Red Lightning (32 page)

Taunting was popular, too. Wise guys outdid each other coming up with insults, chants, nasty signs. Groups gathered to insult them. Mooning was popular and, since most of them were males and no Martian woman would be caught dead keeping company with them, not even the prostitutes, groups of high school girls liked to get together and pull up their shirts or drop their pants and challenge their manhood.

Funny, we'd never had a demonstration before they came, and now we had three or four of them every day. Most of them didn't amount to much more than "Earthies Go Home!" but there were more thoughtful people who had come to see the invasion as a political opportunity.

The word most people were using was "participation." Martians wanted more say in our destiny. Up to then, most people thought of "Martian destiny" as making as much money as possible. Down deep, most of us still thought of ourselves as Earthies. The invasion started changing that.

Only a few things happened worth mentioning during the next month. Travis told us the real reason the Power Company was so upset about losing Jubal, and we had our second and third invasions.

It was starting to look like they were lining up out there to invade us. "All nation-states, corporations, power-mad billionaires, and disgruntled liberation groups wishing to invade Mars please take a number and wait your turn," as a popular comedian put it.

The point of the joke was that we didn't know who the second and third waves of invaders were. We still didn't have much of an idea who our
occupiers
were, though theories abounded, and most people agreed it was an extragovernmental coalition of corporations.

If
who
was in dispute,
why
was even more problematic, except to members of my family and the Redmonds, who couldn't talk. There were rumors that Jubal was dead, vigorously denied by all concerned and backed up by some excellent videoshopped news stories that showed a smiling Jubal working happily in his lab and talking to some visitors, casually referring to various current events. Anyone who knew Jubal knew in an instant that it was bullshit – it took an event the size of the tsunami to get Jubal's attention at all – but nobody but my family and the staff in the Falklands really knew Jubal, so they got away with it.

It's on Mars. Who cares? We got problems of our own.

Evangeline and I just happened to have a front-row seat for the second invasion. Well, I guess we did for the first one, too, but it's not the one I would have picked, seeing as how we almost got killed.

We had been coming out onto the roof of the Red Thunder in the evenings. We'd sit together, watch the sunset. Martian sunsets are pretty, if you like pink. No, we didn't get it on, nobody's figured out how to do that in a pressure suit. It was
night
, you understand, and basically, Martians don't go out at night unless it's an emergency. What you do if you
have
to go out after dark is put on an insulated oversuit, stay in groups of three or more, and get back inside as soon as you can. And still you get cold.

What we'd do those summer evenings was sit on electric pads, lean back against our airpacks, hold hands, and watch the stars come out. Watch Phobos move across the sky, see the blazing exhausts of ships blasting for Earth or the outer planets. Watch for meteorites burning up. Sometimes we talked about anything and everything under the sun, sometimes we hardly said anything. We'd stay out there until our feet and hands started getting cold, then we'd hurry inside and down to my room and jump under the covers until we'd generated some heat.

Dad and Mom didn't know where we went those evenings. It wasn't permitted, strictly speaking, and it was just a wee bit dangerous, though we were always within ten seconds of the pressurized and heated freight elevator. Sometimes you just wanted to get away from people, you know?

Then one night, all ten of the black ships that had surrounded the city for just over a month blasted into the air.

"Whoa!" Evangeline breathed, and we both sat up straighter. We were almost blinded by the light of their bubble-drive exhausts, bright enough to partially polarize our faceplates. "What's going on?"

"You got me."

The black saucer-shaped ships were soon invisible against the black sky, but the exhausts were still there, and dwindling fast.

"They must be pulling five gees," she said. "What's the hurry?"

"Beats me. Maybe they just got tired of pushing people around and decided to go home." She was looking at me, trying to decide if I was kidding. She laughed.

"Yeah, right. Well, good riddance." She pointed a middle finger skyward and let out a whoop. "Take that, you fuckers! And never come back!"

That was the moment that one of the black ships exploded. We stared at it, stunned, a huge white flower like a fireworks burst. We could actually, see bits of it twisting and turning, trailing fire.

Evangeline was still standing there, finger extended like she didn't quite know what to do with it.

"Don't ever point that thing at me, okay?" I told her.

"That's not funny."

It was miles and miles away by then. We watched until most of the wreckage had fallen beyond the horizon. For the next fifteen minutes we watched the first space battle in history develop over our heads.

Being Martians, and having spent quite a few nights out there on the roof, we thought we knew spaceships. These ships were behaving like ships in a bad sci-fi movie from last century, twisting, deking, slowing, and accelerating. It was an actual dogfight. At the speeds they were moving, it must have been brutal for the crews.

"Those things were purpose-built," I told Evangeline at one point.

"What do you mean?"

"Your normal ship has just the one drive, at the back. It's built to take acceleration stresses from just one direction. There's little attitude jets, but they couldn't put a ship into a turn in vacuum like we're seeing here. For that, they must have side drives, forward-facing drives, all of them highly maneuverable. These things are to normal spaceships like a fighter jet is to the
Sovereign
."

They were armed like fighters, too. We'd see one of them streaking along, a thin line of expanding light, and suddenly there would be a series of flashes and the tinier lines of air-to-air missiles being launched. Actually, space-to-space, I guess, though I'd never heard the term. Aside from a few satellite shoot-downs, the military guys had never been allowed to play their deadly games in space because of international treaties.

Didn't seem to matter to these guys, and I knew they hadn't built these killer ships in the days since Jubal flew the coop. Somebody had been cheating, and hiding it.

We could see the movements of the ships because they seemed always to be under thrust, sometimes sprouting more than one exhaust as they used the only means of turning in space, which was vectoring thrust to one side or another, using secondary engines. Sometimes one bright plume would stop spouting and another would start, in precisely the opposite direction. You get going too fast up there, and next thing you know you're beyond the fight. They didn't take the time to turn ship, they had jets in the nose, and in the sides as well.

We'd see what looked like small explosions... and have no way to tell just how big or small they really were, since we didn't know the distance. They could be firecrackers a half mile up, or nuclear bombs a hundred thousand miles away. But some burst in clusters, and I figured they were salvoes of missiles, possibly intending to spread shrapnel in the path of another ship.

Naturally our faceplates were buzzing with small windows off to one side, and normally I'd have been doing a lot of looking and listening to that stuff... but how often do you see a thing like we were seeing, live, right in front of your face? The news was a mass of confusion, anyway, the times I glanced at it. One talking-head newscaster was actually in his pajamas, looking like he was at home, just got out of bed, as he relayed the jumbled information he was getting.

Ships taking off. Explosions. Fire in the sky! No reports of injuries...

I knew more than he did, so I shut him down.

Then there was a
big
fireball in the sky, and a short time later, another.

"I'm getting real tired of not knowing what the hell's going on," Evangeline said.

"You and me both. Do you think –"

There was a loud emergency signal in my helmet. A face appeared on a larger window, overriding our own stuff. She was wearing the uniform of the Emergency Services, the Martian equivalent of the fire department. They did handle fires, but their main concern was pressure integrity.

"Even when this fighting is over," she said, "we are concerned with debris impacting ships in space and the surface itself. We are advising all airboarders to stay within Phobos, or land as soon as possible. All shuttle flights are canceled until further notice. All deep-space vessels are advised to get as far as possible from the fighting, since our radar is showing literally thousands of high-velocity fragments and we haven't had time to chart the fastest and/or most dangerous ones.

Everyone downside is advised to remain in their quarters with pressure doors sealed and storm shutters closed, or to seek public shelters on the lowest levels. Follow the flashing green arrows embedded in the floors of all public areas. Remain in the shelters, tuned to this channel, until the all clear has sounded."

I was going to say something, but Evangeline was shouting and pointing behind me. I turned, and saw something big coming down. It burned a bright blue-white, and chunks of stuff were coming off it and bursting. For a moment it seemed to be coming right at us, but that was an optical illusion, I guess, because it passed overhead at least a mile up. I could judge the distance because it still retained some of the saucer shape of the black ships. It looked like a big bite had been taken out of it. It went over the hills to the east of town, there was a moment when we could see nothing... then a towering fireball rose into the air just as the sonic boom from its passage overhead hit us.

"I think we'd better get below," I said.

"I'm already on my way."

I got another urgent message as we ran for the elevator. Dad's face popped up in a side window, looking harassed. "Ray, where are you?"

"On my way, Dad."

"Come to the subbasement shelter if you're close enough," he said. "Have you heard anything from your sister?"

That's the moment it all stopped being a video game for me. Pretty late, I know that, but you had to be there. Until that ship crashed beyond the hills it was very hard to make yourself believe it was all really happening.

The elevator shook as we descended. Evangeline grabbed my arm and held on, and I put my arm around her. Ice was forming on our supercold suits and bits of it flaked off and fell at our feet.

We reached the bottom elevator level and stepped out into a crowd of hurrying people, some of them dressed in suits, most of them in regular clothes. Down a flight of stairs and we were in the pressure shelter, the absolute last line of defense against blowouts, only to be used if you felt the whole structure of the Red Thunder Hotel was in danger of being breached.

Later, Dad had cause to be proud of his workers. We only do shelter drill twice a year, as opposed to pressure drill, where all guests are sealed into their rooms for ten minutes and shown a video of how to don emergency suits, which we do once a week. So you might have expected them to be a little rusty, especially since nobody really took shelter drill all that seriously. After all, what sort of catastrophe was likely to rupture all the multilayered pressure defenses at the same time? No quakes on Mars. No tsunamis. Plenty of tornadoes, but pretty weak in the thin air.

War? Don't make me laugh.

But there they were, hustling the confused and beginning-to-be-frightened hotel guests into the shelter almost as efficiently as the crew of the
Sovereign
, who did this sort of drill once a week. Two big guys in bellhop uniforms were at the entrance, putting a hand on everyone's shoulder to move them along, while the other hand passed out emergency suit kits.

"Move it along; please, take one and move it along, all the way to the end of the corridor. Move it along, break the seal on the suit pack, and you'll be shown how to put it on. Move it along. I'm sorry sir, I don't have time to answer your questions, move it along please..."

We hurried down the long, narrow room. TV screens every ten feet or so were showing how to break the seals on the suit packs, how to unfold them, how to step into them, how to zip them up. Very few people had gotten that far. A lot of them were still at step one and not making a lot of progress. Most of them were stuck at step three, trying to stick their legs into the suit arms or putting them on backwards. You can wear them backwards, in a pinch... but pinch is the key word. They're just thick man-shaped baggies, designed to be tolerable for about an hour, and survivable for a day. You plug the air hose into the socket in the wall, then you sit there, sweltering or freezing, wondering if the next time the air monitor says you need more oxy, there will be any coming down the line.

How I Spent My Martian Vacation.

Dad was near the end of the shelter with half a dozen employees, working on the more hopeless cases. He was trying to unwrap the air hose from an elderly woman's neck. The old lady was looking a little blue. He looked up.

"Ramon, I need you..." A piece of ice flaked off my suit and dropped at his feet. He frowned at it for a second, then at me, then decided to ask me later what I'd been doing out at night. "Get to the pressure control center. They're a man short." He turned back to his charges, and I made myself scarce, with Evangeline following behind me.

The control center was just off the middle of the tube. There were three chairs in there, each facing consoles. From them we could access any of the hundreds of cameras in the Red Thunder complex. I slid into a seat. I recognized Patil Par-something, never could remember his last name, our house detective.