Red Lightning (6 page)

It was somewhere between the impacts on Andros and Abaco and the arrival of the wave front at Grand Bahama Island that I noticed something in the one window I had kept functioning on my stereo. It was down in the left-hand corner of my field of vision, where I always parked it. It was the log of my incoming calls. There were forty or fifty names of friends who wanted me to log on to a group chat.

I guess it was the Earth icon that caught my eye. I've got a fair number of chathogs on Earth, but by the nature of the, time lag they were more like old-fashioned pen pals – it was seldom important to get back to them right away. But this one was marked
Florida, USA
, and any of the people I knew in Florida might be writing their last words to me at that moment.

I ticked on the icon, and when the number came up I shouted and got to my feet without even realizing I was doing it.

"It's Grandma!" I said, and quickly ticked the incoming window over to the house computer with an ultra-urgent priority. A window opened up right on the center of the wall. The picture formed, and was chaotic for a moment, then settled down. At first I didn't know what I was looking at, then saw it was an old laptop computer sitting on a chair. Grandma's face was on the screen. She looked a little harried, but calm.

"– how much time we have left, but I had to take a moment to do this," she was saying. I found Mom and Dad and Elizabeth were standing beside me. I felt Dad grab my hand.

"There's never enough time to tell everyone you love how much you love them, is there? I know, I've told you all. But trouble is coming, and they're saying it may be big trouble, maybe the biggest of all, and I have a lot of things to do, but I have to take a moment to do the most important thing of all in case... well, in case this is the last chance I have to tell you."

Dad squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, but I didn't complain. Elizabeth took my other hand.

"Kelly, I am proud to have you for a daughter-in-law. I haven't told you before, but I never thought it would last, you being... well, from a different sort of people." She laughed. "People with money. There, I said it. I thought you were slumming, and you proved me wrong. I've never been so happy to be wrong in my life."

I heard Mom sob, and she sat down hard on the couch, like her legs had been cut out from under her. Dad sat beside her and hugged her, and Elizabeth and I were left standing. I didn't look back at my parents. I don't like to see my parents cry. In fact, I don't think I'd ever seen it before. Surely not when Mom's father died. The only thing I ever heard her say about that was "Well, now they've got a Mercedes dealership in Hell. But they better keep their hands on their wallets."

Mom and her late father hadn't gotten along.

"Ramon and... sorry, Ray, my big boy, and Elizabeth, I'm so proud of you guys I could just bust when I think about you. I wish y'all could have come to visit me more often, and I wish I'd had the guts to take a trip to see y'all on Mars, but watching y'all grow up in the videos you sent me was the next best thing, and I guess it may have to do. I love you so much."

Grandma never even liked to go out on a boat on the ocean, and she hated to fly, so she'd never set foot on a spaceship, even though her son had helped build the first really good one. My throat was hurting something awful, and my nose was stopped up. Yeah, I was crying pretty good, I guess.

"And Manny... oh, Manny. You've done your mother proud, young man. I can't tell you –"

I thought I was about to burst, and suddenly the camera moved. I gasped, thinking
My god, the building is falling over
! It jerked around for a while, then showed Grandma's face. She was holding the little camera at arm's length, looking into it. She looked very tired.

"Okay, you'll get that as a message attachment if you get it at all. Let's get practical here." She set the camera on something steady and backed up a little bit. We could see her from the knees up, and I realized she was standing on the roof of the Blast-Off Tower. There were other people in the picture, none of them familiar. Grandma was wearing an automatic pistol in a holster on her hip and had a serious-looking rifle over her shoulder.

"It's been chaotic, but I expect it'll get worse." She smiled grimly and patted the handgun. "For now, we've just opened our doors to anybody who's in the area. I'd say we're at about twice capacity right now. Most of the people seem to have gone to the bigger hotels. They might be surprised later. I figure anybody who's in here when the wave comes is my guest. I've shut off the water in the tank up here on the roof, and turned off the gas, and the tank of diesel is full, and the generator is tested. You know I keep my emergency hurricane supplies up here where they won't get flooded, so I've got enough food to keep this bunch going for at least a week, and I've had volunteers bringing up stuff from the restaurant.

So the only question is... how big is it? If the building holds up, I figure we'll be okay. I've been thinking back to '04. Manny, you're too young to remember it well, I guess, but it was a pretty big deal. I wondered what it would be like if it hit here. I figure that help will arrive a lot quicker, but it will still be pretty hairy for the first week or so. So I just wanted to let you know I'm prepared..."

She looked off to one side and smiled.

"See, Manny," Mom said. "I told you she was a survivor." "She's a tough old broad, all right."

Grandma was beckoning to someone off camera.

"Come on, Maria, you have to say hello, at least. Come on!"

My aunt Maria came reluctantly into the picture, moving slowly with a cane, camera-shy as always. She wrote to me frequently, but never sent videos, scoffing at all that newfangled nonsense. I was shocked at how old and fragile she looked. She had always been... well, Mom says she's an "ample" woman, which means at least chubby. Not a lot over five feet tall, dark-skinned, her hair all white now. She wasn't exactly thin, but her skin seemed to hang off her.

"My god, she's lost thirty pounds," Elizabeth whispered to me. Her tone wasn't happy, it was clear to both of us this wasn't a healthy weight loss. Was something happening to her that no one had told me about?

Aunt Maria was no sooner in the picture than Grandma looked off to her left. I could hear people shouting.

"I think it's coming," she said. She faced the camera again. "I'm going to move the camera again, so y'all can see this. We may not be talking for a while, so let me say again I love you all, I love you so –"

The screen went blank.

Large interplanetary passenger liners don't have to be streamlined because they never land anywhere. The ship does have to withstand acceleration of one gravity for extended periods, so it can't be spidery and insubstantial like so many Earth- and Mars-orbiting satellites, but as long as you distribute the mass evenly along the axis of acceleration you've got pretty much a free hand in design. So you'd think that interplanetary ships would be inner-oriented: that is, the outside would reflect what's on the inside and nothing else. Sort of like the old Lunar Excursion Module, the first human vehicle that never had to operate in air.

You'd be wrong. They mostly look like Buck Rogers or Walt Disney.

The ship that would take us to Earth, the
Sovereign of the Planets
, was run by Royal Caribbean, which seemed ironic to me considering what we'd witnessed a few hours before in our home.

We got our first glimpse of it in free fall after a three-gee boost up from Marsport. Dad was looking a little green in the face despite the antinausea drugs, which are a lot better now than when he was young. Not that they took any with them on the voyage of
Red Thunder
. The one thing that never occurred to him and my uncle Dak was that they'd get spacesickness. So naturally they both spent most of their free-falling time heaving up their guts, while Mom and Uncle Travis and Alicia got along just fine. He laughs about it now, but it's best not to tease him. I think he's deeply ashamed that he never became a good space traveler. A hard blow for a boy who grew up crazy about space and eager to be an astronaut.

The thing about luxury interplanetary travel is, if people have a choice between a nondescript, tossed-together collection of nuts and bolts that you can hardly tell from a bulk cargo carrier and a fantasyland traveling glitter dome that looks part Arabian nights and part Buck Rogers, they'll go for the fantasy every time. People like sleekness, even if it isn't there for any aerodynamic purpose. They like luxurious colors, they like sexy curves.

Bottom line, when they get on a spaceship they want it to look like something that can really go
vroooooooom
!

There's really no point in getting into a long description of the
Sov
. You can get pictures at the Royal Caribbean cybersite. The main body of the ship is graceful and tapered at both ends, like a real rocket ship. Things stick out for no real reason: big swept-back fins and art deco ornamentation and toward the front a stylized statue of Mercury, the corporate logo of RC Deep Space Lines, that's only about half the size of the Statue of Liberty. The colors are silver with crimson racing stripes. Heck, if it would sell more tickets, they'd gladly fit the ship out with big headlights like a '56 Pontiac and big mag wheels with racing tires. As it was, the thing glittered with lights that raced around the hull in a continual light show, sometimes pausing to spell out the names of the acts who would be performing that night in the theaters and clubs and pictures of the delights to be had at the Mercury Buffet.

Pai-Gow Poker
!

Four-Star Dining in the Rotunda
,

Reservations Recommended
!

Celine Dion Twice Nightly in the Intimate Starz Cabaret
!

"Memories of Hip-Hop" in the Main Theater
!

24-Hour Room Service
!

They didn't advertise anything for my generation while I watched the message boards, my generation mostly didn't have the money for a stateroom on the
Sov
, so it was heavily tilted toward the old farts, older even than Mom and Dad. That's okay. Get six or seven of my generation together in a room with our stereos on, and we can make our own entertainment.

The
Sov
was large, but she wasn't the biggest ship in space. She was built for the Earth-Mars run, four to eight days out, four to eight days back at one gee, depending on the positions of the two planets. I'd call her
pretty
big, as opposed to
huge
, like the liners that go to the outer planets, or
gigantic
, like starships.

The docking was about as exciting as the Staten Island Ferry pulling into its berth – less exciting; I'd have enjoyed riding a water ferry, something I've rarely done. The flight attendants strung the safety line down the center aisle of the shuttle and then bounced around snapping everybody's tethers to it, all the time chanting the mantra for space-stupid Earthies: "Please remain seated and do not remove your seat harnesses until you are requested to. Departure will be in strict order, from the front to the back of the spacecraft. Blah blah blah blah..."

I resented the hell out of being treated like a clueless Earthie, but what can you do? Instead, I sat there beside Elizabeth, and when our turn came we meekly unbuckled and allowed ourselves to be handled like baggage, passed slowly and carefully down the line at a very low rate of speed, one hand on the safety line as we were instructed. One plus: no carry-on luggage in a free-fall transfer. Nothing but the clothes on your back and whatever you could carry in your pockets and your stereo, buckled to your face. You don't even want to imagine what it might be like with 150 Earthies swinging backpacks and briefcases and small suitcases around just as though gravity would rescue their careless asses like it always did back home. Talk about your deadly missiles!

Into the ship, and I'll admit it was a little disorienting, going into a strange place in free fall can do that to you. Not really that much to see, anyway, between the shuttle and the assembly room, which would be reconfigured when we boosted and become the main theater, right near the stern of the ship, but which right now was set up to hold the entire complement of passengers. Just ordinary corridors, most of them curving slightly with the hull of the ship, with stewards stationed at every turn to slow passengers who'd gotten too enthusiastic and get them headed in the right way without any broken bones.

They had it down to a science. In the assembly hall they were packing them in like sardines, in three layers, two of them temporary fold-up bleachers with bucket seats and seat belts. I was settled into mine, between Elizabeth and Mom, and in a few more minutes the hall was full. Very much like a ride at Disney World.

Within five minutes we were treated to a big-screen picture of the
Sovereign of the Planets
, from one of the shuttles we'd just left. They didn't waste any time. The longer they spent in free fall, the more vomit bags there were going to be to dispose of, drugs or no drugs.

"Ladies and gentlemen," came the announcement. "We are beginning our acceleration. We will take three minutes to achieve four-tenths of a gravity, just slightly higher than you have been used to on Mars. Please remain seated while this is done, with your seat belts firmly fastened. Some of you may experience some nausea as gravity returns. Please notice that there are plenty of spacesickness bags in the pouch behind the seat in front of you. You may also want to take the in-flight magazine and look at the ship's map you will find inside, to familiarize yourself with the layout of the ship. The captain will be joining you shortly after full acceleration is achieved. Thank you." This was repeated in Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese.