Stars Rain Down (3 page)

Lisa Albright nudged Jack's shoulder. "This his first drop?" she shouted over the thunder of the leviathan's rotors, motioning toward the new corpsman.

Jack nodded. "Another
fine
day in the Corps," he said.

He glanced into the cabin, made sure his people were out and transmitted an all clear to the pilot, then broadly motioned toward Skip. He and Albright flanked the vomiting corpsman and moved him over to the side, while the empty leviathan lifted back into the air and was away.

The team was in a clearing at the southern end of a two-kilometer valley, surrounded by forested hills on the other three sides. The sky above was thick with leviathans, the biggest swarm of which buzzed around the smoke plume to the North to drop smoke jumpers and loads of fire retardant. Another steady stream of helicopters headed east over the city of Santiago De Compostela, and Jack supposed the local air field was off in that direction.

His brigade stood in a rough circle waiting for orders, with a dozen other groups of orange jumpsuits scattered across the clearing. It'd taken them a full hour to come in from Vandenberg, which meant they were last to the party again. The whole summer had been that way.

Jack flipped through channels on his smartwatch until
Logistics
came up, opening a direct line to the local host brigade. Then he tapped his headset and began transmitting. "San Jose Bravo Brigade on the ground and requesting assignment."

A voice with a thick Spanish accent came back. "Roger that, San Jose Bravo. What's your specialty?"

"Search and rescue primary, and first aid. We've got surgical personnel."

"Hold. Report to Med Station Three for triage detail. Coordinates are as follows..." The voice rattled off a long string of numbers that Jack hardly paid attention to.

"Roger, over and out." He took a deep breath and clicked his headset off. The Bravos weren't going to like it, but with a little luck, they wouldn't tar and feather him. "Good news, folks. We're on triage again."

"Again?" they asked in chorus.

Around his cigar, Leonid Nikitin said, "Come on, Jack-o. I didn't join up to stick band-aids on boo-boos." The man was pale and towered over the rest of the team like an old fashioned lighthouse. And he had a point: he had extensive experience in tracking and wilderness survival, skills that were totally wasted at a triage station.

The same went for the rest, who all had first aid or first responder certs, but were actually specialists in other fields. All except for Dr. Lisa Albright who was a real bona-fide MD, but even she preferred to be out in the bush.

Jack couldn't do a damned thing about it, though; he'd tried before and it was a lost cause.

He looked up at Nikitin wearily and said, "It's damn hard work ignoring you all day, Nicotine. How about you complain to someone higher up the food chain, and let them ignore you for a change?"

Nikitin's lip quivered until he couldn't contain it any longer, then he let out a huge belly laugh that flung his cigar to the grass. Everyone else laughed, too. Jack took it as a good sign: tedious work was bad enough with a good attitude. With the wrong attitude, it could be torture.

The Bravos were all business from then on. They descended on the tent that was Med Station Three and didn't so much relieve the exhausted Madrid Echoes as push them out of the way. His people came up to speed in minutes and dug into the work of examining, sorting, and usually treating the refugees who'd fled the raging wildfire.

Most of the patients had cuts and scrapes, and a few suffered a touch of smoke inhalation or first degree burns. Thankfully, there were plenty of oxygen tanks on hand, and the Bravos were surprisingly good at putting pseudermal band-aids on all sorts of boo-boos, so their patients moved quickly through the system. Having a full-fledged physician also meant they could treat the few who required real care, instead of sending them on to the busy ICU tents or the city hospital three long klicks away.

By the time sunset rolled around, the Bravos were running on empty. The billowing clouds up above burned bright magma orange in the setting sun's light, made starkly visible against the pallid and darkening sky. The raging fire that stretched across the low hills could now be seen like a great glowing serpent, hungrily digesting the blackened trees within it. Though the firecrews couldn't stop the blaze, word came through that they'd contained it, and the remaining danger was negligible.

The stream of patients finally thinned down to nothing shortly afterward. "Let's think about packing it in," Albright said.

Jack took a look at his watch and discovered it was coming up on 2100 hours local. The exhaustion didn't fully hit him until he did the math and realized they'd been working for ten straight hours.

He tuned back to the Logistics band, and was just about to make the call when a loud burp like a hail of automatic gunfire sounded from the hills. The initial burst was followed by a handful just like it, each weaker than the last.

The weary corpsmen throughout the camp snapped to attention.

"What the hell was that?" Nikitin barked. "Since when is this a combat zone?"

Jack switched back to the Report channel and heard messages from firefighters flooding in.

"...some type of small community. Musta missed it."

"...could be a weapons stockpile. Debris everywhere..."

"Survivors. Fifty, maybe a hundred. Hard to tell. Some badly injured. Send medevac."

"Barrier broken at section twelve. Need immediate air support. I repeat, need air support!"

Jack clicked the headset back off with a sigh. He didn't need to hear anymore. "Grab a fast bite and a cup o' joe, Bravos. More work is on its way."

It didn't take long for leviathans laden with new refugees to return from the hills and start unloading. Men, women and children stumbled out of the cargo bays, painted in a mixture of soot and ash. The rest were carried out on stretchers. All three med stations, which had been almost empty just moments before, now had more work than they could handle.

Injuries were more severe: third degree burns and the kind of wounds Jack had only seen near warzones. Bullet holes from small and large caliber rounds, flesh shredded by flak, whole limbs missing in some cases. The ERC's orange jumpsuits were soon painted in an even coat of blood, making them hardly distinguishable from the patients in their care.

The work became a blur of wounds without owners. Jack was applying a beige bandage to a bleeding arm whose owner occasionally grunted. The patient was a tough customer, just as they'd all been. Then Jack felt a tap at his shoulder and heard his name, and it snapped him out of the trance.

Young Skip Walters was behind him with concern all over his face, and beyond waiting a mother and daughter. The little girl's face was so dark with soot that her bright eyes seemed to glow, and even though her shoulder had a deep gash in it, she wasn't crying. She looked lost and was shaking like a leaf in the cool night air.

"Jack, these people..."

"What!" Jack barked, in no way a question. He was tired. It was late. There was work to do, and his fuse was dangerously short.

Skip motioned to his upper arm, then pointed to the mother. "The tattoo. These people are separatists, Jack." He leaned closer and whispered conspiratorially, "Terrorists."

When the last word came out, Jack went on autopilot. His hands finished applying the bandage while he stared at Skip with cold eyes. "Nikitin, help the girl," he growled, and his fingers latched onto the new corpsman's collar.

He strode out of the tent dragging Walters stumbling behind him into the darkness. His pace quick, his skin on fire, Jack slammed the corpsman against a titanium supply crate and punched it hard with his free hand. The wall rang like a hammered gong, and his grip of the collar tightened.

"Remember this, because I only tell you once. The Corps helps everyone the same. If you ever hesitate to help anyone again... if I see you even think about it, I'll God damn kill you myself. Are we clear, Corpsman?"

"Yes sir," Skip croaked. His eyes were wide with fear. Both men's hearts were racing at full speed.

Jack took a deep breath. His grip loosened, and he straightened the young corpsman's collar. "Now get back in there and do your fucking job."

Skip took off running with a fire under his heels, two parts fear and one part shame driving him. He wouldn't need to be told again. The kid would probably make it, Jack hoped, get with the program and fly right. Maybe even make a good corpsman some day. His first day had been a bad one, though.

Then Corpsman Jack Hernandez, knuckles bleeding and muscles burnt, turned and headed back into the massacre. San Jose Bravo Brigade worked long into the next day.

The Global Aerospace Foundation's main campus was a huge complex that covered two square kilometers outside of Bangalore, India. The architecture married gothic to high-tech, with great swooping roofs that seemed to be reaching for the distant stars. To Marcus Donovan, it was a revival of renaissance cathedrals, pure pomp and self-importance, evoking the immeasurable vastness of space and by comparison, man's own insignificance. Other times, he just thought it was huge and ugly.

The main doors were on the eastern side, surrounded by a half-circle of stone columns arrayed as a sundial. They tracked the sun's daily and yearly journeys through the sky, a simple reminder of Earth's endless whirling journey through space.

Beyond that sat a sunken courtyard with a large memorial, a wall inscribed with the name of every person to have ever perished in space exploration (in addition to a few craftily hidden dogs and monkeys). The monument was inspired by the Vietnam Memorial still standing in old DC, and oddly, both were made of granite from the same Bangalore quarry less than ten kilometers away.

As usual, Marcus passed the wall without pausing, and promised himself he'd stop and read the names next time. It was always next time.

Leaning heavily on a metal cane, he limped past the wall, through the towering columns and headed straight for the automatic doors. He was thankful for that last detail... His tours in space were growing longer and more frequent, and coupled with his own innate aversion to exercise, every return to gravity was more difficult and more painful than the last. He'd endured two weeks of physical therapy after touchdown this time, and his legs still felt like chewing gum in July. He wouldn't be walking at all without the cane, and normal everyday doors were more trouble than he cared for.

As he limped up to the doors, the GAF emblem loomed above him. It was a circular seal with a shape that could possibly have been a great red bird soaring up to the stars, but he wasn't entirely sure. The design was terribly abstract, and the bird could as easily have been a spaceship, a boomerang, or man's indomitable will to greatness. He wondered if anyone knew for sure.

The Foundation's motto was written in golden letters around the seal, reading
Ab terra, ad infinitum et ultrum.
Marcus had (repeatedly) failed high school Latin, but he was pretty sure that meant
From Earth, to infinity and beyond,
and he often wondered if a certain cartoon studio had paid for the product placement. And that thought never failed to put a smile on his face, no matter how onerous the task ahead.

This time was different, though. Utterly unique, in fact. Marcus was usually there against his will, bureaucratically kidnapped in order to give seminars about his methods, or appear before this board or that committee to explain himself. Not this time. No, he came with a plan in hand, and had pulled in favors from every corner of the Foundation for this opportunity to sit in on the
Budget Oversight Committee's
monthly meeting.

That didn't stop him groaning on his way in.

The inside of the building was just as unfriendly as the outside, and largely empty as a final proof that it was all pretense without purpose. Marcus thought it symbolic of the culture of waste that had crippled the Foundation for decades, and he ground his teeth while calculating how many exploratory missions could have been funded on the cathedral's budget. If he had his way, the whole organization would probably be pared down to two dozen full time accountants, meeting once a week at an all-night diner... but that dream was a little far fetched, even for him.

The half-kilometer journey to the
Goddard Meeting Hall
was swift thanks to the network of moving pavement—what he called the
Great Conveyor Belts of Doom
—and he at a meeting early for the first time in his life. The feeling was strange, maybe even a little refreshing, but nothing he intended to grow accustomed to.

He took a seat and somehow survived the next three hours, which were slow, tedious and boring in the extreme. One rotund pencil pusher after another stood at the head of the long table, pointed sweatily at ill conceived charts and graphs, and failed to describe in words what his diagrams failed to describe in pictures. The inability to come to a point must have figured highly on their resumés, and Marcus stifled laughter when the thought occurred to him.

Once the last presentation was blessedly over—something about cost cutting measures in the office supply division—Marcus was up. It was show time.

He limped uneasily to the head of the table and tried to find some comfortable way to lean on his cane, and failing that, settled on leaning uncomfortably instead. His pose was not the absolute picture of masculinity, but it'd have to do.

He reached into his pocket and removed a wireless drive that doubled as a remote control. He slid his finger across its surface and it connected to the room's projector system, uploaded his presentation, and waited for his next command.

"Gentlemen," Marcus said and cleared his throat. "We've heard a lot today about cost-cutting measures: department re-organization, energy conservation, toilet paper recycling and what have you." He paused to let that barb sting a little. "What no one's mentioned is that they're only offering band-aids which will, in all frankness, do nothing to stanch the Foundation's financial bleeding. No amount of schedule shuffling can fix our problems."