Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (34 page)

The doors clanged into their recessed sockets, and Travis gestured us to follow him inside. It was a huge room. It had to be, to contain everything Travis had stored there. I had thought of the weapons beneath the bunk in Sheila as his arsenal. That was just a gun safe. This was the arsenal. This was a pocket army, navy, and air force.

There were dozens of battle tanks and other assault vehicles I couldn’t identify. There were amphibious vehicles. There were pilotless drones, and manned fighter and small bomber aircraft. There were other things I had no idea what they were, and wasn’t eager to find out. Some
big
guns, with bores big enough to fit my fist into.

“Army surplus,” Travis said. “Most of these are obsolete things, not much use since the Europan invasion, where everyone’s been too busy staying alive to fight each other. I got most of it real cheap. But it’s all refurbished and ready to go if we have to.”

“Let’s hope we don’t have to,” I said.

“Amen to that. And we won’t need much of this stuff today. Just a few vehicles.”

“Travis,” Mom said, “are we going into battle with this stuff?”

“Not you, Pod. And not your wonderful daughters. And not me, for that matter. The war is over for us.”

He had reached a long, long row of black bubbles arrayed on racks and held in place with light cargo netting. He went to another keypad and fed it some numbers. He pressed a button.

“It’s going to be her war now,” he said.

The netting in front of the nearest bubble rolled up, and the bubble was shoved out of the rack. It hung there in midair, weightless, a spot of emptiness about five feet off the ground. Then it was gone, and a woman tumbled out.

No, tumbled was the wrong word. She was stretched out more or less prone when she appeared—you never know how the contents will be oriented when the bubble goes away—but she twisted in the air like a cat and landed on her feet, crouched, sweeping the area with her goggled eyes and the barrel of a huge gun. All this happened in the first second. By the next second she had relaxed and straightened. I could see her taking in Travis’s ravaged face. She frowned, then dismissed it. I realized that some sign of trouble like that was something she had been expecting.

“Podkayne, Cassie, Polly, meet Colonel Jane Litchfield. Jane, meet Podkayne. Polly’s the one with the bandage. Cassie’s the one with her jaw hanging open.”

She flipped up the goggles and zeroed in on Mama, and a big grin split her face. She took a few strides forward, right hand held out. Mama, looking a bit stunned, shook her hand.

“Podkayne, I’m a big fan of your music.”

“Um . . . thank you.”

She was a big woman, a few inches taller than me and Cass, but built heftier. She was dressed in full black battle gear, a bit like us only a lot more serious. It fit tightly, and showed off her lithe muscularity. She had strong, high, Nordic cheekbones, but was far too brown for a pure Swede unless she had a hell of a suntan. She fell like a cat, and she moved like a cat. Quick, no wasted motion, an air of assurance and powerful control. It was hard to guess her age, but I’d say somewhere around forty.

She shouldered her weapon and swept off her helmet in what seemed like one smooth motion, and faced Travis, all business again. She had obviously scoped out the situation and knew there was no immediate threat, but she also knew she wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t some kind of problem.

“What’s the situation, Travis? You look terrible.”

He put one arm over her shoulder and they moved off a bit. I could hear some of it, but didn’t really listen, as I knew what he was telling her as well as he did.

“Did you know anything about this, Mama?” Cassie asked.

“Not a clue, darling.”

Cassie was looking kind of funny, keeping her eyes on Travis and Jane. They had moved off a ways, and now were coming back. Jane was nodding thoughtfully.

“I think three platoons could do it,” she was saying. “I’m going to uncork four, just to be on the safe side.”

“You’re the boss.”

She leaned over and a little down and kissed him on the least injured corner of his mouth. I saw him glance at us, a little nervously. Travis? I had never figured him for a monk, but he had always been discreet about his romantic affairs. Interesting.

She hurried over to the panel and frowned at it. Then she punched in some numbers and a whole lot of nets rolled up away from a whole lot of black bubbles. They started coming out of their cubbyholes.

“She was the head of my security detail,” Travis was telling us. I knew he had maintained a pretty large force to protect Jubal and himself. There had been a lot of angry, or greedy, or crazy people who would have liked to get their hands on the two richest men in the Old Sun system and try to get something out of them, or kill them.

“She trained with the American SEALS, and some spook agency, then was with the Secret Service for a while, until she couldn’t stomach being around presidents anymore. I hired her and gave her a free hand. And Jubal and I are alive and well.”

I know very little about military organization, but I thought a platoon was about twenty-five soldiers. There were around a hundred bubbles, so four platoons. And they started opening. Each one contained one soldier, and each one arrived as alert and ready for anything as Jane Litchfield had.

“Except for Jane, who has popped out now and then, all these people went into the bubbles before we launched, twenty years ago. They understood they wouldn’t come out except in case of bad trouble, or arrival at New Sun. They trained here for six months, as we were building. They know every nook and cranny, and they have practiced tactics for every situation we could think of.”

“They look sort of scary, Travis,” Mama said.

“I hope so. They
are
scary. But we’ve done the same testing on them as everyone else. They are soldiers, but I don’t think we have any psychopaths among them. Jane wouldn’t have recruited them, for one thing. This is the A-Team, girls, the toughest, meanest bitches and sons of bitches you ever saw. This is going to be easy for them.”

I could believe it. They were all dressed in full body armor and were fully armed. Helmets, rifles, grenades, grenade launchers. They were about 30 percent female and 70 percent male. None of them were what you’d call small.

In ten minutes, Jane had them formed into combat teams, and they rolled out on little vehicles they called jeeps and a few larger personnel carriers, all bristling with guns.

And Travis was right. It was easy. Within twenty-four hours, the mutiny was over, all the leaders were in jail, all the followers taken in for questioning.

Cassie:

It was love at first sight. The first time I saw Jane Litchfield, I fell madly in love with her.

Not sexually. I’m not even what they call bicurious. No, the love affair was because I wanted to
be
her.

For the last few years, Mama had been after both of us to decide what to
do
with our lives. Now here we were, a few months away from college, and neither of us had selected a career. At least, if Polly had, she hadn’t mentioned it to me.

As for me, I had been drifting, no question. I was never a whiz-kid student. I brought home decent grades, not quite as good as Polly’s, but I’d never failed a course. And I’d seldom aced a test even though I had often thought I could if I studied more. The reason was that I just didn’t
care
. The only thing I had found so far in life that I loved was skypool.

There’s an old song Mama played for us once that said don’t know much about history, biology, science, don’t know what something called . . . a slip rule? What it’s for. I don’t know, either. If I were writing a song—something else I don’t know much about—it would more accurately say I’ve got a
smattering
of history, biology, science, etc. I am reasonably literate, I can express myself in the lingua franca of
Rolling Thunder
, which is English. I learned enough of those other subjects to be able to hold my own except among experts in the field. I studied them enough to know I didn’t want to build my life around them.

I’ve looked at the jobs other people have, and none of them have ever leaped out at me and said, “
This
is what you want to do.”

I’m not artistic. I don’t want to sell anything.

What I figured, I’d take general courses, all over the map, for the first year or two at good old Rolling Thunder College, get on one of the skypool intramural teams (there’s no varsity here, as the only teams we could play would be from Rolling Thunder University), and see what interested me.

But now I thought I had it. What I want to be when I grow up. An explorer. An adventurer. A soldier? Not unless we had to fight intelligent species that were our equal.

I had just finished the only adventure of my life, and it had been a dilly. Stopping now, resting, watching Travis and Jane organize the counterattack, I felt a terrific buzz, and nothing to do with it, nowhere to put it.

Yes, it was horrible. We suffered. A good girl died. Some other people, good or bad, died as well. People were injured, including Polly. But other than in a hard-fought game, I had never felt so alive. Was I an action junkie? Maybe. If so, what’s wrong with that?

I had finally put my finger on something I’d never considered before but now realized had been bugging me most of my life. Life in the ship was . . . boring. Tame. Every blade of grass was carefully planned. Every structure and farm and animal and every human was there for a reason. The mutiny was basically the first time anything unexpected had happened in my lifetime. I’d have been happier if it had never happened . . . but it did, and I learned something about myself.

I wanted to hack my way through unexplored, virgin jungle.

I wanted to swashbuckle my way over the high seas, maybe harpoon a New Sun version of a whale. Or lasso one, put it in a black bubble, and bring it back alive to Earth, where they were all extinct now from the invasion.

I wanted to be the first to plumb the depths of the ancient underground city, abandoned by the inhabitants of our new planet a million years ago when they left for another galaxy. Well, could happen.

I wanted to discover new animal and plant species and, if necessary, fight off an attack of giant carnivorous rhododendrons.

We were going to have a whole planet to explore, and it wasn’t going to be barren and dead, like Mars. Of course, it might harbor nothing more ominous than little ferns and tiny lizards and frogs, but who knew?
We
would know, eventually.

So for the next few weeks, as things sorted themselves out for a return to something approximating normal, I hung out with Jane. Actually, at first I tagged along wherever she went, and she paid little attention to me. I’m sure she saw me as a bumbling little puppy, eager to play adult games.

But eventually we talked some, and someone else told her what Polly and I had done (we modest adventurer types never brag about our exploits ourselves), and she started showing me considerable respect.

As well she should! I don’t want to toot my own horn (well, not too loud), but looking back, it was pretty amazing that we did it all.

I told her of my newfound desire to become a part of her team, to be one of the first ones down to the planet, to . . . well, to be like her. I wanted to hear some of her adventures, but she wouldn’t talk about them. I figured that someday I could pry some information out of Travis.

In short, I was a happy girl, a girl with a purpose.

I could hardly wait until we got there.

How could I know it would all change so quickly?

Polly:

I said it was all over, but, of course, it was not. There was the aftermath of it all to deal with. And we still had the problem that Papa had found that started it all.

Papa was fine. He had spent the time with Patrick, hardly aware of where he was. When we came to get him, he greeted us lovingly, as always, but he was very excited about something and couldn’t wait to get back to his lab/workshop. I don’t think he has more than vague memories of there being any trouble. And that was fine. That was Papa. The story of how Cassie and I made our way to the North Pole and what we did there is something he would never hear. He pays zero attention to the news, and none of us in the family would ever tell him.

There were around eight hundred people involved in the mutiny. There was a core group of Max and about a dozen others who planned it all. There were about a hundred who knew the real story. The rest were dupes who were roped in by a tall tale of Travis and others about to declare martial law, or something silly like that. Those people were given a stern talking-to, but what else could we do? Max exploited a weakness in the security systems or he would never have been able to sell that idea. In the end, aside from the mild social stigma of having been fooled, they mostly went back to their regular jobs.

It was different for the hard-core plotters. I expected that Travis’s wrath would be enormous. Hang ’em high, draw and quarter the bastards, build an electric chair. Something like that. So I was a little surprised at what he did to them.

Nothing.

Okay, not quite nothing. But there was no trial, not even a hearing. Each of them was allowed to make a statement. Contrition, defiance, pleas for mercy, apologies. Whatever. And then they were popped into black bubbles.

“Let the elected civil authorities on New Sun take care of it,” he said. “I wash my hands of it.” He felt betrayed by an old friend and guilty that his elaborate safety measures had had just enough holes in them to allow that stinking son of a bitch to get away with as much as he did.

They would be let out of the bubbles sometime after we got there. And that was the scary part, for them. That
sometime
could be a long way off. Remember, the bulk of the colonists were already in bubbles, and they would not all be coming out at once. They would come out as their particular skills were needed. As Cassie pointed out to me a few days after the hearings, the need for mutineers would be quite small. I hadn’t thought of that. It was possible they would never come out.

Max made an angry statement before vanishing into an unknown future. He said we were all crazy to accept Papa’s calculations about the dark matter and dark energy. He called us all quitters, cowards, without the nerve to continue on to our new life. He cursed us if we decided to stop the ship, or turn it around. He singled out Cassie and me in the crowd and had a few nasty words to call us, which I won’t repeat here.

I smiled, and waved at him. Bye-bye, Max!

Cassie had a hand gesture for him that Papa would have frowned at. But of course, Papa wasn’t there. He was working on something.

My arm healed up nicely, with only a little scar. Why is it that I get all the scars? And why does Cassie keep winning that silly scissors-rock-paper game?

Cassie:

Life returned to normal fairly quickly. The damage from fires and such was not apocalyptic. If people had had guns, it would certainly have been much worse, like the pictures of bullet-riddled and bomb-blasted buildings I’ve seen from fighting on Earth. There were a lot of injuries from the hand-to-hand fighting with knives and clubs, broken bones and concussions and cuts and a few burns, but only seventeen people died. For people who aren’t used to close combat, closing in with a knife or even a sledgehammer is a scary thing to do. Most of them ran away as fast as they could, and I don’t blame them.

One of the dead, of course, was Cheryl Chang. Polly and I and all the skypool teams in the ship, boys and girls, attended her memorial service, in our uniforms. Mama was there, and Travis gave a moving speech. Her parents were brokenhearted but stoic. They were Buddhists. They believed she had moved on to a better life, or something like that. I don’t know much about religions. I hoped it helped.

Polly and I cried our eyes out. I still choke up when I think about it.

But we still had to decide what to do about the threat Papa had discovered and that he and I had left the ship to learn more about.

So one day, Travis summoned all the mayors of all the townships—except the one currently serving an indefinite sentence in stasis, awaiting trial many years from now—and had them assemble on the bridge. When Polly and I asked to be there, he said we had a right to be, no question. So we sat off to one side as the big shots took their seats on folding chairs and regarded Travis and Papa and something Papa had brought with him.

It was typical of one of Papa’s gizmos, though a little large. He had had time to work on it for a few weeks, so it didn’t have as much of the slapdash look of some of his creations.

How to describe it. It’s hard, because it didn’t have many parts you could call square, or spherical, or much of anything else. It slightly resembled some of those shapes I looked at once in a book on topology. Theoretical constructs that were twisted through some other dimensions, like a Möbius strip that had had a nervous breakdown.

It was mostly metal and glass, or plastic, with a few other things. It was about ten feet tall and four feet wide, bigger at the base, smaller here and there, with no rhyme or reason that I could see.

It didn’t do anything. It just sat there. No blinking lights, no emissions of steam, no sizzling Jacob’s ladders. Maybe it wasn’t turned on. Maybe it would put on a better show later. Right then, it looked like it would be more at home in a museum of “modernist” sculpture than on the bridge.

Polly and I whispered to each other, and our consensus was that it might be something that would shield us from the deadly sleet of dark lightning. That would be good. The thought of turning back gave me an ache deep in my heart. The thought of an extra fifty or sixty years getting there was almost as heartbreaking. I
had
to get to New Sun. There wasn’t much left back at Old Sun for an intrepid girl explorer.

We had talked to Papa, asking him what he was working on. He had let us get glimpses of it in various stages of construction. We asked him what the gizmo would do.

“Maybe nothing,” was all he would say.

It was taking a while to get going, so the sibling and I continued to whisper. What I was most concerned about at the moment was Patrick. I had asked the lovely boy out on a date, and he had said yes. Which was a big surprise. I had been sure that, with the intense time Polly and Patrick had spent together, they would have formed some sort of bond.

“You knew I took Patrick to a dance?” I asked her, cautiously.

“Somebody mentioned it. How did it go?”

“Okay. He’s a good dancer.”

“Yeah, I figured he would be.”

I knew her well enough to sense there was something she wasn’t telling me. If it had been me, even in the midst of the crisis, I would have made some sort of attempt to get closer to him. I mean, life goes on, right?

Could it be his acrophobia? I’ll admit I was a little surprised when I heard about that, him looking so strong and all, but none of us are responsible for our phobias. If you dropped a tarantula in my lap, I’d pee my pants. Papa’s got more phobias than I can count, and yet he’s the kindest, best person I know.

So I’ll continue to take a hack at Patrick.

Travis’s calling the meeting to order put an end to my speculation. I’m going to leave out all the niceties and formalities he engaged in and get right to the meat of the matter.

“So once more, let me go through our options at this point,” he said.

“One, we continue as we have been, accelerating to the midpoint, where we will be moving at well over 98 percent of the speed of light, turn the ship around, and decelerate until we get there. In other words, our original plan. Jubal, do you have a better fix on when you think that would kill us all?”

“Nothin’ exack,” he said, looking very troubled. He was medicated to the eyeballs, doing better than usual in the low gravity, and still able to function. “But it be soon. Another couple a months at the most.”

“Okay. Option two. We shut down the engines, drift at this speed, which Jubal thinks might be safe.
Might
be. When we get to the right point in space, we decelerate until we arrive.

“Option two A, decelerate some right now, to be on the safe side. That adds about seventy years to our trip. More years with option two A.

“Option three. We start decelerating right now, do that for twenty years until we are motionless relative to the sun, accelerate another twenty years to this speed, turn around again and decelerate another twenty years until we arrive back home, tails between our legs. Total, sixty years wasted, in addition to the twenty years we’ve already wasted.”

So, tell us which option you
really
hate, Travis, why don’t you? Duh. But Travis still had a trick or two up his sleeve.