Damage Control - ARC (6 page)

“Good!” Jett replied.
“Bring me back a monkey.” She was so close he could have touched
her, but he could barely see her. Her face was hidden in the lush
foliage.

“I don’t know if I can take
a monkey,” he said. “It depends on a lot of things. The planet may
not have enough monkeys. In that case, I’d have to leave them all.
It’s time to come down now. Hold on with your hands and let your
body hang down like we practiced. I won’t let you fall.”

He would have liked to call
his wife first, but he didn’t have time for sentimentality. She was
half a world away, studying how seaweed prices affected population
trends. There was nothing she could do, except call the rest of the
children to let them know. He called the twelve
zirodes
—
captains
—
who worked for him directly, and then his wife, and then his
car.

“I have to leave, my girl,”
he said to Jett, touching her nose with the middle knuckle of his
left index finger. The spines of her head were starting to grow in.
He wondered how sharp they’d be the next time he saw her, how tall
and wise she’d be.

“But you have twelve
days.”

He squatted to bring his
face to her level and looked her in the eyes. “I have twelve days
to get the whole ship and crew ready. I have to go to the ship now
and start.”

Together they walked to the
pool and slipped in. The water, like the air, was warm and rich
with plant life. Jett found her little sibling
—
the legless, genderless tadpole who would one day become a
bipedal child like herself
—
and placed him
gently in his transport case. Chegg picked up the case and they
both climbed out of the pool and walked out of the tangle of
carefully interwoven trees that made up their home, out into the
sunshine where Chegg’s car waited.

The baby didn’t have to
stay in the carrying case long. Chegg carefully transferred him to
the tank in the back of the car and set the case on the floor in
front of it.

Jett gave her little
sibling a rub on his smooth, soft head, turned her nose up for one
more touch from her father’s knuckle and watched him go. He knew
she didn’t want to stay, but she was fourteen now and had school in
the afternoons.

On any other occasion, Chegg would
have felt a surge of pride when the small transport pod drew close
to his ship. There came a moment
—
hazardously disorienting to student
pilots
—
when the giant mobile space station
seemed to become the whole world, as if it were a planet in its own
right. In reality, it was only about the size of a decent asteroid.
If it had been a natural heavenly body, it would have been one of
those insignificant rocks at the edge of some solar system. But for
a ship, its immensity wasn't easy for even a veteran Chuzekk keev
to fully grasp.

But this trip was
different. The instant the feeds from the exterior cameras began to
fill up with vast expanses of hull, all Chegg felt was a tightness
in his gut. With an effort, he pushed the fear aside and focused on
his first task: a meeting with his surveillance zirode.

With all the usual
flourishing movements and body decorations of a water man, Zirode
Luak Zeeg didn't’give most people the impression of a formidable
soldier. Chegg figured he used that fact to his advantage, and
probably even played it up a little. Today, his claws were an
iridescent purple, but his head was left unpainted. He must have
gotten ready in a hurry.

"We can't win this one,"
said Luak after the customary arm grasp. "We have met the cucumber,
as my grandmother would say."

Chegg sighed. "I had twelve
dozen people spend a week running probability models. Every last
one ended badly for us. There'snot even any precedent for it.
Chuzekks simply don't fail like this."

Luak tilted his head and
wiggled his shiny claws in the air. "Which model ended with the
least damage to our regional image? Maybe that's the one we need to
use, together with a great diplomatic campaign."

Chegg bared his teeth and
hissed. "No," he said. "I don't intend to lose. I'm working on a
different kind of plan."

T
he instant Thaddeus
Frenck saw the Kremlin building show up on the TV screen, he pulled
out a twenty and threw it on the bar beside his Heineken. "Sorry,"
he said to a passing busgirl. "I got some place I have to be." And
he grabbed his camera bag and ran out to the street.

"LaGuardia," he told the driver, when he'd
finally found a cab. He closed the car door, scrolled through his
phone contacts and hit the 'dial' button.

"LaGuardia Airport?" the driver asked. He was
using his mirror to look at Thaddeus instead of watching for a
chance to pull into traffic.

"Yeah, LaGuardia Airport. I've got a real
time crunch here, sorry."

"Got it," the driver said and adjusted his
mirror.

He'd been asleep when it had started. His
ex-wife, of all people, had called him at 3:00 a.m. and screamed in
his ear. Actually, that part wasn't so unusual. He'd already hung
up by the time her words had sunk into his sleepy brain: "Turn on
the TV!"

Suddenly fully alert, he'd grabbed the remote
from his nightstand and jabbed a button. The 60-inch flatscreen on
the wall was already split up and tuned to CNN, Al-Jazeera, Fox
News and the Russian website Gazeta.ru. This time, they'd all
carried the same footage, supposedly live but nowhere near
synchronous.

He'd been relieved to see that all the fuss
was coming out of Beijing. It wasn't a local scoop he'd missed.

When he'd seen what the story was, he'd
laughed and called his ex a stupid bitch and jabbed the remote
again. It was an old hoax, and a dumb one, too, but it was just the
sort of thing she'd fall for. He'd been asleep again in under a
minute.

But in the morning, Beijing was still
celebrating.

"You sure you want to be flying?" the cabbie
asked. "They might come here."

"Yeah," said Thaddeus. "They might."

When he got to Washington they had the
National Mall barricaded off. He got in with his press pass and set
up his gear: a smart little director's chair, a down sleeping bag
on a folding cot, a stash of cigarettes and self-heating cans of
soup and coffee, and of course the camera on its tripod.

Twelve hours later, the mall looked very
different. Military personnel and equipment were everywhere, a
brass band in Marine uniforms was tuning up, a crew scrambled to
set up a speaker's platform, and a small, dappled grey blob grew in
the sky directly overhead. Thaddeus had turned his camera on every
hour, two minutes before the hour, all night, because in both
Beijing and Moscow the first appearance had happened exactly on the
hour. And sure enough, at 7:00 a.m. to the very second, his camera
had captured the very instant the fuzzy grey image appeared.

He drank cold coffee, bought a breakfast
sandwich from a vendor who must have had one hell of a security
clearance, and watched history unfold. The brass band played "God
Bless America" and left, the platform grew into a hulking mess of
plywood and hardware before blossoming into something Presidential.
Tanks and rocket-launchers and even a row of Revolutionary-War-era
cannons rolled in and lined up in pretty rows attended by people in
sharp haircuts, braided ribbons and enough brass buttons to make an
extra flugelhorn for the band.

"They look ridiculous, if you ask me," he
mumbled to his camera.

By 7:30, the fuzzy thing in the sky had
become a cluster of twelve disks, and by 8:00 you could see with
the naked eye that they were not really disks but 12-sided objects.
By 10:00, they filled the sky, and by 11:00, only the central one
could be seen from where Thaddeus sat on his director's chair.

An Army platoon marched in and took up
residence only a couple of yards from him, in dress uniforms and
shiny shoes and hats that Thaddeus figured must have been designed
to kill the enemy with laughter. Their weapons looked out of place
with the dressy clothes: 36 rifles, as near as he could see, and a
portable anti-tank rocket launcher.

The President showed up, but Thaddeus
couldn't get a clear view, so he had to give up and let another
photographer handle it.

He checked his main camera and adjusted the
angle again. The object above had long ago grown too large to fit
in the frame, so he'd chosen a feature based on what he'd seen from
Beijing and was filming that. If his hunch was right, that feature
was a hatch, and if he was lucky, that hatch would eventually
open.

The Corporal holding the rocket launcher
didn't look like he was feeling lucky. Maybe it was just that the
launcher was heavy, but there seemed to be more to it than that.
The young man looked scared.

Thaddeus grabbed a second camera from his
bag, secured it to one of the auxiliary mounts on the tripod, and
discreetly turned it on the Corporal, whose nametag identified him
as COLEMAN. A moment later its feed was streaming live to the major
networks along with the feed from his main camera. Technicians at
the studios would decide which feed to pull from—either of
Thaddeus’s or someone else's—at any given moment.

The Corporal's fear wasn't all that unusual,
Thaddeus knew. Millions of Americans were probably spending this
historic morning hanging their heads over toilets and trash cans
and storm drains. Emergency rooms were doubtless overflowing with
patients suffering from everything from heart attacks to hives.
Thaddeus shook his head. He would never understand the Human
propensity for irrational fear.

If this had been the first landing, he would
have understood. If this landing had shown any signs of being
different from the other two, he would have understood then, too.
But so far at least, what was happening here in Washington was
exactly the same as what had happened in Beijing and Moscow.

It had all started when a blurry object had
appeared in the sky directly over the city. Over time it had come
close enough to come into focus as twelve separate objects. More
time, and the objects had proven to be so mind-bogglingly huge that
only the central one could be seen from any point in the city.

If the pattern continued—and Thaddeus would
be very surprised if it didn't—the huge object would eventually
stop descending. A hatch would open on its vast, smooth belly and
twelve large ships would emerge and hover in the same formation as
the first twelve objects.

Out of the central ship would come something
surprisingly similar to one of NASA's old space shuttles. This
'shuttle' would land, and a man or woman who looked a little bit
like a crocodile would step out and address the crowd in excellent,
but accented, English.

And Thaddeus was lucky enough to be here,
right in the middle of the most important event in American history
since the Corn Goddess had created the first Humans, or however
that story went. He supposed he ought to put a little more effort
into keeping his mythology straight, but there was always something
in the present to occupy his mind, so he never got around to
it.

Events continued to unfold exactly as they
had in Beijing and Moscow, but that didn't seem to calm Corporal
Coleman any. He passed the rocket launcher to his neighbor, a
Private DiBenedetto, and stood there steadily turning greener. By
the time the 'space shuttle' emerged from its ship, Corporal
Coleman had the launcher again, and had changed from green to an
unnatural white. Thaddeus wondered how he could manage to keep
holding the thing when he seemed on the verge of passing out. From
the size of it, it must have been heavy.

Thaddeus carefully kept the shuttle in the
main camera's frame as it landed, but left the other one focused on
Corporal Coleman. Over the years, he'd learned that the Human side
of a story was sometimes just as important as the actual
events.

At four seconds past 11:57 a.m. the shuttle
door opened and, true to the pattern, a single figure began to step
out.

And Corporal Coleman fired.

A blast of flame shot out behind him as the
rocket came out of its launching tube and zoomed into the sky.

The visitor from the shuttle stepped onto the
grass, glanced at the celebratory projectile, then settled his gaze
on the president and began to walk toward him.

The rocket flew directly over the visitor,
turned and shot straight down, erupting in a fireball that engulfed
the shuttle.

When the flames were finally extinguished,
the visitor's charred corpse was spread in small pieces across the
blast zone.