully constructed cages, going nowhere while their feet plodded on little treadmills. These animals just were. There was grass, a dozen kinds of grass, and different shades of rock, and even the browns and faded greens of the high desert seemed like an assault on the eyes after so many years on ships and stations breathing sterile recycled air.
“You were born here.” Charlie came to stand beside him. He shrugged at Pike’s questioning look. “The briefing said as much. When did you leave?”
“When I was eleven.” That wouldn’t mean much to him, but it didn’t have to. “The Telestines found us. The Rebellion got us out, took us to Johnson Station. Ganymede,” he clarified, when Charlie frowned. “It’s a moon of Jupiter.”
“Is that one out or in?” Charlie frowned.
Pike felt a stab of annoyance, quickly tamped down. “Out,” he said curtly, assuming he meant outside the asteroid belt. It was his mother’s annoyance—his mother, who had not wanted her children to grow up ignorant. Who said they had to know everything children were taught Before, so they could pick up where humanity had left off when the Telestines were gone.
His mother was dead, and those who hadn’t cared as much as her were still here.
Whatever Charlie saw in his eyes, he didn’t press the issue.
“We should go. They’ll be sending more ships soon.”
“Should we ... destroy these?”
“No point. We used to try, but they have locators of some sort; the next ships always come right to where the last two were. We’ve got about half an hour, probably, to get back to camp.”
Pike looked around himself. He couldn’t see anything habitable nearby.
“It’s there.” Charlie looked satisfied. “But they can’t see it, either.”
That, at least, he could approve of. Pike smiled and let the man lead him down the slope.
“Do you go by William or Bill?” Charlie called over his shoulder.
“Pike, actually.” His father had called him William, and his mother had called him Bill, and after the escape, he hadn’t wanted to be either. While his father died a slow death from grief, alone in their apartments on Johnson Station, Pike had worked to forget everything about Earth, about Christina and his mother, about the Rebellion. He was Pike, he told his father, not William, and he let his lip curl in contempt when his father asked if he’d be joining the Rebellion. He didn’t have to say anything to remind his father what the Rebellion had cost them. He hadn’t been on Johnson Station when his father finally died, and he wondered sometimes if the man had thought of Christina and their mother at the end.
The guilt was familiar, but not so easy to dispel as usual. Maybe it was the mountains.
Maybe it was the shotgun in Charlie’s hand.
Or maybe it was the thought Pike hadn’t been able to banish in two weeks, wondering if his father would be proud to see him now.
He’d come here to see Earth again, he told himself. Not for the Reb
ellion. Maybe they’d save humanity, maybe not. He hadn’t believed that was possible in years—too many people, too much despair, too many odds stacked against them.
He was just here to see home again. To see mountains. To breathe air. To feel sun. He wondered if Walker knew that, and felt a fresher guilt. Walker believed. He didn’t want to hurt her, he told himself. He just had a clearer idea of the odds.
He realized Charlie had been speaking.
“Hmm?”
“I said, it’ll take a few days to get to the lab.” Charlie used the gun to point north along the range. “You can’t see it from here, but last we knew it was moving away, up toward Laramie.”
“One of their labs?” Pike raised his eyebrows.
“Well, sure.” Charlie looked bemused. He gestured to the grimy clothes and the old-style shotgun. “Did you think we made the Dawning?”
“What is the Dawning?”
“No idea,” the man said cheerfully. “That’s your call to figure out, and frankly, none of my business.” He sobered. “The rest of us, we’re going for something else.”
For the first time, Pike felt a flicker of unease. “What are you going for?”
“Rescue mission. We think there’re people in the lab, too.”
Pike stopped.
“We gotta keep moving.” Charlie didn’t turn to look.
“What do you mean, there are people up there?”
“I mean, there are people up there. In the labs.”
“Why?”
The man tensed. “Nobody knows. But if you ask me? Experiments.”
Did Walker know about that? If she did, she hadn’t said so. He heard her voice as clearly as if she’d been next to him, almost amused: What would it change, Pike?
Maybe he didn’t have a clearer idea of the odds, he thought. Maybe she just had hope. Maybe this was what his father had always called, inexplicably, a Hail Mary pass.
