by Jerry
Perhaps there was a simple way to look at it, Eddie mused. As long as the Lizards were gone, the war was over. It’d be years before the reinforcements came—Earth could even have sent out a second Interstellar Expeditionary Force early—but if somehow they could stay alive, they might see this through. Team 84632 did have a long record of surviving.
Dammit, he though, I have to do something.
“Jayes,” Eddie said more calmly than he felt, “raise the Command channel—seventeen.”
“Uh, yessir. Have a carrier—you’re linked.” Jayes looked at the others—Lt. Eddie had never contacted Command before, always going through Battalion or Unit Reporting.
“Command, this is Lt. Eddie . . .” He stopped and began again. “This is General Edward Arthur Latrelle, Supreme Army Commander Interstellar Expeditionary Force 1. Cancel the nuclear attack in progress. ID code Alpha-Delta-Seven-Fiver-Three-Four-Seven-Alpha. Acknowledge.”
Eddie closed his eyes and waited. It was a long shot, taking Tooth at its word and taking charge. But there were still thousands of missiles in the skies and they needed to ground this spaceship and live in the remains of this planet.
A mechanical voice came from the radio. “Authority acknowledged. Confirmation required.”
“Understood,” Eddie said. “This is my executive officer, Lt. Rhonda. Ronnie—confirm my orders.”
If she was surprised at her elevation to officer, she didn’t show it. “This is Lt. Rhonda Anne Alice Merriweather. ID Code Baker-Echo-Niner-Niner-Niner-Zero-One-Zebra. Confirm. Acknowledge.”
The radio stayed silent probably for only about ten seconds, but to the team in orbit it seemed interminable.
“Nuclear attack canceled. Command System awaiting further orders.”
The voice may have been monotone, mechanical, but it triggered a flood of emotions inside the small alien ship. For the first time in forever, he heard Rhonda laugh. Jayes brought up the notion of trying to find an intact hotel room to bunk in. Even Eddie had to smile at the thought of a real bed and sheets. Perhaps, he thought, they’d actually won this war, for some odd definition of winning.
He’d like that.
And there had to be others. It would’ve been so easy for Team 84632 to have been left without someone like Eddie who had any codes at all. And civilians, hiding from the chaos. Perhaps this southern continent would be in better shape. Perhaps Tooth was wrong about all the humans being dead.
“Starting re-entry sequence,” Rhonda said. “Maneuvering to new heading.”
“Make sure your straps are secure,” Eddie found himself saying. “These Scalie seats aren’t the most comfortable for humans.”
“Captain Eddie—I’ve got a landing beacon for Crystal City.”
“Is there an audio link?”
“Negative, sir. It’s an automated beacon—military tech. But we’re locked in.”
The southern continent began coming around the bend of the planet. There was still a lot of blue water showing inland and the land didn’t seem as blasted as in the north. Crystal City would be at the far tip, as far from where they’d been as they could get.
“Can you magnify Crystal Bay?”
“I can do better than that, captain,” Jayes said. “I’ve linked into a recon satellite.”
The far edges of the bay looked damaged—bombs had broken the cliff fortress into fused rubble. But the water itself looked blue and inviting.
“There,” Eddie said. “Those white shapes. Magnify.”
“Sailboats?” Jayes gasped when the image changed.
“Boats under sail, at any rate,” Eddie said. “And someone has to be sailing those boats. Do you see any other ships?”
“Negative. Satellite isn’t picking up any E-M emissions. I am getting some carbon emissions—soot, smoke. I’m not seeing any buildings on fire.”
“Civilian tech isn’t hardened against EMP,” Eddie said. “Sailboats and cookfires might be as advanced as it gets.”
“Would explain the lack of communications, sir,” Rhonda suggested, not looking up from her control boards. “But there are people.”
“Yes there are, lieutenant,” Eddie said, smiling even as he said it. “What are those things next to the sailboats.”
“Could be nets, sir,” Robbie said. “Fishing the bay perhaps.”
“Do you have a radiation background count?”
“No, sir,” Robbie said. “But look over there—there’s erosion on those cliffs. Those strike craters are not recent.”
It didn’t make sense to Eddie. All along they’d thought the war was planetwide. Now they find out that the aliens had left the southern continent alone? As they began to feel the first effects of their re-entry, the words trade winds came to mind. It had to be the planet’s strong equatorial trade winds, preventing the northern fallout from crossing over to the southern continent. And the aliens had to know about that.
“The Lizards were lying,” Eddie said. “They wanted to destroy the army in the north so they could take over the southern continent without any opposition.”
“What changed their mind, sir?”
“The doomsday bombs,” Eddie said. “They’d ruin everything.”
“Crystal City Spaceport to inbound traffic. What the hell is going on? We haven’t heard anything in months.”
Eddie stared at the radio unit. It sure didn’t sound like a military space traffic controller, but a valid military code number was displayed in green letters and numbers on the radio.
“Uh, did any of you hear that?” Jayes asked. “In the clear?”
“That’s an affirm,” Rhonda said.
For a small team, their cheers sounded pretty loud.
Maybe, just maybe, Eddie thought, they’d make it.
SUNSET
Tobias S. Buckell
The starship crash-landed somewhere in the dark and early hours of morning. The thunderclap sound of it striking the East Bay woke Tamuel up, heart racing and confused. He glanced out his window, but didn’t see anything. He stumbled out into the common room to see if he could see anything different from the balcony.
“What was that?” One of his siblings also was apparently out and looking around for the cause of the sound. “There’s no storm.”
Outside, through the windows opened to allow the cool land breeze rushing out toward the ocean to pass through the foundling dorm’s corridors, Tamuel saw only stars and the looming dark of the Berenthais Mountains.
Tamuel squinted through the dark to see that it was Shau who had woken with him. Several of the other boys grunted and swore from in their rooms, annoyed at the late interruption to their sleep. Group classes would start early in the morning; this was an unwelcome event.
“I—” Tamuel stopped as the horrid wail of the tsunami sirens pierced the night.
Everyone woke up and streamed out of their doors, sleep forgotten as fear jolted them awake. There was a mass of panic before some of the prefects, older and well-drilled, asserted order. “Line up! Those of you near the east corridor, march to the stairs and head to the third floor. West corridor, march! Do not go back to your rooms to take anything with you. Move now!”
The thirty boys fell into lines and the entire common room split right near Tamuel into two groups that streamed out into the two stairwells. Emergency lighting, red and calm, dappled their worried faces as they rushed upwards.
Minutes later the water struck. It rushed up Watt Street, just several inches of foaming sea, lapped at the wheels of the carts parked around the dorm, then gently poured out through the storm drains and retreated back down the street, leaving only some confused small fish behind.
The warning sirens stopped, leaving a strange quiet to fall over all of Weatherly, from the distant East Bay to the Callum Docks.
They all waited for whatever came next. Some of the second floor girls started to complain about Tamuel’s siblings staring at them in nightdresses. It was creepy. Tamuel understood. They were not all really siblings; they�
��d all been raised in the foundling dorm together. Go stare at some other girl from Summerstown’s foundling dorm.
“Hey, get off the balcony,” one of the prefects shouted from the back. “We don’t know if something else is coming.”
Shau was pressed against a railing, looking out toward East Bay with night vision binoculars. “Nothing else is coming,” he announced. “It’s a fucking starship crashed into the bay!”
“Language!” snapped Tosha, one of the prefects. Tamuel shivered when he heard her voice. She’d been singling him out for any dorm infractions and worse for the last year. “Who was that, is that Shau? Get over here. And what are you doing with binoculars? You’re supposed to leave everything in place during a drill.”
Tamuel decided to take a chance and shoved past siblings to get to the balcony. Shau was his closest sibling. Shau would let him use the binoculars.
“Shau, let me look!” he demanded.
Shau passed the binoculars over. Tamuel looked out over Weatherly to the curve of East Bay, skipping over the roofs of hundreds of structures in grainy green, and he gasped. There it was, a shark-fin shaped mass squatting in the dark pool of water where they normally sailed their tiny catamarans on weekends.
He recognized the shape. “It’s an Interstellar. It’s a Shatter Dart.” Thousands of tons of bio-organic, semi-sentient starship. With a crew of hundreds, it could leap between the stars. Hundreds of light years with each carefully planned gulp of the void-mouth contained deep in the belly buried under the water in East Bay.
“What the hell’s it doing here?” Shau asked.
“That’s it!” Tosha had pushed through and stood right behind them both. “I gave you a language warning, and asked you to get off the balcony.”
She grabbed Tamuel from behind. It was a violation, broaching someone’s physical space like this. The last time Tamuel had formally complained, there’d been a disciplinary board hearing. No one would step forward as a witness. Tosha was six years older than him. A respected prefect who had the ear of the adult board. He’d learned to try and stay invisible to her since then. He’d wished for cameras inside, like the street cams, but that would be a violation of dorm privacy.
Tamuel twisted loose from her and shoved the binoculars into her hands. “It’s a starship.”
Tosha couldn’t help but raise the binoculars. Tamuel, as he’d hoped, had completely yanked the prefect’s attention elsewhere as she succumbed to curiosity and looked out toward East Bay.
He yanked Shau away from her. “Nothing like this ever happens in Weatherly,” he said as they pushed through the crowds of siblings toward a stairwell.
“My binoculars!” Shau protested.
“Fuck your binoculars,” Tamuel hissed, just low enough none of the prefects would hear him. “Nothing like this happens in Weatherly. Or in Summerstown.” Or even, for that matter, Yelekene. Their entire world, all the archipelagos scattered across it, were far from the Core. Ships of this size had last visited Yelekene a hundred years ago, to ship terraforming equipment and raw materials here. Even the original Founders had come via smaller cargo skip-planers that had been disassembled upon arrival.
This . . . this was something different.
“What are you doing?” Shau asked as Tamuel pulled him down the stairwell.
“We’re going to be first to see it,” Tamuel said.
“We’ll get our asses handed to us.”
“All the prefects are upstairs herding us. We won’t get a better chance.”
Shau stopped. “You know how many demerits I have? No, I have to stay put.”
Tamuel paused. He really didn’t want to do this alone. Going out into the town at dark, it wasn’t scary, they’d snuck out before. But he’d rather have some company if he was going to head out onto the open ocean in the dark.
He briefly reconsidered, then bit his lip. “Then just cover for me as long as you can. Tell them I went to use the bathroom or something.”
“Yeah, sure,” Shau said. “Good luck, Tam. I hope it’s worth it, you’re going to be pulling weeds in the garden for weeks if you’re lucky.”
Tamuel grimaced.
• • • •
The plan to get there required a sprint down Watt Street toward the Ocean Walk and piers. Tamuel’s shoes soaked through within minutes as he stepped into puddles of stranded seawater in the dark. The sidewalks were lined with solar tiles that marked the street’s edge, though, so it was easy to get where he needed to be.
He passed several adult mixed-use housing complexes with their greenspaces folded inside their clear solar walls and dodged several officials whizzing by in carts, electric motors whining as they raced to wherever their civil disaster response plans ordered them.
Tamuel passed his parents’ sprawling multi-family home on the way down. He half expected his father to be on the lawn to shout “Where are you going, young man?” at him. But although the lights were on, his mother would likely be coordinating with the Council and Disaster Response teams.
He’d have a lot to answer for at their fifthday dinner meal together.
But Tamuel already had a cheeky response for them. He was a child of Weatherly. A people who risked lives to fling themselves far out from the Core to live on a far-off world. A resident of the shared foundling dorm, where all the children were raised together to share their educations and the community’s common values.
Could a descendant of such brave and curious people really not run to investigate?
Tamuel slipped onto one of the small catamarans that Weatherly’s children used to race across the bays. He untied the painter, shoved away from the dock, and then pushed the small electric engine in it up to full power after double-checking the charge. The hull and decks had soaked up the previous day’s sun and it didn’t look like anyone had used it.
He could see cart headlights heading for East Bay. He saw some people gathering around the docks, probably waiting for some consensus on whether it was safe to go out toward the starship.
Once he’d left the harbor, out alone in the taller, rolling swells of the ocean, Tamuel flicked the running lights on and aimed for the large lump of nothingness interrupting the usual slope of East Bay a few miles away.
• • • •
The East Bay’s waves hissed as they lapped against the side of the starship. In the dim light of Yelekene’s moons, Tamuel could see the hull was pitted and scarred, gouges and repaired patches streaking the starship’s mountainous flank.
He’d motored around it, hundreds of yards, keeping his distance and gaping at the incredible bulk that had settled into the bay. The fin-shaped ship looked top-heavy, now that he had to crane his head back to look upwards. Something whirred nearby, a wasp-like insect darted out from near the hull where it had been hovering. It bit Tamuel on the neck and he slapped at it, crushing it under his hand. He wiped oily residue off onto his pants.
People who lived in an aerodynamic world with atmosphere all around them expected a superluminal starship to look more needle-like, he thought. This fat and heavy lump looked like nothing that could move quickly.
*WELL TO BE FAIR I CAN’T ACTUALLY MOVE THROUGH ATMOSPHERE WELL AT ALL*
Tamuel reared back, his mind struck by the sound of the words. They sounded like they’d come from the fog horn in the lighthouse near the tip of the bay. He leaned over the catamaran and vomited. “What the fuck?”
“Sorry,” the voice said more softly. “I turned down the gain.”
“Oh god, I have the worst headache,” Tamuel moaned.
“Again, I’m so sorry.”
Tamuel wiped blood from under his nose and spat a gob of something into the ocean.
“It’s okay.” He smiled, the moment sinking through to him. He was talking to a freaking Shatter Dart! “Where are you from?”
“Mars,” it said. “I was born on Phobos.”
“Oh.” For some reason Tamuel was slightly disappointed. He’d studied Origination History enough to ha
ve a map of the First System in his head. He’d secretly been hoping for something more exotic. “But you’ve traveled the stars?”
Something like a smile bloomed in his mind’s eye. “Yes, yes, I have. I have seen many different systems in my life.”
A spotlight hit Tamuel in the eyes. He shielded them with an arm. “Please stop that.”
“It’s not me,” the ship said. “There is another small craft approaching.”
Tamuel blinked and faced the worst of the light, realizing the voice in his head was right. He waved at it, and heard his mother’s shocked voice. “Tamuel?”
“Mom?”
It made sense. She’d be in charge of any delegation sent out. This was an odd event, of course the town’s chief representative would come out. Starships didn’t come to Weatherly, on the far northern edge of the archipelago. They went to Summerstown, or Elidia. Hundreds of miles away by boat, and far enough away that the one starship that had come to their world was only a distant contrail heading into the air for an even younger Tamuel watching it, hoping to catch a glimpse of something otherworldly and dramatic.
“What are you doing here?”
Tamuel smiled and extended his arms excitedly as their launch tapped his. “I’m first!”
Two of the town’s deputies leaped into the catamaran. Tamuel blanched when he saw that they carried rifles, long barreled and chunky-looking death tools that gripped their forearms. They looked pissed.
“Take him back to town,” his mom ordered. “And find out why he’s out after closed dorm hours. Gerard, Misty, and I will try to see if there’s an airlock and keep trying the radio frequencies.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they said.
They pulled him away from the electric motor.
“They won’t be able to get in,” the ship said. “Everything is sealed. Every airlock fused. The only communication I am allowed is the warning beacon.”
“Wait,” Tamuel protested. “I can talk to it.”
But they ignored him. He was just a kid pulling a stunt, and they were busy talking to each other on radios and coordinating.