Stars Rain Down (3 page)

Late on the second day, a few teams started to examine the secondary hull, which was two-thirds the length of Zebra-One’s main hull and attached by five thick struts. Unlike the primary, the secondary hull was streamlined and mainly hollow, devoted almost entirely to a series of interconnected chambers. Each one housed different kinds of machinery, including a legion of segmented manipulator arms attached to gargantuan support rings. All of that equipment, alien as it may have been, bore a striking resemblance to construction equipment back on Earth. Unless the expedition missed their mark, the secondary hull was a factory complex. The largest factory ever seen, in fact. The only question remaining was what it was supposed to build.

On the morning of the third day aboard Zebra-One, Marcus Donovan decided it was finally time to take a look at her heart. Back on the Copernicus Observatory, it was the discovery of a network of veins connected to that organ that convinced him and Rao that the vessel was biological. Now that he was aboard, he’d seen the sheaths that contained the thick, fibrous veins, but it was anyone’s guess what was inside the heart itself.

The structure was the size of four skyscrapers bundled together, and it lay at the center of the primary hull. Marcus was sure that it was the main power generator, and he absolutely had to know how it worked.

Faulkland volunteered to join him, which surprised no one; the two had become inseparable since they came aboard. Rao also came along, being twice as eager as the others to learn how the aliens generated power.

They ate a quick breakfast, looked over the old scans to get a fresh image of their destination in mind, then each of them pictured the heart and was flung through the endless maze of corridors. The entire journey of five kilometers took only a dozen seconds, and undoubtedly imparted them with enough momentum to splash them against a wall like water balloons. Marcus would’ve preferred not to think about that, but just couldn’t stop himself.

At the other end, the artificial gravity gently lowered him back down to one of the raised octagonal landing pads. Identical pads existed at every corridor entrance. Much like everything else on the ship, no one knew whether they were decorative or served some particular purpose.

Faulkland followed a moment later. He floated down beside Marcus, followed by Rao who was shaking with adrenaline and had his eyes closed. Considering the fact that Rao usually had to be sedated before orbital launches, merely closing his eyes was a significant step in the right direction.

Marcus had expected the heart to already be lit when he arrived, since it was ostensibly powering every other light on the ship, but no such luck. In fact, it took longer for the room to react to human presence than any other they’d explored. When the walls finally began to glow, in a cool blue rather than the warm amber of elsewhere, they found themselves in a small cul-de-sac with no obvious opening apart from the one they’d come through.

“Think she’s screwing with us?â€

The generator’s outburst washed over Marcus and slammed him into the framework. He tried to shield his eyes from the light to no avail, and blinded, he somehow managed to climb through an opening in the cage and emerge on the other side.

Marcus didn’t know what was happening, but he knew it was his fault. He’d just woken a sleeping bear, and an old fashioned mauling was on its way.

It took him several seconds to regain his sight, and he found himself back on the catwalk with Rao and Faulkland. The generator’s outburst only lasted a moment, after which it settled back down to a level still brighter and more active than when they found it, accompanied by a new, dreadful and furious song. The lights throughout the room were dimming and changing color. They turned blood red.

Reports started to stream in from all over the vessel.

“Anyone else hear that? Like an animal screaming.â€

“He’s delirious. St. Martin to Shackleton, prep the medical bay for surgery. Donovan’s been compromised by some kind of alien parasite. We’re en route now.â€

What struck Jack in the first week following the invasion was the quiet. Not silence, but the serene quiet of wilderness in the absence of man. It was the quiet of civilization’s demise.

It took a little time to set in. At first, the sound of alien craft filled the air, while ground troops overran the ruins and rounded up the last survivors. Then, after less than a week, there was nothing and no one left. With their task complete, the bastards withdrew and left nothing behind but the piles of dead, the unsettling quiet and the furious howling of the dust filled wind.

As the second week began, the next thing that struck Jack was the smell. Although his gas mask kept the dust out of his lungs, it did little to obscure the stench of death. He would’ve done anything to get that smell out of his nose, but there was simply no escape. At least they were in sparsely populated rural areas; he didn’t dare imagine what the cities were like.

The invaders were still on Earth, though. That much was certain. The cycling sound of their cuttlefish craft occasionally sounded high overhead, but they never came down. They never bothered. They had better places to be than in that stinking wasteland. China was defeated, and held no more mystery for them. No more resistance.

The enemy had exclusively targeted humans, killing them and moving on, never staying longer than it took to perform the extermination. This turned out to be a boon to Jack and his makeshift team. While buildings of every kind had been laid to waste, vehicles, roads and bridges were left untouched. Food was easy enough to find and quite a few places still had water pressure. Fuel cells were scattered everywhere amongst the rubble, whole and functioing thanks to their crash-proof casings.

On the eighth day, while the team sat on the edge of yet another ruined village, Jack decided time had come to find transportation. “Anyone know how to hot-wire a car?â€

Back when he first saw aliens piling up the dead, Jack retreated. His body was stuck there in the remains of China, but his head ran all the way back home to the comfort of his girlfriend’s arms, where it stayed while his body persisted on. He did what was necessary to survive, but only in a dim, mechanical daze. He was an animated corpse that had forgotten to fall.

Then he found a family of survivors, and everything changed. The discovery filled him with a ray of hope that brought him back to life. From that point on, he was fully charged up and firing on all cylinders because it wasn’t just about survival anymore; it was about saving lives, and that meant everything to him.

It woke all of them up.

Nikitin and Chase returned with a delivery van which had carried more than its fair share of fish, by the smell of things. No one liked the stink, but the vehicle was spacious and all in one piece, so they spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning it up and packing it full of supplies. By the end of the night, the van was stocked with enough food and water for a month, and still had space left over for a makeshift medical bay.

The next day, they added two more cars to their collection. The first was a minivan for the family of survivors, retrofitted with a few good layers of grating over its vents. It had all the amenities, including a plush interior and an audio deck loaded full of Chinese pop.

The second vehicle was a beaten up and rusty old jeep that’d seen better days. Nikitin was adamant about having an off-road vehicle for scouting purposes, and the jeep was the best he could find. Or so he said. Jack suspected Nikitin had a soft spot for beaten up and rusty old jeeps, which he refused to admit to.

On the third day, they mounted up and hit the road as the winds began once again to rise. Jack and Nikitin rode ahead in the jeep where they both took a serious sandblasting in the open air. It was worse than they’d expected, and at every stop, they layered on more spare clothing until they both looked like mummies. The extra layers made the ride survivable, if not particularly comfortable.

The jeep scouted ahead by a paltry fifty meters most of the time, while the others trundled along behind them with their headlights on. It was slow going at first, but roads proved to be in excellent condition and they picked up speed. They traveled two hundred kilometers in that first week, and Jack suspected they could cover more ground if they wanted to.

They stopped to check for supplies and survivors at every settlement and the search was well worth the effort. They found plenty of both, and their small group sprouted into a motorcade. Survivors started coming out to meet them, drawn out of hiding by the sounds of car engines and human voices shouting over the roar. The motorcade swelled into a mass migration in time, their population numbering in the thousands, in a puttering line of cars that stretched across a kilometer of road.

Every influx brought another handful of orange jumpsuits, stocked up and ready for duty. Many spoke multiple languages including English, and they found constant work translating. The local guides were also plentiful, although each one delivered the same morbid warning: don’t bother with the cities. There was nothing to find there but death.

They traveled for more than two straight months past the ruins of towns whose names Jack would never know, at the foot of the great mountains to the North which they only saw in silhouette. Always headed westward, they passed from China to Myanmar, then along the northern border between India and Nepal, and finally through Pakistan where they met up several more groups like their own.

As they neared the end of Pakistan, they finally caught sight of a city. Where Peshawar had been, there was a black and still smoking petrified forest, with a thick layer of shattered concrete lining the ground and the twisted steel skeletons of buildings standing in for trees. A power capable of such total destruction was unthinkable. They skirted the edge of the ash heap faster than common sense might have suggested, and as they headed for the mountains, no one bothered to look back.

In single file, they entered the Khyber Pass, which Jack had once heard described as a knife-wound in the mountains. The words hadn’t meant much to him, but they were all too appropriate once he saw the steep gash as if the earth had simply been sliced away. The pass had been used by armies since the beginning of time, and he wondered how it would be remembered from then on, having carried so many survivors away from that terrible destruction.

As they emerged on the other side of the mountains, the travelers saw the most wonderful thing they’d ever seen. After more than two months in dust-choked twilight, they could finally see the bright blue sky again. They were back on Earth.

At the other end of the pass was a village built of sand-colored stone which rose up out of the landscape like a natural formation. It was part of the land, and Jack wondered if that was what had spared it from the onslaught. The village was whole, intact and full of people, and along the road stood a handful of soldiers in desert camouflage with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. For the first time Jack could remember, he was glad to see soldiers. Overjoyed, in fact.

With the fish van behind him, Jack pulled the jeep over and killed the engine, then he peeled off his gas-mask. He took one giant lung full of clean air. Fresh, reasonably dust free air. He held it as long as he could, and the feeling was amazing. As he took the second deep breath, he heard Nikitin doing the same beside him.

In another moment, he pulled off all his extra layers and tossed them in the back seat, until he was down to just the jumpsuit. He felt naked, and he was quickly struck by how bad he smelled.

“I was starting to worry the whole world was choked up with that cloud of shit,â€

Midday on Mars. The sun shone brightly, but a sandstorm was brewing on the horizon, hazing the line where dusty ground met rusty sky. Somewhere over that horizon lurked the biggest mountain anyone had ever seen, rising thirty kilometers into the emaciated sky, but no one would ever believe it was a mountain while standing on it. Its body stretched over an area the size of France, with a grade nearly as steep as a wheelchair ramp.

Amira Saladin was a teenager the first time she made the trip with her parents. They pointed at the ground and told her she was on the peak of the tallest mountain in the solar system. At the time, she didn’t believe a word of it. Fifteen years and more than a dozen return trips later, she still found it difficult to believe. It was a let down, actually.

She eyed the approaching storm with a touch of annoyance. “Just another beautiful day on the Arcadian Plain.â€

Marcus Donovan was deep inside Legacy’s secondary hull, her factory complex. From the observation platform where he stood, he looked out over a cavernous chamber lit in blue-green and filled everywhere with activity. The Shackleton Explorer was there, docked inside a series of orange constructor rings whose countless biomechanical arms twitched about and inspected the vessel. Legacy wanted to know more about human technology, and they both agreed the most direct route was to take a closer look. Faulkland was against it at first, but after six weeks of constant badgering, he finally caved and reluctantly allowed his boat to be brought inside.

The last of Shackleton’s crew moved to more comfortable quarters aboard Legacy, although the engineering team maintained a presence on the Shackleton to monitor its nuclear reactor. The chief engineer, Olli Enqvist, insisted the reactor was perfectly safe and could operate itself, but he preferred to err on the side of caution. Marcus smelled subtext.

All the while, Legacy was in a state of transformation. She had been quiet and despondent when she woke up, but the crew’s presence raised her spirits. Marcus didn’t completely understand it, but humans invigorated her somehow. She had been incomplete without them; now she was filled with purpose and an eagerness to please.