Stars Rain Down (7 page)

Jack found the Bravos among the sea of orange jumpsuits without too much effort, and he fell into formation. "Hey Albright... any idea what's happening?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," she said.

He scanned the group and took a mental picture. He'd never seen five thousand completely dumbfounded faces before, and doubted he ever would again.

The regional director came out a few minutes later and cleared his throat over the PA. "Settle down," he said, and the chatter died. "I know you're all wondering what the hell's going on, and you're not alone. There seems to be a perfect shit storm coming down right now, and we're working double time just to put the big picture together.

"First off, as you no doubt noticed, communication networks are down. All of them, as far as we can tell. This is due to some sort of broad-spectrum interference that's wreaking havoc with anything wireless. We haven't identified the source yet, but we believe the effect to be global.

"It's a small miracle that we managed to get the alert out at all. Of course, I know all you dedicated boys and girls would've followed regs and reported in during a communications black-out, anyway."

There was stifled laughter in the crowd.

"But that's not Priority One." The director took a deep breath. "Shortly before communications were interrupted, two impacts were reported on the Asian subcontinent, one in India and the other in China. The events registered on our seismic equipment, and we've estimated the power of each to be in the five gigaton range."

Jack gasped, and heard five thousand others.

"We initially believed the impacts to be asteroids, but the evidence we've pieced together points to the Helios and Hyperion solar arrays being the culprits. We have no idea why they fell out of orbit, but we can assume the destruction is... simply unimaginable.

"Both occurred in high density population centers; in fact, the most densely populated regions in the world. Considering the coincident failure of communications networks, we must assume that this constitutes some form of attack. Terrorism cannot be ruled out, although it's hard to imagine a terrorist organization with the resources and coordination required for this.

"Our job, as always, is to provide humanitarian aid. We'll be double and triple loading laviathans, and cluster dropping at full speed from LEO in order to get as many feet on the ground as possible. Your primary jobs will be to collect refugees and organize temporary camps, then hold tight until we can begin airlifting them out of theater. Expect local military as well as Blade and Carbon personnel in the area."

The director took a moment to think back through the speech, making sure he didn't leave anything out. Then he said, "You know the rest. Let's get in the air."

From there, it was a normal launch but with more bodies and none of the banter. The Bravos got into their leviathan accompanied by a reserve squad and two full pallets of medical supplies, rations and light-weight collapsible shelters. Everything and everyone was locked down fast, then their leviathan and its nine identical siblings were lifted up and connected to the tranzat's docking clamps.

With the windows covered, the rest of the launch process always happened blind. There was the feeling of being moved in one direction and then another, the ratcheting of the launch gantry as the tranzat was angled upwards, then a roar and immense pressure as it thrust itself into the sky. The roar subsided and for the rest of the trip, they swayed and bobbed like an inflatable dolphin in a pool.

This time, Leonid Nikitin was wide awake and Lisa Albright's earbuds were nowhere to be found. Each passenger was wearing the same blank expression found in hospital waiting rooms: their eyes were cast down and their brows were drawn together. Most were lipping something, and Jack assumed they were prayers. But when he noticed his own lips doing the same, he couldn't recall what he'd been reciting.

The tranzat blasted through the upper atmosphere for an hour, and the corpsmen sat in silence waiting for the drop. Then they heard a strange howl and the cabin rocked hard to the side.

"Tell me that's just turbulence," Skip shouted across the aisle.

Several more howls rushed past the hull, and another one struck. The cabin rattled and shook. Jack could only think of one possible answer: they were under attack.

"Masks!" He cried out, and everyone reacted instantly, grabbing their oxygen masks from the packs above and pulling them over their heads.

Another howling thing struck the leviathan and it lurched free of its cradle, dropping into the thin air at the upper edge of the atmosphere. No warning light this time; just the sickly feeling of plummeting like a stone, tumbling end over end.

The portholes on either side of the cabin revealed the Earth, the dark sky, and the Earth again, chasing one another in rapid succession. The burning tranzat spear shrank into the distance, and the air around was thick with strange shapes that Jack couldn't make out.

Another volley of howling rounds screamed past the hull, and one struck with a deafening crack. The safety windows exploded in a rain of small pellets, and the air pressure inside the leviathan disappeared.

They were falling, unguided, uncontrolled. Jack had a hunch, and if he didn't act on it quickly, it'd be game over. He tugged the climbing hook out from his harness, latched it to his metal restraint, and slammed the seat's emergency release. The metal bar jerked up and away from him, but before he could fly loose in the spinning cabin, he tensed and pushed himself hard toward the cockpit door.

He flew through the air while the cabin twisted around him, only to crash into his target with a thump. His bones rattled and his body ached from head to toe, but he grappled at the guidebars and managed to grab hold. With a tap at his harness, the hook released and he retrieved the spring loaded arrestor cable, then latched it at his new position.

His gloved hands fumbled at the door handle then pried it open with a twist, revealing the shattered cockpit beyond. He clambered through and found precisely what he feared: a destroyed windshield and two dead pilots strapped into the seats.

The next few moments were a blur of motion. He released the pilot's belt, pulled the limp body free and climbed in to replace him. It took him a second to focus, to blot out the spinning Earth and make sense of the instrument panel in front of him. Jack was rated a Class C leviathan pilot, and this was hardly second nature to him, but he wanted to live. He was determined to focus and remember.

He closed his eyes, imagined the diagrams and tried to hear his flight instructor's commands. Reaching out, unsure if he was grabbing the right lever, he pushed one all the way forward and the leviathan's air-baffles extended. They increased drag at the top of the craft and righted it as it fell.

The helicopter wasn't tumbling anymore, but the altimeter was still spinning like a buzzsaw blade, and the air speed indicator had a few too many digits for Jack's taste. The speed was dropping, but not fast enough, and the rotors would shear off if he tried to extend them, destroying any remaining chance of a controlled landing.

He needed to drop a lot of weight and fast. He flipped the cargo panel open and punched the door release, then looked back over his shoulder and watched the ramp lurch down. At half-way, he activated the cargo ejectors and watched the two heavy pallets tumble out into the sky, where their parachutes popped and gently lowered them to the Earth.

"At least they'll make it," he mumbled into his mask.

With the pallets gone, the leviathan's descent slowed down to something reasonable, and Jack breathed a sigh of relief. He leaned forward and slapped the
EXTEND
button, but nothing happened. He slapped it again and got the same. A blinking light higher up the console caught his eye, and it didn't take an expert to realize what
JAM
meant. It meant he was fucked.

Why would it be jammed? He burned through options. The cover could be damaged, or the rotor destroyed completely. There was no hope in either line of thought. No possibility of recovery, so he abandoned them. Power cables could've been severed, but that had its own warning light. He was missing something. Then he remembered... the rotors wouldn't extend until the engines were running.

Jack moved the throttle and listened for an engine response, but it was impossible to hear anything over the thousand-KPH winds whipping through the craft. There should be a
STALL
light somewhere, but he couldn't remember where, and there wasn't any time to look for it.

With the furious Earth rushing up at him, the only thing Jack could think of was the auto-rotate procedure, and it would have to do. His hands flew across the controls, flipping switches that disengaged the transmission and overrode safety protocols. Paying no mind to the hundreds of lights blinking across the console, he once again reached forward and mashed the
EXTEND
button. The blades unfolded and began to spin.

The leviathan wouldn't travel far without power, but the rotating blades would make an effective parachute and even offer minimal steering. The only thing left to do was bring his bird down to the ground.

Jack finally looked around and got his bearings, and things didn't look good. There was no trace of the other leviathans or the tranzat, and God only knew how far he'd traveled before getting things under control. The air above was thick with those strange vehicles, now too distant to see clearly, while below there was only a thick dust cloud that stretched to the far horizon.

The barely stable leviathan dipped down into the cloud, where vicious winds tore at it from every direction. Jack held onto the controls tightly, and as he dropped into the darkness, he prayed that he'd seen the worst of this day.

Rumours spread through the Shackleton like the flu, and its crew were up to speed within an hour. They'd found an alien vessel. What followed was overwhelming excitement, and fifty-six astronauts futilely trying to squeeze into the ship's eight-man bridge.

Despite feeling impatient, they did nothing the first day but survey Zebra-One, traveling up and down its length like a mosquito considering a tasty buffalo. The ship scanned as it went, observing and recording every strange surface feature of the amazing artifact, and each new discovery elicited bursts of exotic conjecture, chased by heated debate.

Faulkland eventually banished the crowd from the bridge, but they wouldn't be deterred. Instead, the lot of them crammed into the maximum-occupancy-twelve dining hall where they monitored progress by CC-TV and somehow managed not to suffocate.

It was a long day mapping Zebra-One's surface, and at its end, Marcus couldn't sleep. He didn't even bother trying. He knew from experience that he'd have lain awake, running every possibility and contingency through his head. Commander Faulkland claimed that he could sleep at will anywhere in the universe, but he spent the whole night on the bridge with Marcus, staring in perfect silence at the sleeping giant just outside their window.

Meanwhile, Mason Shen sat off to the side and tried to solve the communication mystery, and he was still at his console and no closer to an answer when morning rolled around. He was in contact with Ares Colony on Mars, but everything in the direction of Earth remained morbidly silent for them both.

"I'm about ready to give up," Mason said around 0800.

Marcus was still staring at Zebra-One, now with dry and sore eyes. He asked the obvious question. "Still no luck, Mason?"

"I wouldn't say none," Mason replied. "I've been chatting with this Martian comm operator, and she sounds really cute. Earth, though... Boss, it's like everyone just up and moved away. There's nothing."

Marcus felt like that should bother him more, but he was so far away that it didn't matter. "No worries. Sure there's a simple answer."

"Yeah," was all Mason said, his voice lacking enthusiasm.

"Have there been any signals from Zebra-One?" Marcus asked, switching back to the important topic.

"Not a peep, sir. I've been cycling greetings in every language I know and some I don't, but she's just as quiet as the Earth. If she's awake, she ain't talking."

"Just as well," Faulkland said. "It'd be a little anti-climactic if she called us back."

By 0915, two teams of eight were assembled, briefed and ready to get on with the show. Marcus' team included himself, Commander Faulkland, Dr. St. Martin, and a handful of eager zero-g miners. The second team was Rao's, and included Crew Chief Hector Pacheco, the paleontologist Professor Caldwell, and their own team of miners. As much as Marcus pretended there was some deep strategy to the team rosters, they were actually divvied up based on personality. He knew who got on well with whom, and he preferred his teams not to be at each other's throats until after a mission started.

Like Marcus, hardly anyone had slept the night before, and they were running on a mixture of high octane coffee and lipid bars. Combining stimulants and sleep deprivation never added up to a level head, and Marcus had a sneaking suspicion that most exploration had begun in a similar fashion. It could explain why so few natives survived first contact.

He was about to say a prayer for whatever natives they might encounter, when he realized his own people were completely unarmed. The tone of his prayer changed very quickly.

With the Shackleton stationed fifty meters from Iris Charlie, the exploratory teams entered the EVA module, which housed a dressing room and airlock. The pressure suits were skin tight, as close as a human could get to naked in space, and the only clothes worn beneath were thin thermals that left little to the imagination.

It took the team less than ten minutes to suit up. Then, with everyone helmeted, sealed, checked and double-checked, they entered the airlock. The heavy door closed behind them and the lights turned red: depressurization. At the same time, a gauge on the wall began to tick down. The process was never speedy, but with history waiting on the other side, it was glacially slow.