Stars Rain Down (23 page)

Marcus Donovan was floating in the middle of his quarters. The walls were in
crystal mode
as he'd taken to calling it, revealing the stars all around and the rust colored planet below. This was how he spent his downtime, the closest he could get to the pure freedom he felt while reliving one of Legacy's memories.

He ached to be back there again, and the ache filled his thoughts and dreams. He just didn't know how to make his longing a reality.

While rooting around inside the ship's mind, he occasionally triggered other memories, but they were only faded images and dim sensations. They weren't the rich, sensory complete experience he had that first time. He had literally lost himself and become her... and it was the single most transformative moment of his life.

Now, she resided permanently at one edge of his consciousness, a friend and confidante, but whole, separate and complete. There was no commingling, no question where one ended and the other began.

Sometimes, Legacy wondered why Marcus was so eager to be rid of himself. She thought Eireki were the most beautiful things in all of creation, and the desire to escape that existence totally baffled her.

Truth was that being out among the stars was all Marcus had ever wanted, though, and he just couldn't ever explain it quite right. When it came down to it, he wanted to be a ship.

He consoled himself with the fact that for one titanic battle, he'd lived his dream. It was more than most people could say.

But it still wasn't enough.

He watched the stars and picked out constellations for a while, until Legacy told him Amira Saladin was awake and inside the factory. The fact that Amira had trouble sleeping wasn't surprising; most people had some difficulty their first night aboard, thanks in part to the heartbeat rhythm audible throughout the ship.

"If she's in the factory, that's a good sign," he said aloud. "She'll come around. I promise."

Legacy told him again how excited she was by Amira's presence. The woman had a vibrant imagination, and saw possibilities wherever she looked. Her thoughts were different somehow, radiant like a bright beacon burning in the darkness. She was somehow more like the Eireki of old, and Legacy found that especially invigorating.

She told Marcus to go give Amira a nudge in the right direction.

"You're not going to shut up about this, are you?"

The whole of Legacy's being communicated the word
No.

"Fine," he said, "but let me talk to her alone. Really alone. No eavesdropping."

The ship reluctantly agreed.

Marcus floated back down, threw on a shirt and some loose pants, and headed out the door. At the end of the corridor was a landing pad and transit tube, which carried him several kilometers to the factory floor where Amira Saladin was silently looking over it all. She had the look of someone thinking heavy thoughts.

She was leaned against a railing that overlooked an assembly line. The manipulator arms and their panoply of tools were at rest, just waiting for a job to occupy them.

Marcus walked across the empty floor and took a spot next to her. She couldn't have missed him, but didn't react to his presence. Marcus assumed she'd talk to him when she was ready.

And after an eternity, she did. "The future never quite works out how you expect, does it?"

"Not as far as I've seen. I think life might be pretty dull if it did."

"Maybe. It'd be nice for a change, though. I mean, when I was a kid, before my family came to Mars, I never ever would've guessed I'd become an engineer."

"You had something else in mind?"

She laughed. "Yeah. Artist, all the way. I can't remember a time when I didn't have paint on my hands. And my clothes. And my face. My mother still has all the goofy little pictures I made."

"What happened?"

Amira shook her head. "Mars happened. For my parents, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. The kind of offer they couldn't refuse, and me... Well, I came along. That's the only choice a teenager has."

"There are only a couple constants in the universe, and one of them is that being a teen sucks. So what, there's no market for art on Mars?"

"I dunno. Things change, so maybe. Probably stupid landscapes. There wasn't back then, though. Art's a luxury, and when we first made planetfall, life was hard... a lot harder than anyone expected. We all worked our fingers to the bone in the early days, adults and kids alike."

"And that's how the painter became a wrench jockey."

"More or less. I had small hands, and I could reach where other people couldn't. I hated it. I hated it so bad that whenever I fixed something, I made sure it stayed that way... just so I wouldn't have to do it again."

They both laughed. When the silence returned, she said, "How about you, Doctor Marcus Donovan? What did you want to be?"

"Me? I just wanted to be on Mars."

"You're kidding me, right?"

"Completely serious. There wasn't anything I wanted more. Rocketing through space, traipsing around alien worlds and meeting little green men. That was the dream, and Mars my first target. It was the only planet close enough to be realistic. The only one with the possibility of becoming more than a stupid kid's fantasy."

Amira shook her head and said, "If it's any consolation, you really didn't miss anything. There was nothing on Mars but rocks and hard work."

"I know," he replied. "I'd still have given my eye-teeth just to hold one of those rocks, though. I had to make do with a crappy telescope, and I kept my face glued to that thing from sunset to sunrise, just dreaming about all the places I'd go if I got my chance... if you look close, I've still got a dent on my cheek from it."

She looked at his face and started to giggle. "Oh God, I thought you were just saying that."

He smiled. "I neglected to mention the part where my brother smacked the back of my head so hard that I needed ten stitches. What are brothers for, right?"

"That's terrible."

"Nah. It gave me character. That's what mom said, at least."

Sal smiled, but it faded quickly. "So, you always knew you were going to outer space?" She sounded wistful.

"S'pose so. I went to university on a scholarship, got my degree in astronomy, and then it was straight into the Foundation. I got so wrapped up in the work that I kinda forgot about aliens and weird worlds, and just stared out into the unknown, hoping to discover some strange nebula to slap my name onto."

"Until you saw an alien ship."

"That was... clearly a turning point for me. I bet I wasn't the first to see her. It just took someone half-crazy to recognize what she was."

"Is that when you became
Mr. Fix-It?
"

"Yep. Doctor Donovan, patch kit and space gypsy. Most despised man in the Foundation, I reckon."

"How do you figure?"

"Say you're working on a project, and the suits inform you that Marcus Donovan is being transferred to your station. How would you take it?"

"Like a slap in the face."

"Right. I got used to steely gazes and professional sabotage after a while. But it didn't matter because I had my eyes on the prize."

A look of utter disbelief suddenly overtook her. "Wait a minute... You're full of crap. You're telling me your life turned out precisely the way you imagined it."

"Not precisely. Like you said, the future never turns out quite how you expect. In my case, I just got more than I wished for."

"More of what?"

"Everything. I wanted to see new places and peoples. Instead, I've got an alien warship plugged into my skull, and a war. The Earth's broken, Legacy's always talking about the fate of the galaxy, and I don't see anyone else in a position to do shit about it. I mean, no one likes extra responsibility, and I'm just about the worst candidate for this job. I'm not a general, or even really a leader... I'm just an astronomer who likes to solve problems."

They were both silent in the wake of that. Marcus hadn't paid much attention to how he felt about it all. He'd just been along for the ride, doing whatever came naturally, and this was the first time he stopped to think about it. He wasn't entirely pleased at what he found.

They both looked out over the sleeping factory for a long while, until Marcus finally spoke again. "I know this isn't the future any of us expected, Amira... but whether we like it or not, it's the one we were dealt. The fate of humamity is hanging in the balance, and we need all the hands we can get. Even the little ones."

She was still quiet.

Marcus decided it was time to leave and let her make the right choice on her own. Before he left though, he said one last thing. "We'll all collapse if we don't carry this weight together, and there won't be anyone left to pick us up."

It was true: Marcus Donovan didn't have a subtle bone in his body, but sometimes subtlety wouldn't do.

With their training complete, the Bravos became a full-fledged combat cell with Jack in command. They kept their ERC jumpsuits, whose colors had faded to dull brown during long months without washing, and they added desert-camo ponchos as further protection against the late summer sun.

Charlie told them their first mission would be a warmup, requiring nothing more than basic competence. These types of missions were assigned to separate the wheat from the chaff: successful cells moved on to greater challenges, while failures would either be drummed out of the organization, or simply swallowed up by the sand.

Their assignment turned out to be as simple as Charlie suggested. The Bravos were to head into the Gaza Strip to search for spare fuel cells and conduct routine reconnaissance along the way. It was known territory with plenty of cover, and screwing it up would require real effort.

The resistance always moved at night. During daylight, alien forces were everywhere, their cuttlefish flitting through the air and long-legged walkers stalking the land. But at night, the alien forces dwindled to scattered foot patrols, and mankind made their moves. The darkness became their last refuge and final domain.

No one knew why the alien activity dropped off after sunset, but rumors and theories flew around in abundance. Most claimed the alien vehicles were some combination of solar powered and cold blooded. Jack meanwhile had a good laugh at thinking the invaders were just afraid of the dark.

Nikitin had his own theory, based on the pet bird he had as a kid. The bird was a parakeet named Mister Whistles, and whenever the sun was up, Mister Whistles would tweet and twitter non-stop. But if someone so much as dropped a blanket over his cage, he'd go silent as a whisper. Lights out birdy. Nikitin called it his
alien parakeet theory,
and Albright was an unexpected supporter, preferring the fancier sounding
diurnal theory.

Whatever the reason, daytime was off-limits. The Bravos trundled out over rocky terrain in a military four-wheeler with Corpsman Andrew Chase at the wheel, and they arrived before sunrise. They hid their vehicle beneath a dirt-brown tarp on the outskirts of the farms, in the palm of a rock outcropping shaped like a hand thrusting out of the soil. The aliens weren't known to be curious, but caution was rarely a mistake.

Then the sun came up. The air turned hot and dry, but unlike Al Saif where the ground was a single shade of beige, the land near Gaza was fertile. Bountiful even. There was ample farmland full of fresh but abandoned crops, separated by pockets of standing buildings, while a scorch mark that used to be a city loomed off toward the coast.

The Bravos found one of the sturdier bombed-out and partially fallen buildings, and made camp for the day. Chunks had been taken out of it but all three levels remained, and it made a good observation post, offering shady hiding spots and a bit of altitude in one crumbling package.

Then the cuttlefish started to pass overhead. The air wasn't filled with them, but they went by often enough to quash any thoughts of stepping outside.

There were patches of cover out there, but only separated by long stretches of open terrain. Without anti-vehicle weapons, getting caught would equal a swift death. It was simple math.

Jack busied himself studying maps of the area, trying to make some connection between the drawings and the wreckage all around, but he wasn't having much luck. The maps were old printed editions, whose like had hardly been used in fifty years. They were relics from a time before global wireless and teraflop pocket computers, and these particular specimens were hilariously out of date.

Despite being awkward to fold and more wrong than right, Jack still kind of liked them. There was something tactile that was missing in the digital versions, and since he didn't have anything else to do, trying to understand the maps made for an acceptable pastime.

The others found ways to occupy themselves as well. Albright inventoried her first aid kit and ammunition, and Nikitin kept watch through his rifle's scope. Chase was playing some incomprehensible card game with Nick McGrath, who preferred to be called
Trash
for some unexplained reason. Rebecca Hartnell and Keith Cozar were staked out downstairs where they could watch the northern corridor.

Their hideout was silent for hours.

"Hot damn, those things are fast," Nikitin said sometime before noon. "Hey Jack, how fast do you think that's going?"

Jack looked up from his maps and out over the farms. On the horizon, one of the four-legged alien walkers was galloping by like some kind of monstrous Chernobyl gazelle. "I don't know. How long do you reckon the legs are? Twenty meters?"

"Sounds about right."

"Five, maybe six hundred KPH."

Nikitin let out a dry laugh. "I love the pause. Made it sound like you did some serious arithmetic before making a blind guess."

"You know me too well," Jack said, and folded his map.

Chase and Trash snickered over their cards.

Another moment later, four more walkers appeared in the distance. They were enemy vehicles, each carrying foot troops to parts unknown, but Jack couldn't escape the feeling of being out on safari, watching a herd of wild animals cross the plain. There was a lot of traffic, and he wondered if it was always like that.