Earthfall

by Joshua Guess

  “Run!” I shouted, snatching their suits by the arms and dragging them.

  A series of explosions like God’s own firecrackers turned the air around us into fire. I don’t know what the hell the Gaethe use in those suits, but if I had to wager a guess I’d say there’s some kind of exotic matter in them. Depending on the variety, it can do weird things when brought together.

  The two detonations so close together had done exactly what we wanted in killing most of our enemies, but it also set off a chain reaction. From the way the floor buckled beneath me, it was one of those situations where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

  All of us were thrown a fair distance back the way we came. When everything calmed down, I took a peek at where the barricade was.

  It was knocked all to hell. Durham tapped me on the shoulder and pointed up and behind us, where I saw one of the thick rectangles of draas with half its length jammed into the wall. The rest of them were scattered about like a toddler slinging dominoes. I also noted with detached interest that we wouldn’t need to blow the door. The entire hallway had deformed around the explosion. The fact that we weren’t a lot more dead cinched it for me; there had been some kind of gravity event involved with the blast.

  I thought about the level of control and precision it took to install something as volatile as Kyotogen in a piece of technology the size of Gaethe armor, and my respect for the race grudgingly went up a notch.

  Jax sent another sphere through the broken door leading into the main section of the warseed. Our supply of Sand was getting low. We had enough to keep our suits formed and some left over, but not much.

  “Clear,” Jax said. “There is…significant damage.”

  Where the doorway had been was a ragged hole, the heavy frame with its thick door just sort of…gone. The massive room beyond was shrouded in dim light and heavy shadow with one exception. A vehicle of some kind twenty meters from the hole was crumpled and on fire. It had a suspiciously door-shaped hole in it.

  The bodies of a bunch of Gaethe lay strewn around nearby, none of them wearing armor. We must have used up the nearest contingent of soldiers.

  “Jax, figure out where we are and find the fastest route to the containment section,” Rinna ordered.

  The map of the warseed reappeared, a red line tracing a route. I let out an involuntary groan. “Are you sure that’s right?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Jax replied. “We are fifteen kilometers away from our destination. The safest path will take us through no fewer than thirty security checkpoints, two crew quarters, and the containment section itself is surrounded by multiple redundant safety measures to ensure no accidental release of exotic particles.”

  “I don’t see a way to achieve our objective,” Rinna said. “We came into the ship from the wrong end.”

  “We didn’t have much choice in that,” Williams said.

  Not that it helped, but he was right. The original plan was to enter the warseed from an opening closer to the center, which would have been wide open while docked on solid ground. It would still have been a huge gamble, but not impossible. Not like this.

  I cleared my throat. “Okay, then. Secondary objective it is. We set the device here and get the hell out of dodge. Let it destroy the ship and hope the fall does the same for the rest.”

  “Someone will have to stay behind,” Durham said. “We can’t risk anyone coming through and tossing that thing out an airlock.”

  “I’ll do it,” Rinna said. “This is my team, my responsibility.”

  Williams started arguing over the com while Durham shrugged and said, “Yeah, okay. That sounds fair.”

  I sighed and had Jax cut off their microphones. “Guys, you’re forgetting one important detail. Rinna might be in charge, but I’m literally the boss of you right now. Jax?”

  The three of them stiffened in unison, their suits lining up in the tunnel. I stood in front of them, knowing beneath the layers of incredible technology there were three very pissed-off soldiers. Durham probably less so than the other two.

  “I’m going to turn your mics back on. Please, let’s be rational here.”

  “I’m going to break both my feet off in your ass, Mars,” Rinna said as soon as she could be heard. “I might borrow Williams’s legs while I’m at it.”

  “I’m sensing some anger,” I quipped. “Williams? Got anything to say?”

  The big man took a calming breath. “I’ll do what the captain orders. Right now I’m hoping she orders me to punch you in the face. Let go of my suit, goddammit.”

  “Here’s the thing,” I said, pointing to the large room. “This over here? It’s the maintenance vehicle bay. It’s close to the exterior so the crew can get outside the ship to work on it easily. That much Jax was able to tell. There are escape pods in there. What I plan to do is stuff the three of you in one of them, eject it, and set the bomb. Once you’re safely away I’ll set the bomb for a very short timer and hop in one myself. This only risks one of us—the one with a supercomputer helping him—while still accomplishing the goal.”

  “That makes a lot of sense,” Durham said. “And I’m not just saying that because I want to live.”

  “I’m staying with you,” Rinna said. It didn’t come across as a demand or an order, but as a fundamental truth like saying water was a cocktail of oxygen and hydrogen.

  “Okay,” I said. “But they get in the pod.”

  “Fine,” Rinna said.

  I released my hold on the team and mentally crossed my fingers that Williams would save my ass-kicking for later. We had just made it to the floor of the maintenance bay when a high-pitched, modulated noise stabbed me in the brain. I lost all control of my suit and shouted, ineffectively trying to cover my ears.

  “What’s wrong?” Rinna said. “Mars?”

  “Can’t you hear that? It’s so fucking loud.”

  The others looked at each other in confusion, obvious even solely through the body language of their armor.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Durham said.

  “You wouldn’t,” Jax replied for me. “That is the UEE beacon signal. It is used for NIC-to-NIC contact in emergencies, when other means of communication are unavailable.”

  “I’ve never heard this before,” I said as the sound changed, the intensity lowering. I sent a furious acceptance and discovered it was more someone talking at me rather than with me. We couldn’t have broadcast further than the hull if we wanted to. Jax could do many things, but his transmitters were weak and limited compared to planetary distances.

  “This is a message for Mars Cori from UEE command,” said a familiar voice. “Mars, if you’re hearing this, be advised we will begin bombardment in one hundred and eighty seconds. The orbital mechanics work out that way.”

  “Oh, holy shit,” I said. “We need to go. Now! Get to the pods!”

  “What’s going on?” Rinna demanded.

  “It’s Garrett,” I said, disbelieving. “Another pilot like me. I don’t think he’s alone, either. Not if he’s broadcasting to me here. They’re about to hit this ship from space.”

  Thirty-One

  When we got to the bank of escape vessels, Jax pulled the Sand from Williams and Durham. I wanted to shove them inside, but the men scrambled in as best they could. I slapped the emergency release and felt something in my chest loosen when the doors closed and the thing sped away as if fired from a gun.

  “Get one ready for us,” I said, pulling the extra Sand to me.

  A countdown ticked away the seconds before my own people rained down hell on top of us, but I wasn’t going to leave this undone. Not after every stroke of luck and act of bravery we’d used to get this far.

  I stretched my suit to the high ceiling and used some Sand to stick the bomb in a corner where two structural ribs met. Jax synced the timer with the strike countdown, and I lowered myself to the ground.

  Black grains fell away from me, and I sprinted to the escape pod Rinna waited in, her San
d already gone. I slid inside and hit to release. Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen the next five times I pressed the button.

  “They have locked us out,” Jax said.

  “Well get into the system and fix it like you did with the cargo ship,” I snarled.

  “He would have if he could,” Rinna said. “This thing probably has exponentially better security.”

  “Correct,” Jax said. “Should I halt the timer on the bomb?”

  We had forty seconds. I looked at Rinna. “What do we do?”

  She tapped her fingers against the chin of her helmet. She stood and opened the door. “Pack all that Sand in here. Set the bomb to go off twenty seconds after the strikes hit. If we’re lucky the emergency system will override the lockout.”

  “Okay,” I said, though neither of us sounded very confident. There wasn’t much else we could do.

  Jax organized the Sand in spring-like structures to buffer us as much as possible. That might actually do some good if whatever the UEE was shooting at us wasn’t catastrophically large or fast and didn’t hit too close. It would be less effective—as in not at all—against the effects of the Kyotogen bomb.

  That whole thing where the ignition of the gravity drive of the warseed made local gravity go insane for a little bit? That was what the bomb did. But instead of petering out and stabilizing from the initial burst, Paulson designed it to create increasingly powerful gravitational shear. In practice it was like the resonance an opera singer could use to shatter a glass, only using the fabric of space/time instead.

  In fact, Paulson had explained it as someone grabbing that fabric like a towel laid flat, then twisting it in their fist.

  Fun times.

  The first impact slammed into the warseed right on schedule, knocking me around inside my survival suit hard enough to make spots flash in my eyes. The escape pod shifted in its berth but didn’t release.

  “I don’t…”

  Whatever Rinna was going to say was lost by a second, much larger impact. Its power was enough to shred the locks holding the pod in place, or at least that was what I assumed, because the thing began to rattle and bounce in its tube. I reached forward and slapped the release again, and this time it worked.

  Not well, but at that point anything was progress.

  The pod had taken damage. A panel displayed failures in two of the five thrusters launching us out of the ship. We were going a lot slower than I’d have liked. I tried to increase the seconds left on the countdown timer and discovered we were out of range. Too much dense hull between us and there.

  We hit open air above the warseed and climbed about forty meters when the timer hit zero.

  I can’t describe what it felt like to be hit by a localized gravitational anomaly because I blacked out when it happened. I imagine space flexed around us and tore our capsule apart, but that’s a guess based on evidence after the fact. When my short fugue ended, Rinna and I were falling through the air, no vessel around us. We had been thrown kilometers past the hull of the warseed, meaning we had likely sustained nearly fatal acceleration.

  I screamed in abject terror, flailing my arms as if that would help in any way. That was when I made the terrible discovery that some of me hadn’t made the trip; my left arm was missing from just above the elbow. Blood sprayed out, but Jax was already on the case. I felt no pain, and Sand coalesced around the wound to keep me from bleeding out. I would probably live long enough to impact the sparkling blue water below. One last gift from my NIC, as double-edged a gift as I could have asked for.

  Rinna woke up right after me. She didn’t scream incoherently as I had, but neither was she precisely calm.

  “Mars, what the fuck are you doing? Get your shit together and make us a parachute or something!”

  I was trying to puzzle out the meaning of these words when Rinna tucked her arms and legs and expertly glided through the air toward me. She wasn’t gentle on contact, but held tight.

  “Oh my God,” She said when she noticed my arm.

  “Yeah it’s not good,” I replied stupidly.

  Jax was trying valiantly to wrangle all the loose Sand he could, but physics was a temperamental mistress. Most of the particles blown loose were gone, subject to their low mass to area ratio. What was left clung to me, some to Rinna, and formed a thin cloud around us both.

  “We’re too heavy,” I said. “There’s no way. I can make something for you, but…”

  “Nope,” Rinna said. “Not happening. What we need to do is lose these suits.”

  No sooner said than done. Jax snapped all the Sand he could grab hold of into a long tether trailing from my stump, then blew the emergency release on our armor. The pieces caught the wind at once and tumbled into the sky like metal birds.

  The streamer of Sand whipped back and forth, grabbing everything from the cloud it could touch. The shape changed into a sort of scoop riddled with regular holes to let air through, piling up more and more Sand.

  “Hang on tight,” I said. My voice seemed distant, and not because of the air rushing past us. I was lightheaded, my body starting to feel sluggish and detached. Objectively I could recognize the signs of shock when they were happening to me, but couldn’t do a lot about it.

  The Sand formed into an ultra-thin foil bowed up in the middle. There wasn’t enough to create a parachute, so the best we could hope for was to slow our descent enough for the impact with the water to something shy of fatal.

  I felt unconsciousness taking me, inexorable as a club to the back of my head. My last thought was that the renewed bleeding where my arm used to be had something to do with it. There was no black cap over it now. I guess Jax weighed the options and decided bleeding out was less of a risk than impact.

  “Keep her safe,” I mumbled too quietly to be heard. Jax sent back a pulse of warm reassurance, and then everything went black.

  ***

  I didn’t die. Again.

  I woke up completely unaware of my own body. There was no outside world, no sensation of where I was or what condition I was in. Instead I existed in a blank space, an emptiness filled only with images and sounds arrayed in grids like screens in front of me.

  It was the same setup used in my training, only then the collage of information was dozens of scenarios I had to navigate simultaneously. This was not that. There was no work for me to do, nothing I could do even if I wanted.

  I watched, each display enlarging as I focused on it.

  In one the world—Earth, that is—lay spread out below just as it had on my approach all those weeks ago. A beautiful blue marble smeared with green and white. Only now there were signs of trouble. Smoke from too many fires to count spread out in clouds massive enough to be seen from orbit.

  Around the planet, flashes of silent light. I tried to peer closer, but the image didn’t respond to me. Then a ship streaked by, the familiar shape of a UEE fast attack scout. Another flash of light, this time much closer, and I thought I had it figured out.

  The UEE sent in small, stealthy ships to take out the Gaethe orbital defenses. How? Had the Friendly or some other species relented and given us enough Halos to send a massive force? There hadn’t been enough time to send ships using our own technology.

  Something huge warped into view. It was too far away to make out more than a bluish smudge against the starry backdrop, but I knew it had to be enormous. The mechanics of warp travel meant any incoming vessel had to drop into normal space at a distance from a gravity well. That fact that I could see it at all said volumes.

  Another blue shape appeared. Then another. They kept coming, at least twenty of them. Two interesting things became clear as they approached; they grew in actual size, not just apparent size by getting closer, and they weren’t what you’d call ships. Not proper ships.

  They looked like debris clouds. My first thought was that a catastrophic mistake occurred during the release of their warp fields, some miscalculation causing their gravity drives to crush the ships to pieces
. But no, there was a regularity to the shapes that belied the idea they were anything but whole.

  The nearest fell into orbit between the Earth and Luna, and it appeared very much to be a cloud of gas and particles filled with weirdly stationary pieces of rock. It was as if someone froze a broken planetoid in place and made a ship out of it.

  The cloud ships began firing. I could only tell from the streaks of gas left behind as the weapons traveled through the cloud itself.

  A nearby display brightened, drawing my attention. It flickered from location to location, showing every single orbital strike. On the one screen, the cloud ships fired while on the other the weapons did their terrible work on the surface, pummeling warseeds with a relentless barrage.

  Another screen brightened, another viewpoint. This showed thousands of Gaethe ships running the spectrum of sizes rising into space and attacking the cloud vessels. I was, I realized, seeing something like a time line of events that had transpired while we were trying to figure out a plan of attack on our warseed. I wondered what the purpose was. Surely not just to give me a debriefing.

  The Gaethe ships fired beam weapons at the clouds, with about as much effect as you’d expect. The strange, formless attackers spread across kilometers, the interior design and makeup hidden by the dense shroud they carried with them. From within the clouds more weapons fire rained outward, the streaks of gas smaller but much greater in number. Rail gun shots, if I were to hazard a guess.

  The majority of those shots disabled or destroyed ships, and my blood ran cold. The accuracy was familiar. It was the kind of display you got used to seeing when you married the intuitive power of a human mind with the raw computational might of a NIC. Without any real evidence, I was suddenly convinced beyond doubt that I was looking at a fleet of ships piloted by Blues.

  Garrett’s message to me was the seed crystal for the idea, one that only grew more firm as I continued to observe.

  What I witnessed was not war as I had always conceived it. I watched as hundreds, then thousands of ships were broken to pieces or left to drift with no power. Shot after shot, mercilessly precise. Perspectives switched, showing a handful of traditional UEE vessels scouring the growing debris field for survivors, prisoners of war broken free of their dying ships and brought aboard with tethers. The operations were too smooth to have been anything but practiced.