Meanwhile the largest pieces—the ones that reached the surface largely intact, would gouge enormous carters into the land and throw vast amounts of matter high in the air.
But inevitably more of those rocks would fall into Erath’s oceans—the place was better than two-thirds water, after all. They’d be enough to trigger multiple tsunamis. Some would propel killer waves as far as 250 kilometers or more inland. In any event, all the coastal areas would be scoured clean of humanity and its trappings.
And it would go on for 30-plus hours, till the last of the rubble had slammed down and all the hot black grit thrown up had choked off daylight itself!
And now—a mere week later—the entire planet was plunged into abject, round-the-clock darkness to be followed by a desolate twilight lasting years at a time.
Temperatures were plummeting.
The remaining plant life had already begun to die.
Soon the animals that somehow survived the initial catastrophe but depended on the vegetation for food would follow. Once they were gone, the last of the carnivores—
“Professor?”
“Call me Barret,” he invited bleakly. “After all that’s happened, all we’ve done, formality seems such a waste of time.”
“Yes. My friends call me Bix.”
This at last drew some trace of a reaction. Shirakawa still didn’t turn from the slowly unfolding nightmare image, but he did frown. This deepened the new worry lines in a face that the autodocs mere days before the beginnings of the crisis had calculated as belonging to a healthy, freely aging man of 39—assuming you could find one in the early 26th Century who’d never set foot inside an anti-aging center.
Slo-Age, the ultimate health regime.
Developed on Earth—in the great and teeming city of Kinshasa, on the Congo River. One of so many places that quite simply wasn’t there anymore.
Ginsberg remembered a meaningless detail from Shirakawa’s file. The man turned 206 last week. Now he almost looks it, she thought with sympathy, not scorn.
And another thought came to her: We destroy a world, but still measure time by its standards.
“It’s short for Bixenta,” Ginsberg finally explained. “From an old Earth language, Basque. Only a couple of that language’s words made it into Pan-Human when the UNH decided to make everybody speak the same language. For the sake of unity, you know?”
Unity.
She paused, a bitter taste in her mouth.
“Interesting.” Shirakawa said, seeming to mean it. “I’ve always been a history buff. Physics—theoretical physics—might be my career. But history in all its intricacy still fascinates—”
Ginsberg nodded.
“Happen to know what the name means?”
“Barret—I—it means ‘Victory.’ Fucking ironic, huh?”
“Indeed.”
They both went silent for another moment, as the holo display rolled on. Would the Professor really sit there for the whole 30 hours again?
She felt a sick certainty—yes, unless she could snap him out of it.
“I—I have news, Barret. As close to good news as possible under the circumstances.”
Shirakawa waited.
“The last of their space-based forces finally agreed to ceasefire, a couple hours ago. We’ll—our ships have already started landing, along with what remain of theirs. We’ll pick up as many survivors as possible. Bring ‘em—well, we’ll find places for them—somewhere, somehow.”
“They went mad,” Shirakawa observed. “Just like us. To keep fighting, blocking rescue efforts in a blind rage. How many, do you think?”
“That we can save?” Ginsberg winced. “I understand we should be able to get a couple million off. That’s best estimate.”
“A couple million,” the professor echoed.
“And then there’s the relative handful that’ve already locked themselves into the underground bunker complexes they threw together on the fly. Their world will be a shattered mess even when they reemerge in a couple years—”
“More like ten years, Bix. I’ve run the numbers, repeatedly. What’s their capacity, do you know?”
“Another million. Maybe a million and a half.”
“A couple million here, a million and a half there—out of nine billion.” He closed his eyes. “’I am become Death, Oppenheimer said.’”
“Who?” Bixenta Ginsberg blurted.
“Oh, God.” Barret Shirakawa cringed. His eyes opened and grew moist. But they never strayed from the holographic image. “Oh, my God—”
THE END.
FIGHTING FITZGERALD by Shawn P. Madison
It was about five or six seconds after I blew Garcia’s head off and while I was still wiping the bastard’s blood off my face when his tuner went off. The wind was blowing through the open balcony windows and the curtains were fluttering all over the place. The buzzing tone sounded again so I thought, what the hell, and leaned down to pick it up.
“Yeah,” I said as I fingered the accept node.
“Get out of there!” a man’s voice rasped. “He’s on his way! He’s coming for you, Garcia!”
I grinned a little at that and flicked another drop of Garcia’s blood off the tip of my nose.
“Too late,” I said, hit disconnect and slipped the little tuner inside my pocket.
So, someone outside the normal channels was working with the chainheads…
Couldn’t be Regent Daniels. No…he shared no love with the drug runners so a warning wouldn’t have come from him. Then who? Well, the mystery remained but I knew who the local muscle was driving this operation. Scarus and his flunky Jelvin might just be dense enough to move against me in this dome. But I knew both their voices and the one on that tuner sounded nothing like either of them. It did sound familiar, though…
So, I knew that one of the local bureaucrats had to be working with the chainheads, how else to explain that warning call to Garcia? But, for now, that could wait – it was time for me to go. I might be the only lawman left in this dome but better off not getting caught in the act of murder. Yeah, the local taxpaying citizenry might not appreciate that too much…however worthless the victim might have been.
* * *
“So it’s true?” Scarus asked as Jelvin settled into the small chair to the right of the couch in the spacious room.
“Yeah, Boss,” Jelvin said. “He popped him right up there in his own bed.”
Scarus leaned back on the couch and took a long swig of the golden stuff Jenny had just poured for him a few minutes ago. “Fitzgerald’s bold, I’ll give him that.”
“Damn, Boss, he popped the guy in his own place and no one ever saw him,” Jelvin said. “In his own place. Garcia didn’t even have a chance to pull his blaster.”
“How did he catch Garcia alone?” Scarus asked. “Where was his security?”
Jelvin laughed, accepted a glass of the same golden liquid from Jenny and drank half of it down. “They found two of them dead on the first floor. Rumor has it the only one who wasn’t found dead at the scene is running around trying to book himself on the first flight off this rock.”
“Fitzgerald let one live?” Scarus pondered. “Not his style…”
“Well, the guy’s tried to scalp tickets for the next burner out of here in three domes already,” Jelvin said. “What I hear, he never even saw Fitzgerald. Just the results of his handiwork.
“Maybe so but he got no mercy from Fitzgerald,” Scarus decided. “If anything, the scumbag ran. I want you to go back over there and give the place a good going over, Slug. Find anything you can that could possibly link me to that turd, Garcia. I want that place clean, you hear me? Wiped.”
Jelvin stood and grabbed his hat from his knee before it had the chance to topple off. “No problem, Boss, but Fitzgerald’s good at this – if there was anything there, he’s already found it.
“I’m not worried about Fitzgerald, Slug,” Scarus said. “He already knows all about me and Garcia. I just don’t wan
t any of the Bubbleheads fumbling around out there and coming up with anything more they might be able to use against me. Fitzgerald’s local, but the black suits can bring a world of hurt on me just by talking into a tuner. You hear me?”
“Sure thing, Boss,” Jelvin said and left the room. The big guy guarding the door never moved an inch throughout the entire exchange. Scarus couldn’t even remember the guy’s name but he knew, if push came to shove, that muscle-headed thug would lay it all down without even thinking. Scarus smiled…now that’s power.
* * *
I looked up as the front door to the station opened and three tall men with military buzz cuts and wearing black suits entered the small room.
“Well, you Bubbleheads sure don’t waste any time, do you?” I said, leaving my feet propped up on the desk.
“Hey, Fitz,” the tallest one said. “What’s cooking?”
“Right now, nothing, but I hear that Garcia recently got fried.”
“You heard that, did you?”
“Yep, sure is a shame, too,” I said. “I was starting to like the little pig. He spent a lot of time here…on the other side of the bars, of course.”
The faces of the two smaller ones showed no expression – they just stood there, behind Callahan, in a show of solidarity.
“Fitz, you know I don’t like this kind of crap in my sector,” Callahan said.
“Like I do?” I shot back. “Every time one of these slimeballs greases another I have to fill up a few gigs on my system. That takes time, time I don’t have. You think I want that?”
“I could care less about the slides you have to fill out for the local pukes, Fitz,” Callahan said. “All I care about are sloppy assassination attempts taking place in one of my domes.”
I pulled my feet off the desk, stood, walked around the desk and faced Callahan. I had him by about six inches and made sure that I talked down at him as I spoke. “You do know that there’s a war going on between these chainheads, right, Callahan? Why would you think that this was anything other than a gang related crime?”
Callahan’s face revealed nothing, not even a hint of nothing. “Because I know what this is, Fitz, and it’s not an ordinary gang hit. And I know what you are, too. And I don’t like either of those things.”
With that, the two statues began backing up and Callahan turned to follow them. “One more thing,” Callahan called over his shoulder. “Watch yourself. I hear that this type of thing tends to hit both ways.”
The door to the station closed. For some reason I had just been warned. That in itself wasn’t all too uncommon. But it wasn’t every day that guys like Callahan took the time to do it in person. Dome Inspectors…
* * *
“What’ve you got for me, Leopold?” I asked the young kid in the white lab coat. A throwback to the old days, this one.
“Well, it wasn’t as easy to trace that last incoming call to Garcia’s tuner as I thought it would be, Cap,” Leopold said. “I had to hack my way into about thirty different routing stations, most of them not even in this sector, and then tie everything I was able to trace together to come up with an identifiable number.”
“Ok, but you got the number, right?”
The youngster’s face cinched up a bit and I felt a sigh coming on. “Well, yes and no, Cap. I mean, I got a number…I just don’t think that it’s the right number.”
“And why’s that, Leo?”
“Well, sir, because it originated from the Dome Inspector’s Offices in Dome Eighteen. And that just doesn’t make any sense, Cap.”
I thought about that for a minute, realizing just where I’d heard that voice on the tuner, and clapped Leopold on the shoulder. “Good work, kid, I think it all fits together just fine.”
“But why would the Bubbleheads be calling a Chainlord just before he got the big eight-six?”
“Beats me, Leo,” I said and turned to leave the lab.
“Unless Garcia and the Bubbleheads…”
“Stop right there, Leo,” I said and turned to face the kid again. “Don’t even go there. Not here, not now, not ever. You know these walls have ears, Leopold. Leave your conjecturing about the Bubbleheads to yourself. That is, unless you favor a career change to forced labor in the extraction pits. You hear me?”
Leopold fixed me with a confused look and then shook his head rapidly up and down. “Yes, sir, Cap, thanks for the tip.”
I smiled at him, that big old disarming Fitzgerald smile, and turned again to leave. That was a close one, the kid was smart…sometimes too smart for his own good.
* * *
“They just found St. Germaine, Boss,” Jelvin said as he entered the room. “His head was missing although they found a few of his teeth and some hair stuck to the ceiling and walls.”
Scarus shooed Jenny off his lap and gave her butt a quick squeeze. The tall blonde was definitely a piece of eye candy but, underneath the fluffy supermodel exterior, that head of hers contained the brains behind most of his very successful operation.
As she left the room, Scarus sat down on the couch beside Jelvin and said, “Tell me all about it.”
Jelvin relayed the scenario as he had gleaned the details from his contacts in the dome. St. Germaine was a major off-world, out-system supplier and distributor. Most of the chain that came through the network here in Dome Sixteen and fourteen of the other twenty-four domes that made up this sector were routed through St. Germaine.
“First Garcia, our main on-line producer,” Scarus grimaced. “Now St. Germaine, our number-one supplier and distributor. Our entire organizational structure is being attacked, Slug. One by one, each component is being attacked. Maybe not the apparatus itself, no, but the old saying – cut off the head and the snake will die…yes, that’s what he’s doing. He’s cutting off the heads…literally, in both of these cases. He’s making it so that the next ones in line will have that ever present threat looming over their heads – take this position and you, too, will die. Interesting methodology, interesting indeed.”
Jelvin remained silent for a time, allowing Scarus a few seconds to manage his thoughts.
“What do you want me to do, Boss?”
“Beef up security, Slug,” Scarus said. “And I mean everywhere. Send all of our remaining prime components a message to be on heightened alert and whatnot. We’re going to be fighting Fitzgerald on this one and we both know it’s not going to be easy.”
* * *
Mark Tucci unhooked the connector and turned off the valve. He looked back at the soot stained and dented exterior of the small lifter and saw that all was clear. His section chief gave him a thumbs up and he climbed into the cab of the lifter. He hated this, every second of it…chain may be the most profitable designer drug to hit the domes of this Extraction Colony in the past decade but, in its unrefined form, it would only take one spark to set the stuff off like a coronation ceremony on New Brittania.
The processing plant was small by most standards and so was his lifter but, together, they still put out more of the stuff than any of the other plants in this sector. Mark wasn’t going to get rich shipping base-form chain to the refining facility but his kids were eating well, they slept in one of the better housing developments in the dome and the bills were being paid on time for once. Becky would not be happy, God rest her soul, but the kids were being provided for better than ever.
The pre-launch system light went from red to green and Tucci hit the ignition switch. A large blast of yellow hit his retinas about one millisecond before he was incinerated in the ensuing maelstrom.
* * *
“I understand what you’re doing, Fitzgerald, but dammit!” Callahan roared. “You almost blew out a major panel in Dome Twelve! How would you feel if you’d have opened that dome to vacuum? How?”
I sat behind my desk, feet propped up, hands behind my head and shook my head. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You know damn well what I’m talking about, Fitz!” Callahan shouted and bits
of spittle flew from his mouth.
“I’m guessing you mean the plant explosion that took place this afternoon a couple of domes over?”
Callahan, flanked once again by his two statuesque companions – were they the same ones from before? I couldn’t tell – took a deep breath and noticeably calmed himself. “Fitz, don’t treat me like an idiot. I didn’t get to my position by being stupid. Everyone knows what’s going on here. You are taking this gang war a little too personally. You’re…”
“Hold up, Callahan,” I said. “If anyone in this sector has a right to take this gang war personally, it would be me. The next time three of your agents get blown away in a senseless shootout between thugs working for the likes of Scarus and Garcia, like my Deputies did a few days ago, you let me know. But, in the meantime, like I just said, what the hell are you talking about?”
Callahan fixed me with what I’m guessing was his most threatening stare. I’m sure it made crooks and cons all over this sector want to turn tail and flee but, for me, it really had no obvious effect.
“I’m warning you, Fitz,” Callahan said and pointed a finger at me. “Do not stir this quagmire up any more than you already have. You’ve gotten your revenge, you’ve done your good deed for society. Now just stop.”
“If I knew what you were talking about this gibberish just might be making more sense, Callahan,” I said and motioned toward the door. “You can leave now.”
“You don’t tell me what to do, Fitzgerald,” Callahan said and made a motion for the inside of his jacket.
Before either he or the two gorillas behind him could react I had both of my blasters out and aimed their way. Silence ruled the small front office of my station house for several seconds and I could feel my rage beginning to boil over. I counted to ten inside my head, using some two-bit mental techniques to calm myself that I’d picked up from the company shrink, and slowly stood.
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