Stars Rain Down (17 page)

"More orange jumpsuits?" The soldier said in disbelief. His English carried the slightest trace of an accent. "Every time we think we've seen the last of you, more come through that pass with another pack of refugees. They've all been Chinese and Indian, though. Where are you from, my friends?"

Jack was glad to hear they weren't the first group, and he guessed they wouldn't be the last either. "Pacific States Alliance," he said, "San Jose. Our tranzat went down over Szichuan province, and we've been hoofing it ever since."

"You're quite a way from home. Tell me, can anything kill you oranges?"

"Nothing yet," Nikitin said with a smile and they laughed. Jack could always count on Nikitin for bravado if nothing else.

"So, where do we go next?" Jack asked. He was trying to recall the local organization from his last trip to Afghanistan. "Is there a refugee camp in Jalalabad, or do we truck all the way to Kabul?"

The soldier laughed again. That couldn't be a good sign. "You're a rare one, to be so optimistic after walking through hell. There is no Jalalabad or Kabul. The entire Mashriq is in ruins. The whole world, if what I hear is true."

Jack hoped he'd somehow misunderstood him. "Come on... The UEO must be coordinating something."

"Perhaps I was not clear. The UEO is gone, friend. Everything's been burnt to ash, and there's no one left to run anything. There are only refugees like you and me."

Jack felt like he was on the receiving end of a cruel joke. "Everything? Europe? North America?"

"Everything. A pair of Blade Valkyrie jets just returned from North America, and they say its the same there as everywhere."

"Son of a bitch," Nikitin said.

"Where do we go?" Jack asked again, but it was hardly a question. He closed his eyes and saw the ghosts of his life back home, a life that was already dead and gone. His beautiful Jessica was there in the pale light of an approaching storm, waiting for him to come home. Waiting for him to ask a question she'd already said
yes
to.

She told him she'd always be there waiting for him, and he refused to let the promise go. He'd survived against all odds, and she must have survived too. Somehow.

When he opened his eyes, the ghosts were gone.

"You have two choices," the soldier said. "The first is to head north, as many others have. There are rumors of enclaves sprouting up in Russia around their
Ark.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear the same about the other two, but who knows."

The Ark Project
had been started a couple decades before, but never totally finished; it turned into such a massive boondoggle that people often wondered if the GAF was running the show. The Arks themselves were huge underground shelters to be used in the event of a planet killer asteroid, each designed to hold a few million people indefinitely. They were located far off the equator—one each in Russia, Canada and Australia—to maximize their distance from potential impact zones... that was the official story, at least. Jack always considered their locations suspicious, no doubt influenced by politics and money.

Still, there was plenty of shelter and Jack admitted that it made a lot of sense to try and reorganize there.

The soldier pointed out across the thousands of cars coming through the pass. "That's what I would recommend for most of them. There's life there, and maybe some kind of future."

"And the other option?" Nikitin asked.

"Join our struggle and give the infidels hell. I know that most of you oranges are hard set against violence, but perhaps the situation is different now? I can see that you are survivors, and I'm sure your skills would find use."

"What struggle?" Jack asked. "You said everything's gone."

The soldier laughed yet again. Jack was starting to think that he and the soldier had very different senses of humor. "You are so fast to lay down your arms, American. Your people have never been invaded, have they? You see, in my world, invasion is our history. First the Greeks, then the Indians, the English, Soviets, Americans, and Indians once again. This land has been invaded a thousand times already, and it will be invaded a thousand more. When the smoke clears and these latest invaders are gone, who do you think will remain?"

The soldier's rhetorical question was met with silence, and he smiled.

"They have taken Africa as their own, and we will force them out however we can. The Mashriq is our front-line, and soldiers of every flag are united in the struggle. Mashriq Coalition, your Blade and Carbon corporations, and more Mujahidin than can be counted. UEO and separatists standing together... isn't that something? Soon, the oil will begin to flow, and the war will truly begin... of course, we could always use more help."

More help. That phrase made it sound so innocuous, like they needed an extra hand raising a barn or passing out fliers. Still, Jack knew the soldier was right. This wasn't a petty political disagreement. It wasn't a conflict of ideologies. The enemy was here to exterminate the human race, and resistance was the only option.

"Should you decide to join us, there is an airfield south of Jalalabad that we use. Transports leave everyday. They will take you to our forward base."

Jack closed his eyes again, but before he could see the ghosts of his past, his decision was already made.

Midday on Mars. The sun shone brightly, but a sandstorm was brewing on the horizon, and it blurred the line where dusty ground met rusty sky. Somewhere over that horizon lurked the biggest mountain anyone had ever seen, rising thirty kilometers into the emaciated sky, but no one would ever believe it was a mountain while standing on it. Its body stretched over an area the size of France, with a grade nearly as steep as a wheelchair ramp.

Amira Saladin was a teenager the first time she made the trip with her parents. They pointed at the ground and told her she was on the peak of the tallest mountain in the solar system, and at the time, she didn't believe a word of it. Fifteen years and more than a dozen return trips later, she still found it difficult to believe. It was the let down that kept on giving.

She eyed the approaching storm with a touch of annoyance. "Just another beautiful day on the Arcadian Plain."

Kazuo Nagai's voice came in over her headset. "Cry me a river, Sal. You love it out here. I know it, you know it... now stop working your jaw and gimme a hand with this."

She estimated an hour or more before the storm would hit, time enough to get their work done with ease. She was also pretty sure she outranked Kazuo, so she kept moving at her own leisurely pace.

At least, she thought she outranked him. As she watched the coming storm, she wondered if anyone really understood the GAF chain of command.

Sal turned back toward the wall of the Ares Colony, where Kazuo was impatiently holding up a half-tonne composite steel panel. His powered environment suit, called a MASPEC, made him look like the bastard offspring of a man and a forklift... and the forklift apparently had more dominant genes. Sal made a mental note to do something about the machine's aesthetics once she got all the bugs worked out.

She marched over and grabbed the other end of the panel, then she and Kazuo carried it to the side, revealing the bare innards of the atmosphere processor beneath. The compartment was full of ducting and jumbled wires; just the sort of electronic spaghetti she hated. "Remind me to chew out whoever left this mess. It's like they never heard of cable ties."

"Probably your father's work."

"Shut up."

Kazuo flicked on his shoulder lamp and hunkered down in front of the compartment. "Which board is it?"

"Jay five. The rack with the bright red error light."

"I'm color blind, Sal. I've told you at least a hundred times."

"And it's funny every single time," she said without malice.

Kazuo selected the screwdriver attachment on his wrist tool, and went to work on the screws that held the circuit board in place. "Tell me something interesting about Mars," he said while he worked.

Sal pulled the replacement board out of her pack. "Alright. Did you know that in ancient times, Mars was inhabited by a race of intelligent tiger-lizard men?"

"Is that so?"

"Absolute fact. Despite their civilization's catastrophic collapse, a few of them survived into modern times, and around the turn of the century, they assisted human exploration of the red planet by wiping down our rovers' solar panels.

"And why didn't I hear about this before?"

"They did it at night while the machines were powered down."

"Amazing," Kazuo said. He handed her the burnt out board, and she gave him the replacement. "Now, what exactly is a tiger-lizard man?" he asked.

"They're basically like normal lizard men... but with jaunty stripes and cheerier attitudes."

Kazuo gave the replacement board a healthy nudge to make sure it was properly seated, then started screwing it in. "That makes some crazy sort of sense, I guess. Wait... Last week, didn't you tell me Mars was originally colonized by little green men with fat heads? There are shenanigans afoot."

Sal gave the faulty board a quick once over, looking for any obvious signs of failure like a burnt capacitor, but there weren't any. She'd have to take a closer look in the lab once they got back. "No shenanigans. The little green men... the Quazlpacti as they were called... they were the first to colonize Mars, and they brought the tiger-lizards with them as pets. Unfortunately, they didn't foresee the mutagenic plague which, in a fit of poetic justice, turned them into docile pets and the tiger-lizards into their cruel masters."

"Fascinating," Kazuo said. "We're ready to seal up here."

Sal packed the faulty circuit board away and then lifted the steel panel up. "It was the Quazlpacti who left the Nazca Lines on Earth, you know."

"To warn us against the dreaded gas monkeys of Jupiter, right?"

"Nope. Just graffiti. The Quazlpacti were jerks."

Kazuo stood and turned to give her a hand with the panel, but stopped and put his hands on his hips instead. His posture positively radiated frustration, and Sal was once again amazed at how much subtle body language made it through the bulk of her powered suits.

"You're holding that panel up by yourself? You weren't going to experiment on production units anymore, damn it."

She laughed. "I wasn't experimenting. It's just a little performance tweak."

"Tweak my ass," Kazuo said. "The suit's only rated to lift half that weight."

She walked past him and lowered the panel over the exposed compartment, then punched the pressure seals into place. "I wrote the spec, thanks. No need to quote it at me."

"That's not the point. It's not safe, Sal. What if your
tweaks
fail and five hundred kilos of steel come tumbling down on you? What then?"

"Then my stalwart yet officious partner digs me out and carries me back to the airlock." She gave Kazuo a nudge in the ribs, which he certainly didn't feel. "Those are the dangers of frontier engineering, soldier boy. Better get used to it."

With the panel locked in place, they both marched back toward the eastern airlock at a pace much slower than their suits were capable of. After a long silence, Kazuo said, "You're really aggravating, you know that?"

"Of course I know," Sal replied. "You think this comes easy? It's why you like me so dang much."

Kazuo groaned, and Sal took it as a sign of affection. Kazuo wasn't the kind to let his positive emotions bubble up to the surface, but it meant they burned twice as bright deep down inside. At least, that's what she told herself while continuing to hunt around for them.

By the time they reached the airlock, the sandstorm was still brewing in the distance and hadn't made much progress. Sal would've been delighted if it never bothered to come together at all. The sound of stones battering the colony's outer shell always ruined her concentration in the lab.

The airlock doors closed behind them and the chamber began to pressurize, a process made agonizingly slow by obsolete, decrepit airlock hardware. The old tech did its job, though, and just well enough that Sal's requests for replacements from Earth were ignored. And since they were all mission critical systems, she wasn't allowed to experiment on them. Not the slightest little bit.

"Tell me something interesting about Mars," Kazuo said, looking to kill time.

Sal's mind was still on those annoying, tiny little rocks. "Did you know that ninety percent of the rocks currently on Mars were brought here by the original colonists?"

"Is that so?" Kazuo asked.

"Absolute fact. The Martian landscape, as originally observed by the Viking probes, was mind numbingly boring... so the colonists brought rocks with them to liven up the scenery. A quarter of the colonists were landscapers by profession, and they spent the first three years carefully arranging them, like some kind of giant Zen garden."

"Incredible," he said. "What about the sandstorms?"

"Ruined all of their hard work over and over again, until they finally gave up trying."

The pressure was half-way there.

"Tell me something interesting about Earth," she said.

He took a moment to think. Kazuo wasn't the imaginative type, so he tended to answer with actual, interesting facts. Or things he thought were interesting, but often times weren't. "Did you know..." he droned out as he tried to think of something, "that when Yuri Gagarin first orbited Earth, the Great Wall of China was the only man-made structure visible from space."

"I did know that."

"Oh."

"And it's not true."

"Damn."

An uncomfortable silence persisted until the green pressure light came on and the internal doors parted, revealing the mission readiness bay. The oblong room was filled with standard GAF pressure suits hanging on racks, as well as a half-dozen of Sal's MASPEC powered suits which faced the wall with their backs open.

Sal and Kazuo marched inside and each stepped up to a mechanical docking clamp, which held MASPECs upright while their pilots climbed out. A person wasn't strong enough to stand once the suit powered down, and attempts to escape were rather comical... when they didn't result in serious injury.