Stars Rain Down (9 page)

"Yes ma'am," they both replied.

Satisfied, she returned to the small foldable medical station and started looking over the results.

The helmets weren't designed to be carried, so Marcus removed the lamp from his, and set the bulky thing down next to the transponder. Faulkland did the same.

"What kind of emergencies did you have in mind?" Faulkland asked.

Marcus shrugged. "Beats me. As far as I'm concerned, we're out among the many moons of Mongo now, and I won't pretend to know what's around the next corner." Then a thought occurred to him. He glanced left then right down identical corridors stretching into the distance. "How's this for starters, though... where'd the iris go?"

Faulkland took a long look around. "Good question. Really excellent question."

"Yeah. I thought so." Marcus ran through some possibilities, but the word
possibility
was quickly taking on new meanings. He needed more information. "Donovan to Base. Humor me for a second... Where's the mission transponder located right now?"

"One moment... Showing right on the other side of Iris Charlie, Doc."

Marcus took that as good news. It meant the doorway was still there but hidden. This was much better than finding out he'd been mysteriously shuttled to some distant part of the ship. Unless Zebra-One was falsifying sensor information.
Best not to consider that,
he told himself. A line of thought like that could only lead to madness.

He decided to worry about the missing door some other time, and turned back to his work. The base camp was assembled, the teams were itching to get started, and he was burning to know what was beyond this tunnel. Time had come to start exploring. "Alright, there's no time like the present. My team will head aftward. Rao, take yours toward the bow. Keep the channel open and plan to meet back here in four hours."

With that, the two teams parted and marched off.

"Hey! Are you alive?"

Jack Hernandez wasn't sure. He didn't know where he was, or who was talking to him. His mouth tasted like blood, his body hurt all over, and the last thing he wanted to do was open his eyes. He felt fingers on his throat, and was relieved when they started checking his pulse.

"Come on... Wake up, hero. We gotta go."

He pried his eyes open and saw bright light. His ears were buzzing, his head was a giant pile of hurt, and he wanted to throw up. What was on his face? Some kind of mask. He reached up and tried to take it off, but hands grabbed his wrists and stopped him.

"You don't want to do that. Trust me. Hey Nik, he's coming around. Can you gimme a hand over here."

The wind was howling like Jack had never heard before. The Earth was angry.

"Hands are full. Can he stand?"

"Don't think so."

His eyes began to focus, and he could make out the shape of someone standing over him. The person was decked out in Corps gear, their face covered in a bulky environment mask. They looked like some kind of human insect hybrid. Jack tried to read the name tag, but the words were floating around, splitting apart and rejoining.

"Albright?" he asked.

"Yup," she said, still hovering over him. She shined a light through his goggles, in one eye and then the other. "Looks like you're concussed, but not too bad. You could be a lot worse off after a landing like that."

Little by little, his vision was getting sharper, but the scene wasn't right. It was like trying to make sense of a kid's drawing. After a couple breaths, the shapes started to coalesce, and he recognized the ruined cockpit of a leviathan. The angles were still weird, though. He finally decided that the vehicle was on its side.

He could hear something outside roaming in big circles. It sounded like a malfunctioning clothes washer on spin.

"What the hell's going on?" Jack asked, his own voice sounding muffled. The inside of his mask was slick and a little sticky.

"No time right now. When I unbuckle your seat belt, you're going to fall. I need you to be ready. Are you ready, Jack?"

He nodded as firmly as he could, then he heard the click and he dropped to the floor. It wasn't a very big drop, and he managed to get his arms crossed in front of him, but he still managed to land partially on his sore head.

There was a strange tugging sensation around his midsection. He thought it might be the seat belt, but he discovered that it was his arrestor cable, its hook still attached to a guidebar in the doorway. His hand found the release button, the cable snaked back into its housing, and the unpleasant pressure was gone.

Lisa Albright took Jack's hand and started pulling him upward. "I know it hurts, but we can't stay here. Whatever's out there is getting closer, and I don't want to be here when it shows up. Can you stand?"

With Lisa's help, Jack climbed to his feet shakily. It felt like he was lifting a cement truck on his back. "Yeah. I'm fine," he said. But he wasn't fine.

When he was half-way up, Albright pulled his arm over her shoulders and together they shambled back into the cargo hold. The room was lit from two torn and shredded holes in the steel hull, revealing the raging dust storm outside.

Lifeless bodies in metal restraints lined the walls, beaten and bloodied exhibits in a museum of death. Seven seats were empty, and five corpsmen were standing near the open ramp at the far end.

Jack was in a haze. He was lost somewhere in a bad dream.
None of this is real,
a shaky voice inside him said, but it didn't sound confident.

He recognized Leonid Nikitin, the lighthouse, standing above everyone else with an extra service-pack slung over each shoulder. The rest were mysteries; orange jumpsuits and gas-masks with unknown occupants. Everyone was loaded with as much equipment as they could carry.

"You find anything other than that sad sack o' shit, Albright?"

"Flare gun and a couple rounds. I raided the first aid kit, too. Some extra bandages, iodine, morphine, mixed auto-injectors. Not a bad haul."

The flying clothes washer was getting closer, louder.

"We're out of time. Let's move," Nikitin shouted.

The four unknown corpsmen didn't need to be told twice; they all wanted out of the butcher shop. They climbed out under cover of the half-destroyed ramp. Meanwhile, Nikitin took two long strides over to Jack and grabbed the arm that Lisa had over her shoulders. "I've got him. Go keep the rabble together," he said.

Five-foot Lisa Albright nodded her head and trotted off ahead.

Jack felt a bit like a sleepy kid with the great Ukrainian holding him up, and he was glad for it. Even with his strength coming back, he wasn't ready to walk on his own. Nikitin wasn't gentle, but he was strong enough to carry an ox if he wanted to, and the two made good time catching up with the others.

The world outside the leviathan was more unsettling than the inside had been. Whirling dust and rocks painted the air a ruddy beige, hiding the blasted landscape beyond. What was visible had been utterly destroyed, a churned up mixture of raw earth and debris, like an endless compost heap.

With Albright leading, the squad moved quickly over broken ground and took cover in a jagged ravine, where the upturned roots of a fallen tree provided shelter, and Jack was glad to be back off his feet, if only for a moment.

Something was getting closer. All around them, the oscillating sound of the clothes washer drowned out every other noise, even the bitter howling of the wind. In another second, a silhouette descended through the maelstrom, and the source of the noise was revealed.

The strange thing emerged from the fog and hovered above the wrecked helicopter. It was shaped like a tear drop sliced in half, with the flat side facing the ground. The body was circled by a single waving fin that moved in time with the sound, like some perverse, airborne cuttlefish. The rest of the thing was covered in sharp edges, bony outcroppings and stalactites, except at its tail where there was a series of overlapping panels resembling silvery gills.

It floated to one side and then the other, while Nikitin watched it through a pair of binoculars. He leaned over toward Jack and said, "It's inspecting the kill."

Short arms on gimbals extended from either side, then angled down toward the leviathan. All of the corpsmen made educated guesses about what would happen next and covered their ears.

Both arms flared and fired bright cyan rounds that screamed into the fallen helicopter, and exploded on impact in a shower of blinding sparks. There followed a groan like steel girders sheering under too much weight, and nothing remained but a smoking puddle of glowing slag.

The floating cuttlefish lifted back up and disappeared into the whirling dust, apparently satisfied with its work.

A long time passed before anyone spoke. They sat there in the ravine, catching their breath, licking their wounds and looking through their gear. It was busy work, the kind people did when they didn't want to think too much. The previous two hours were a lot to take in, even for corpsmen who faced catastrophes for a living.

Nikitin finally said something after twenty long minutes. "Thing I can't figure out," he said and paused, "is how to smoke a cigar with this stupid mask on."

Albright shook her head, but the rest let themselves laugh a little. That included Jack, who would've preferred not to, thanks to his aching head. He consoled himself with the discovery that he didn't have any cracked ribs, even if the rest of his body was thoroughly tenderized and sore.

"What now?" one of the other four jumpsuits asked.

"Find water," Nikitin replied. He looked up and down the ravine. "This used to be a creek, I think. Should lead us toward water, give us a little break from the wind as we go."

Jack could hear two or three more flying cuttlefish in the distance. Either that or his head was worse than he thought. "Yeah, it'll keep us out of sight, too. Anyone know where we are?"

Nikitin shook his head. "Fat chance. Everything looks like landfill, and this shit's so thick I can't find the sun. Could you make out any landmarks from the cockpit?"

Jack's memories were still scattered, coming back in flashes that faded just as quickly as they arose, like embers spitting out of a campfire. He closed his eyes and tried to play through it, and all he saw was a dust cloud stretching off to the horizon. "Nope," he said.

Nikitin looked down at his watch. "Well, we'll have a better idea at sundown. I should be able to figure something out, what time zone we're in at least. Until then, let's make tracks."

Weary and bruised, the corpsmen climbed back to their feet and dusted themselves off. The jumpsuits that were once bright orange were already growing dingy, turning the same shade of brown as everything else in sight.

Jack knew that Nikitin was doing the right thing; they had to keep moving. The weight of their situation might sink in if they stood still too long, but there was always hope as long as they were moving forward. Better to keep going, keep pressing on toward something, toward anything at all. Settlements clung to running water, and with a little luck, they might find some scrap of civilization that had survived the massacre.

For the first time, Jack realized he wouldn't even mind running into Blade Aerospace or Carbon Corp troops.

Nikitin looked up and down the ravine again. To Jack, both directions looked equally inhospitable, but using some method that he couldn't guess at, Nikitin picked a direction and said, "That-a-way."

The rest of the corpsmen started to march. Nikitin waited to pull up the rear with Jack. "You alright to walk, pal?"

"Yeah. Just needed a couple minutes to recharge."

"Good." Nikitin gave him a hardy slap on the back that hurt more than it should've. "You know me, Jack. I'm not real big on this leadership crap. The sooner you can climb back into the hot seat, the better."

Leadership meant responsibility, and that had never been Nikitin's strong suit. He was a real hero-type to be sure, the kind that went to the zoo ready to jump into a lion cage at the first shout of "My baby!" He'd never let Jack down, but he preferred to have the option. Leaders don't have that luxury.

Jack was just the opposite. He ate up responsibility like a shark after chum. "Gimme a few klicks to get my head on straight."

"Sure. One other thing, though," Nikitin said, and he craned down to Jack's level. "Thanks for saving our bacon in the 'viathan. That was some true blue hero crap, and we'd be pudding splats without you."

The memory of a spinning cabin flashed through Jack's head, accompanied by the feeling of tumbling out of the sky. He'd never heard Nikitin thank anyone for anything, and at first, he didn't know what to say. The only answer that came to mind was the trite catch-phrase from the old ERC recruiting commercials. As he started to recite the words, Nikitin chimed in and they said them together. "No need to thank me. The Corps saves lives. It's what we do."

The thing that really struck Marcus Donovan about Zebra-One's interior was the emptiness. As his team trundled down the long corridor, there were no access panels, controls or anything for a person to interact with. There hadn't been any junctions, nor were there any markings indicating where they'd been or where they were going. He wasn't foolish enough to expect a wall-map with a big red arrow labeled
You Are Here
, but anything at all would've been nice. Something resembling writing would have been even better.

Instead, he was left to wonder whether the original occupants—the
natives
—used written language at all. It was possible that their writing was in a wavelength he couldn't see, but the team's few peeks into infrared and ultraviolet revealed nothing worthy of note.

Still, he felt like the natives must have had some way to keep track of their location, and as his exploration continued on, the possibilities occupied his thoughts.

Small round ventilation organs ringed the corridor every twelve meters, and it was possible they released pheromones, or some other chemical marker that neither his team nor their equipment could detect. Communication by stink, as it were. That left him with an image in mind of man-sized ants and Zebra-One as their hive, but it didn't excite him very much.