Crystal Rain (36 page)

Authors: Tobias S. Buckell

BOOK: Crystal Rain

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Three mongoose-men guided Dihana through an underground sewer filled with dirty, wet women and children huddled around each other. They piled quietly up against the sewer walls, shoved aside by the mongoose-men as they tramped down the middle. A mongoose-man ran forward, peered around a corner, then nodded. They followed it around into more ragged-looking refugees from the streets, climbed up rusty iron stairs, and Dihana broke to the street level back into hell.

Spotlights lit up the sky over Capitol City, stabbing out in search of Azteca airships making bombing raids in the dead of night. One by one the Capitol City airships had gone up against the Azteca, but there were just too many, and now only a few struggled to keep the sky over the city safe.

“This way, ma’am.” A gentle tug on her elbow. Dihana walked swiftly with them down the alleyway toward a makeshift hospital. They were out near the harbor, she could smell the salt on the air. They were near the wall, but apparently the Azteca hadn’t bombed this section much.

Moaning wounded filled the portable cots that lined the alleyway. The sewers were too dangerous, unpredictable tides swept them clean, and large enough buildings for this many wounded were targeted by Azteca bombs. The alley was the best they could do.

A woman with her head bound in bloody rags shuffled out of Dihana’s way, but didn’t seem able to focus on anything. Two small children huddled next to her.

A round whistled far overhead and struck a building. The children flinched at the sound of the impact, and the rain of broken brick afterward.

Someone’s steady sobs carried over the cobblestones.

The mongoose-men conferred with a nurse dressed in a long and shabby beige dress. Splotches of blood darkened the plain material. The nurse pointed. “He just down here.”

Dihana walked past the rows of suffering. Nine rows down she kneeled next to Haidan’s cot and took his hand in hers. He opened his eyes.

“Edward.” She used his first name, and he smiled. “I came the moment I heard you were awake again. We really need you.” She stroked Haidan’s cheek. The Azteca had pushed the mongoose-men, and any volunteers willing to pick up a gun, back to the last ring. Several times it had looked as if the sheer mass of Azteca warriors would break over the last line, but the mongoose-men held. And they were paying for it.

And so was the city. They had been naive to think that the walls alone would save them. The Azteca airships constantly tried to fly over the city and drop bombs. Something hit a house several roads over, the ground rumbled. Azteca flares floated down through the air, giving the night an eerie red glow that flickered in the corners and crevices. They were trying to see what damage they might have done.

Dihana looked up the tall expanse of the city wall, stories over her head. She could see the dim shapes of soldiers moving around, reloading, resting.

“We go fall soon, right?” the nurse asked.

“No,” Dihana said, defiant. “The city can hold.”

“We hope.” The nurse set a bowl of fresh bandages by the bed.

A fourth mongoose-man ran up.

“The boat ready?” his companions asked him.

“What boat?” Dihana asked.

“Gordon says you should run for Cowfoot Island,” the nearest soldier explained. “You could try and regroup people there. The Azteca ain’t as good with boats like they are with weapons.”

But the fourth man shook his head. “Azteca have some boat outside Grantie’s Arch. We moving men and cannon out to face the sea.”

“And besides, the airships can reach Cowfoot just as easily as a ship can.” Dihana clenched the edge of the cot. The city was now surrounded in every conceivable way. She looked at the mongoose-men assigned to protect her. “Go,”
she ordered. “Get on the walls. And the boat you would have me run away in, use it. Get guns on it.”

“We suppose to protect you. We can’t just leave.”

“There might be nothing to protect come morning. Go.”

The four mongoose-men broke and left. Dihana took the bandages and helped the nurse lift the sheets from over Haidan. She winced when she saw the bloody, seeping wounds on his stomach.

He squeezed her hand and drifted away again.

Hang in there, she willed. Please wake back up. She wanted to talk to him at least once more.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

The pod released John just as the sun dimmed and night fell. Pepper watched John groggily walk into the cockpit and sit down, frowning when the cushions adjusted themselves around him.

Did he have his memories back? Was he fit? Pepper watched John’s every movement.

“Where are we?” John asked.

“Over sea, circling, letting
Ma Wi Jung
fly herself. She isn’t fully online, so we can’t skip out of the atmosphere just yet. Plus, it needs you for that sort of thing. I can only access autopilot for nonorbital flight.” Pepper smiled. “John, how are you feeling?”

“You son of a bitch.” John put his head in his hands. “Asshole.”

“Maybe. But only you can pilot this thing out to the next star system with a wormhole. I want to go home, John. I miss Earth.”

John looked up at him. The pod had given John a shave, repaired his thigh, and given him a new hand. As far as Pepper could tell, John didn’t seem to be paying attention to the change.

“You’ve brought it all back. I have memories.” John sniffed and cleared his throat. His eyes wrinkled. “I considered killing you for this. I don’t need this shit.”

“You were wandering around being a little Pollyanna,” Pepper said. “Oh, look at me, I’m different without my memory. Oh, I have feelings. Oh, I forgot I helped pull the trigger on an entire damned solar system. It was time to set your priorities back in order.”

“That’s what I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want any of that back. I didn’t want sitting in the pod back. I certainly didn’t want you back.”

“That’s a shame. John, I need out of here.” This conversation was going nowhere.

John shifted in the seat, brushed his hair back, and stared at his new hand. “You’re right.”

Pepper nodded. “Better.”

“You
were
right. This ship isn’t the weapon they had hoped for back at Capitol City. But we still need to help them. Capitol City can’t hold out long. You
know
that. We can’t just leave them to the Teotl and Azteca.”

Pepper sighed. “I have done more than my bit here, John. I was there as protection with you when they terraformed. I was with you when the first Teotl came through, I helped create a defense. I was with you when we realized there was nothing we could do against them. And, John, I helped destroy the wormholes to gain us time to stop the Teotl. You know where that got me? Over two hundred and ninety-seven years of drifting in space.” Pepper threw the teacup by his elbow at John, a snapping motion so quick his hands blurred.

John caught the cup with his left hand. A few small drops struck his dirty shirt. A few more stained the carpet, then faded.

With a faint smile, John looked at the teacup and his new hand.

Then he set it on the floor by his feet.

“Two hundred and seventy-one,” he said.

“What?”

John blinked tired eyes. “When the wormhole was severed, I floated for two hundred and seventy-one years before
the pod could eke its way back to Nanagada. I’ve been living in retirement for twenty-seven years. Six years in Brungstun, sailing, two in Capitol City and sailing north the first time, and nineteen married to my wife. I have a son, Pepper, that kinda shit changes people.” John grabbed the malleable cushion on either side of his thighs with fists. “I’m still here, with the old memories coming back now that you ‘healed’ me, but I know more things about life, Pepper. Twenty-seven more years’ worth than I had before. I can’t get rid of those, and they’re giving me one hell of a headache I can’t ignore.”

Pepper stood up. “What do I have to do to get you to fly us home?”

“Home. To get home, Pepper, we will have to fly almost thirty light-years to reach the nearest wormhole. Even there no one lives to help us, it is just a random dead system, a transit point. How long will that take in this ship? More hundreds of years? I know your body will last that long, and the recycling in this ship will handle it just like our pods did. But can your mind?”

“Yes. Just because you snapped and blocked those memories doesn’t mean I will,” Pepper snapped. “There are ways. I can edit. I can loop, I can learn, I can be entertained. I’ve done it once already. I’ll do it again.” The sheer dreadful passage of time in a pod was a horrible, mindaltering thing. Doing it in a ship designed with that in mind would be easier.

Space travel was a long affair. Humans had met other races, and the men who traveled space adopted lifeextending technologies to manage journeying between stars where there were no wormholes to help them.

“Yes. Ways.” John reached down and picked up the teacup with his new hand. “Some Pilots were willing to suffer those years in transit when the Teotl took the wormholes and blockaded us in this system. But we need this ship for something else now, so it won’t happen just yet. I’m the Pilot. This is a ship. You can’t even get into a simple orbit without me. I say we’re going to Capitol City. We will not let the Teotl win here, on Nanagada. Not after everything I’ve been through.”

Pepper struck the chair nearest him. It slowly moved forward, then pulled back to its position after absorbing the strike.

“
Ma Wi Jung
has forward shields to stop dust punctures. It’s just an electromagnetic umbrella, though, we can’t protect ourselves from crude artillery fire, or anything of the sort that the Azteca will have at Capitol City. This isn’t a magic bullet.”

“It doesn’t need to be.” John handed Pepper back the teacup.

“You have a plan?”

“I do. And if you help me, I’ll do you one better than taking you back to Earth. I’ll make you a Pilot. We have a medbay for the alterations, we can train you. You can return to Earth on your own. You don’t have a choice. I’m back, Pepper. You did this.”

Pepper blinked. “Back to Earth. If it’s even there anymore.” He sat back down with the empty teacup as John grimaced. Humanity scrabbled for survival among the intolerant Gahe and Nesaru since being given political freedom by the Maatan in the days after the pacification of Earth.

Messy times. Times that had created men like Pepper and John as the Gahe and Maatan fought over the remains of the solar system. Immigrants and whole societies had tried to run and hide deep in the tortuous mazes of wormholes, out of reach on new, undiscovered worlds.

The immigrants had run into something worse. Teotl and the Loa, creatures embroiled in their own struggle for survival.

John and Pepper started out running the Black Starliner Corporation to profit as they moved paying minority populations to safety, away from the dying mother planet. The immigrants contracted them to provide security on the newly terraformed world against the aliens, and suddenly it became a war of survival. One so bad that the only choice was to collapse the wormholes and spark off a round of final destruction.

“Okay,” Pepper said. “I will help you.” He rubbed the
edge of the teacup with a thumb. “But, John. Remember this: you started it.”

John bit his lip. “I have a plan. I’ll be in the pilot’s cabin. Call me when we approach Capitol City.” He walked off. Pepper noted the slump of his shoulders. John once again carried the load of a world on them. Old habits die slowly.

Pepper leaned back in his chair and threw the teacup against the wall. He watched the composite accept and absorb the projectile, then gently slide it down to the floor.

He should never have let John talk him into coming to Nanagada 354 years ago.

Pepper would never forgive him for it.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE

Dihana watched the sun rise and fill the inside of Capitol City with amber light. She sat in a boarded-up house near the waterfront, listening to the murmur of her guards in the nearby room.

Harbor waters lapped at the new high-tide mark cut into the stone of Grantie’s Arch. Just beyond the harbor walls Dihana watched three Azteca ships tack into the wind. They turned their sides to the city’s seawalls and shattered the morning calm by opening fire.

A full previous night of shelling showed its effects on sections of the seawall. Pockmarks, gaping holes, and chips on the edge could be seen along the full expanse. Bodies littered the seaside footpaths, volunteers caught by Azteca sharpshooting last evening when the ships had sailed toward Grantie’s Arch.

The three ships formed a wedge and made another run for the harbor’s entry. For several minutes the two ships in the rear would sail forward, split out and turn their sides toward the city walls, fire a broadside, then turn back in to follow the lead ship.

Newly moved guns on the walls kept a constant rate of fire, hoping to push the ships back out to sea again.

Four small fishing boats with cannon aboard loitered on the inside of the arch. If the Azteca ships came in, they would ambush them, though they knew it was a suicidal task.

The Azteca ships continued forward, catching the full wind, coming in on the tide. They almost entered the harbor when the middle of Grantie’s Arch exploded, and the structure slumped into the sea.

Dihana covered her mouth. The mongoose-men had blown up the arch to stop the ships from coming in.

After several seconds of commotion the two covering Azteca ships turned away and managed to tack out. The ship in front struggled to turn, but came through the remains of the arch. Chunks of rocks still dropped into the sea, and onto its deck.

The Azteca ship ground to a halt with a loud scraping, stuck in the one opening to the harbor.

Mongoose-men fired down into its mast, threw flaming pitch onto the decks, and dropped bombs. Dihana walked up to the window to close it and not watch anymore. But she paused. A high-pitched roar shook the sky. People paused and looked up. A silvery winged machine swooped out from over the water, headed straight for the city.

The incredible craft slowed down until it floated leisurely over the harbor. It dropped slowly down, kicking up a furious amount of spray and water.

It edged itself next to the docks and dropped into the water with a deep sigh, not fifty feet from where Dihana stood, frozen at the window. A fine coating of salt drifted up and covered her face.

Then it just sat still for several minutes, thrumming the deep hum of a content beast.

Was this the old-father machine from the north? So soon?

She turned to the nearest mongoose-man. “Get a wheelchair. Bring Haidan from the cots.”

“Prime Minister, he still very ill.”

“He’ll want to see this.”

The mongoose-man nodded and ran out of the room.