Earthfall

by Craig Delancey

  Tarkos patted at the man’s pockets, found a phone. He expected that: implants were too easily traced. He held one of the man’s eyes open, then held the phone’s camera over it. The phone turned on and opened. But there was no signal in this room.

  He crawled to the French woman. She had similar wounds, but she also still breathed.

  He could almost stand now. He limped over to the open doorway. It opened into another room, this one empty, but at the far wall a wide stair went down. Human screams echoed through the warehouse, and gunshots. Tarkos stepped through and hobbled over to the window at the top of the stairs. The phone showed signal now available. He hit 112.

  “Oui?” a voice sounded.

  “I am Amir Tarkos, a Harmonizer and a First Citizen of the Galactic Alliance,” he said in French. “I have been kidnapped. Attacked. I am with a Sussurat. She is also a Harmonizer and First Citizen of the Galactic Alliance. Send help. And inform the Galactic Embassy. There are men here who are heavily armed. I do not know how many.”

  He set the phone on the sill of the window, leaving the connection live. The GPS would broadcast the location.

  He managed to stand straight. His head still hammered. He stumbled back to the Englishman. The man’s gun was a simple mechanical weapon, with no intelligence. An automatic of Swiss design. Tarkos picked it up, checked the chamber, and then trudged toward the door. He knew how to find and help Bria: he just headed for the screams.

  CHRONICLE V:

  EARTHFALL

  CHAPTER 1

  “It can’t be,” Margherita Calvino repeated, as she looked out of the small airlock of the asteroid where her ship was docked. The stars spun by outside, dizzying in their speed, but she looked along the axis of spin, toward the bright star that they orbited. The star shone green, with a pale green halo surrounding it.

  It could only mean one thing: the asteroid had not moved. She remained in orbit around the Second Green Disk. She remained where she had started. She remained where she had been a prisoner, for more than a year.

  But how could that be? She had been convinced that this asteroid in which she was a prisoner had been moved to the solar system. She had been certain that they now orbited the Earth. But no. No. She was still dozens of light years from Earth. She was alone. Totally alone. Thirteen years old, starving, living among antagonistic aliens that would use her for weapons experiments as soon as she no longer proved useful for translating and interpreting Earth communications. She would die out here.

  She pulled herself back and rolled over, lying on the floor of the airlock. She stared at the grim blue lights above, tuned to the miserable dark glow preferred by Rinneret eyes. She had been certain that the asteroid had been moved near Earth. How else could the Rinneret talk with their human spies in New York City, in real time, with no noticeable delay? The alien that owned her—the thought made Margherita shudder, but she had to admit to herself that she lived now as a mere slave of Six-Traveler of the Rinneret, a three meter long centipede who wanted to exterminate the human race—that Rinneret had talked in real time with a human. A human on Earth. Even the fastest hyperradios should have had days of delay. How had she seen them talk in real time?

  She blinked, and the hot tears streamed from the corner of her eyes. They fell back into her ears. She tried to wipe them away, forgetting the helmet, and her thick gloved fingers thudded against the visor.

  There was no escape. She orbited a star many lightyears from Earth, in a region where neither Earth, nor even the great Galactic Alliance, had influence. And she served an enemy of the human race, who worked with traitorous humans. If she didn’t serve Six-Traveler, she would be tortured to death by another Rinneret and enemy of the human race, to test its biological weapons. Her slow death would be used to help develop humanity’s extinction. So if she obeyed or disobeyed the Rinneret, she would betray Earth.

  She lay a long time, trying to think of what to do. She considered just leaping out of the airlock: she would drift away from the asteroid, and after an hour floating away she would suffocate in space. She imagined her old beat-up ship alone, empty. If it had a smarter AI, it would miss her. But it was stupid. It would just sleep forever, waiting for her to wake it with a question. Waiting for her like she waited for her parents.

  She wondered then if her parents were dead. She didn’t often let herself wonder if that could be. But now she did. Because there seemed to be no hope. No hope of any kind.

  Margherita had put the small hyperradio in her belt before leaving the ship, instead of leaving it inside the suit. She pulled it from her belt and thumbed it on. The suit made a local link with the radio.

  “Mom?” she whispered. She rolled over and held the radio out through the airlock door, although that shouldn’t help at all. “Mama, are you there? Mama? It’s me, Margherita.”

  She took her thumb off the transmit button and held her breath to listen. But the only reply was the hiss of background hyperradiation, the leftover cry of the big bang: the ancient, ancient song of the birth of the universe, howled out at a time when all of space had been lonely of any kind of life.

  _____

  Although she had been tempted to throw it away as useless, Margherita planted a radio transponder outside the airlock, on the hull of the asteroid. She closed the outer door, and the fiber optic cable linking to the transponder did not break as the airlock seals pinched it and the room pressurized. She climbed back into the bay. In the dim blue light she could just make out the outline of her ship, and the pale form of its white door. As far as she could discern, nothing else moved in the bay. She closed the emergency hatch behind her, and then carefully checked the fiber optic line, laying it in a long crack in the scored floor. She double-checked the cable’s connection to its data port on the ship. Then she laboriously climbed the front of her ship, finding handholds on the torn metal of the cut nose cone. The front door shuddered open, to her relief, when she asked the ship to let her in, and, to her greater relief, it closed behind her when she crawled inside.

  “How is it possible, ship!” she demanded, as soon as she got her helmet off. The air was not yet filtered and repressurized, and she coughed on a lungful of Rinneret atmosphere. She wiped at her face with the rough glove, the thick plastic threads scraping at her soft eyelids. “How is it possible?”

  “Excuse me?” the ship said.

  “They must have hyperradio that’s, like, instantaneous across the galaxy. They must be way ahead of Earth in technology. But why are they living like this then? Why mine asteroids, and hang around this pale old star, if they’re that powerful?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Margherita growled and pulled off her suit. She threw it and the helmet into the closet, and kicked the flimsy door closed. “How can I get out of this trouble?” she said. “I can’t help this Six-Traveler any more. He’s attacking Earth, or something. He’s doing something bad there.”

  “Excuse me, Miss Margherita,” the ship said, adopting a slightly more urgent tone, “but you asked me to inform you if I received any signals of human origin.”

  Margherita stared at the bank of lights on the far wall where she knew the AI was housed. “What?” she whispered.

  “Through the radio transponder that you have recently activated, placed on the exterior of the asteroid, I am receiving a large number of radio signals of human origin. They are in human languages.”

  “No way,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  “If you suspect an error, I can begin a diagnostic cycle. It will take four standard hours and—”

  “No! Tell me what you have.”

  “I am receiving a large number of radio signals of human origin. They are in human languages.”

  “There are humans here,” she whispered. “There are humans at the Second Green Disk.”

  “I am also receiving web links,” the ship said.

  “What?”

  “There are also web links.”

  Margherita frowned. “That make
s no sense. How do you bring the web with you to the Second Green Disk? Why would you? And why set up your own web, and then transmit it?”

  “There are also web links,” the ship repeated.

  “Show me,” she said.

  The screen lit up with a standard browser program. A search engine appeared.

  “Search for Doctors Sabrina and Steven Calvino.”

  A brief note in a journal called Galactic Survey Reports came up first, dated six months before.

  Sabrina Calvino, physicist, and Steven Calvino, exobiologist, have not reported back from their expedition to an uncharted region of space to investigate reports of an occlusion detected by the second stellar catalog. The scientists, working under a grant meant to fund original human research, had been criticized for taking their daughter, then 10 years old, Margherita Calvino, on their expedition. Their last contact was received....

  She turned away. The entry was less than six months old, and it had no new information. Her parents were not on Earth. Not when this note had been written.

  “Let’s keep looking,” she told the ship. “Maybe they got to Earth, only later.”

  But after half an hour she sat back on her bed. “No news,” she whispered. “My parents aren’t on Earth. They aren’t with the Galactics. Where are they?”

  “The web has no information on their current location,” the ship reported.

  “Ship, how is it we’re getting the web? This is like the web from Earth. And it’s not old.”

  “Yes. There are web posting available that have synchronic timing identical to my own, when time debts are accounted for. There is less than one second of delay. It appears hypersimultaneous, therefore.”

  “That isn’t possible. Unless... I know! Maybe also the humans invented superhyperradio, instantaneous, while we were away. So it’s not just the Rinneret who have it!”

  “There is no web posting describing such an event.”

  “Hmm. And the web isn’t transmitted on hyperradio, is it?”

  “No, the web is not transmitted on hyperradio. These are standard nineteenth-generation wifi transmissions. We are exchanging message with routers that identify themselves as Earth communication satellites.”

  “That makes no sense! How can we get the messages without delay?”

  “We must be within 0.35 light seconds of Earth’s surface,” the ship said.

  “But we’re not!” she said.

  “We must be within 0.35 light seconds of Earth’s surface.”

  Margherita put her small hands on her head. They felt hot against her forehead. I better eat, she thought. But then a more pressing idea came to her. “Is there like... can we link to police, or something?”

  “There are web sites for all the major law enforcement agencies of Earth.”

  “Let’s....” she hesitated. Who to call for help? “Is there police for outer space?”

  “The Galactic Alliance has the Executive. The UN has the Enforcers.”

  “Do they have a web site?”

  “There is an Enforcer web site for Enforcer Station Earth. There is also a small Executive Annex which lies in the city of Paris, as part of the Harmonizer Headquarters there.”

  “Call the Enforcers. See if they have a way to report crimes and stuff.”

  “There is a public contact link with videoconferencing.”

  “Connect to that! No! Wait! I have to get dressed. I can’t see another human dressed like... in my suit underwear. Where are my clothes? I haven’t worn them in.... In a year, I think.”

  “Your clothes are in bin twenty six,” the ship said. A green light appeared on the bin beneath her bed. The rectangular surface of the door lacked black fingerprints from asteroid dust: she had not opened it in months. Margherita hurried over to it and found her jumpsuit. She pulled it on. It barely fit. Somehow, even with her nutritional deficits, she had grown.

  “OK,” she said, moving in front of the screen.

  The image sputtered, and then showed a WE APPRECIATE YOUR PATIENCE sign. She jumped up and down nervously, waiting for someone to appear. Then, with surprising suddenness, a young man’s face materialized. He had short dark hair and blue eyes. He looked at Margherita, and then frowned. Margherita’s mouth fell open. She’d never seen a boy like this before. She could not in fact remember talking to a boy before.

  “Bonjour,” the man said. “Vous parlez avec un representative de Executive Mission de Terra.”

  “I don’t speak French,” she said, an observation and curse for her own benefit.

  The man promptly said, “Good day, I speak English.”

  She sighed with relief. “Is this the UN Enforcers?”

  “Oui. Yes. I am a representative of the UN Enforcer Mission on Earth. How can I help you? This line is for reporting global jurisdiction crimes or concerns about crimes, miss.”

  “Yes! I know of a crime!” She spoke now in a heated rush. “Yes! You have to help me! I’m trapped in Rinneret space. I’m at the Second Green Disk. The Rinneret, well, they haven’t enslaved me, really, but they own me. Most of me. I’m like practically a slave here. And they are trying to do something, I don’t know what, to attack Earth. They’re trying to make me help them attack Earth. There’s a weapon maker, called Two-Five-Weapon-Maker, who wants to kill all of us, after testing his weapons on me, and—”

  “What is your name, miss?”

  “One-Human. Oh, god, no, I mean, Margherita. Margherita Calvino.”

  “And where are you?”

  “I’m in an asteroid, a Rinneret asteroid, at the Second Green Disk.”

  “Miss, that’s impossible.”

  “That’s where I am.”

  “Miss, you are transmitting in real time. And there is only one known Green Disk system.”

  “Listen, there’s a man who’s helping them. He’s helping the Rinneret. He’s in New York. He’s a traitor to the whole planet. He’s a traitor to Earth and the human race. His name is DiAngelo. Alfonso DiAngelo.”

  “Miss, I can see that your transmission is coming from a shipboard connection. The ship seems to be registered. But you must be here on Earth to be talking with me in real time. Or in orbit. Now, I’d like to help you, but I cannot help you unless you tell me the truth about what is happening to you and you tell me where you are. Then I can call the police nearest you—”

  “There are no police near me! You have to come save me! With a starship.”

  “Miss, I’m going to have to pass you off to our artificial intelligence, which can take a statement and then we can see if we can help you.”

  “No!”

  “Miss, the AI is much better than me at handling this kind of thing. It will help you. It will do a better job helping you than I can. Just tell it the truth.”

  “Oh, dammit,” Margherita said, tears starting again in her eyes. “I have an AI, and it’s as stupid as can be. Yours isn’t going to help.”

  But the man was gone.

  “An artificial intelligence is offering a connection,” the ship said.

  “You talk to it. Repeat what I said to that guy. I’ve got to think.”

  She flopped down right there on the deck before the screen, and slapped the floor angrily. “Stupid stupid stupid,” she said.

  Margherita stared at the screen a long time. Then she sighed. “I have to do this on my own. But how? How?” She rubbed her fingers over the wide scar that covered her face. The whole human race, the whole planet Earth, depended on her. But what could she do? What?

  “Ship,” she said. “Search for Alfonso DiAngelo, in New York.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Tarkos stumbled down the free-standing stairs of the warehouse, crouching, the heavy mechanical pistol held in both hands and aimed down before him. He could hear only screams below. Not screams of surprise, but long, repeating howls of pain.

  He bent to look under the ceiling as he descended into a long factory room. Machinery and cars were parked at the far end of the space. Bria stood before
these, drawn up to her full height, her nose down. She surveyed the scene.

  Seven people lay on the floor. Only two of them still had both arms. Bria had, Tarkos realized, simply used the laser to remove any limb that held a weapon. Most of the people in the room screamed with pain and horror, clutching at their stumps. Tarkos held the gun over them, looking for any threat, but he could find none. The room seemed to contain no one else: nothing moved except for these writhing people.

  Nearby, the sirens of French police cars dopplered into higher pitch as they approached. Then came the thwump thwump of helicopters descending onto the roof above. In a few moments, human police rushed into the room behind Bria, guns held taut in their hands. And then, from behind Tarkos, spindly robots of the Galactic Executive moved with lightning speed down the stairs, parted around him like water, recognizing him as a Harmonizer by his implants. They moved into every corner of the room.

  One of the French police walked cautiously towards him. Tarkos dropped the heavy pistol he held. He lifted his empty hands. “I am Amir Tarkos. That is Bria.” He pointed at his partner, who still stood at her full height. “We’re Harmonizers.”

  The policeman nodded his head to indicate that this was obvious.

  “There are two more humans upstairs,” Tarkos said. “A man and woman, Caucasian, thirties. They’re hurt but they may be conscious soon. If conscious, they will be dangerous. They must be taken into custody immediately.” He looked around the room. “Do you have an ambulance coming? We should be able to save everyone here if we act quickly.”

  _____

  A small air transport came after the ambulances. It carried Tarkos and Bria back to the Harmonizer Headquarters, both of them dripping blood onto the white seats of the sleek Galactic transport. Tarkos called his mother from the transport’s computer.

  “Amir!” she said, frowning in the small screen that he leaned towards. “What happened? Where are you? Where were you last night? You look terrible. And this connection is terrible.”