by Greg Keyes
“There’s a place in town that shows old movies for a dollar,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. Then he cleared his throat. “So, Friday?”
“Okay,” she said. “Right here, six o’clock.”
She turned her attention back to the book, and after a moment he mumbled a goodbye and continued home, wondering exactly what had just happened.
* * *
Dikembe was kneeling, reading the tracks in the damp understory of the forest. They were deep in the south, probably beyond the borders of the country his father had invented, moving into the Congo basin. It was supposed to be the last hunt.
Part of him refused to believe it.
Since his brother’s death, nothing had been the same, including the aliens. They never again showed the level of organization they had shown before. Over the years they became increasingly aimless. Some fought, especially if they were in a group, but many seemed hardly aware they were being slaughtered. But there were so many of them. The ship, after all, had been more than twenty-four kilometers in diameter.
For the nine years since his brother’s death, Dikembe had hunted. His ability to almost smell them had deepened over time, deepened in them all. From a decade of butchery, his arms had grown as hard as the steel of his machete. He felt, at times, like some sort of automaton, a robot that did only one thing.
So he hardly dared hope that it was nearly at an end.
No one had seen one for almost a year—and then, a few days ago, a report came from a village on the edge of the rainforest.
The jungle seemed to explode in front of him, as the vegetation ripped open and the aliens came swarming at him and his men. Without a sound, he launched himself forward, sliding beneath the legs of the first, a maneuver now so practiced it took no thought at all. His machetes, honed every night to a keen edge, did their work, as did those of his men, and they did it in almost unearthly silence.
There had been a time when the men cried out with fear or anger or jubilation as they came at the foe, but that had been ground out of them long ago. They saved their breath for the fighting. These aliens fought better and harder than any he had encountered in many years. A few still had energy weapons and tried to use them, although to little effect.
As he struck one down, another loomed over him, and he realized with a start that it was larger than the others, larger than any alien he had ever seen. It looked a little different, too, although he didn’t have time to reflect on why, because its tentacles struck him in the ribs and sent him sprawling. He rolled and came back to his feet, finding it hard to breathe, reckoning that he must have broken ribs and hoping the newly sharpened edges of bone hadn’t pierced his lung.
He sliced off the tentacles that were reaching for him, and backpedaled. He ducked behind the trunk of a massive tree and darted around it. The alien was already turning, but too slowly. He slashed at its back, severing the rest of its flailing tentacles, and then cut into its head. It required three chops as opposed to the usual one, but the exoskeleton finally split.
He felt the monster trying to get into his thoughts, something none of them had managed to do for a long time. His legs tried to seize up, and he felt a deep despair, as if he had failed in something profoundly important, a failure for which there could be no forgiveness…
Then Zuberi slashed the thing inside of the exoskeleton. It died, and only the echo of its pain remained.
“You’re okay?” Zuberi asked.
“Yes,” Dikembe murmured, shaking it off.
“This one was different, don’t you think?” Zuberi asked.
“It was,” Dikembe agreed. He moved in for a closer look. The creature inside the ruined armor was a different hue than the others, a dark mottled green. Its head was bigger, too, proportionally. Thicker, the shield more widely flared. Zuberi’s weapon had severed its neck, but above its left eye was a sort of pucker.
“Looks like a scar,” Zuberi said. “An old bullet wound, maybe. What do you think it was?”
“The last one,” Dikembe said. “That’s all I care about. It was the last.”
* * *
That afternoon, he brought the news to his father.
“It is finally over,” he told him.
His father shook his head.
“It will never be over,” his father said. “For me, it will never be over.”
16
Rain Lao had barely had time to settle into the cockpit when the guy was suddenly all over her, putting his hands places they had absolutely no business being. He wasn’t rough or anything, but she still didn’t like it. She pushed him back, irritated.
“You said we could go flying,” she said.
“There’s lots of ways to fly, baby,” he said.
“Well, I want to literally fly,” she said. “In this plane.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe in a little while.”
She had sort of known the guy was a creep. He was probably ten years older than her, and she’d caught him leering more than once, even though she was almost always wearing her school uniform. She should have known better.
“Well,” she said. “Could you at least maybe close your eyes for a second? I’m shy.”
“Now you’re talking,” he said. He closed his eyes and put his hand over them.
“Don’t peek,” she said.
Then she braced her back against the passenger side door, put both feet against his hip and pushed him out of the open pilot-side hatch. He yelped and fell to the ground. She yanked the door shut, locked it, and then turned her attention to the controls. He started yelling and banging on the door, and she ignored him.
Giving the instruments a quick check, she started the plane, a two-seater used almost entirely for crop dusting. Its single prop began to spin, became a blur, then nearly invisible. She eased the plane forward and turned onto the single, unpaved runway.
The fellow chased after. He was still yelling, but she couldn’t hear him anymore, which was good, as he had been becoming increasingly more profane.
As she sped down the runway, he diminished in her rearview mirror, and she put him out of her mind as the plane rotated up and leapt into the sky. She knew she was grinning ear to ear. It had been far too long since she had flown.
This was a perfect day. The fields of winter wheat spread out beneath her, a quilt sewn of autumn colors. She took a few slow lazy spirals, gaining altitude, and then turned due south. The radio started yammering for her to turn around and land, but after a bit she switched it off.
It occurred to her that she had finally lost her mind, that the rural backwater of a nowhere place had finally driven her insane. Nevertheless, she felt sane, better than she had in a long time.
Because she was flying.
She didn’t remember how old she was the first time her uncle had taken her up. Young. She did remember the first time he had let her take the stick—she’d been ten. Of course, he was always right there, ready to take control if she screwed up, but she never did—or at least she didn’t think she had. He had pronounced her a natural.
By eleven, he was letting her take off. But then her Auntie Far had moved to the sticks, and she never saw her uncle anymore. Now Auntie Far was with the new guy, and Rain hated him.
She passed the small airport every day on the way to and from school, staring longingly at the planes. She’d asked if she could fly one, but they didn’t take her seriously—or even pretend to until today.
In a little over half an hour, she saw it, the gigantic disk of the ship her father died fighting against, lying on the remains of the city of Wuhan. Although their move had taken them to within two hundred kilometers of the place, Auntie Far had refused to take her there to see it.
Rain banked, trying to imagine what it had been like, the hundreds of alien fighters filling the air, the desperation of the human pilots who knew they only had moments to act in order to save, not just themselves, not just China, but the human race. If just one of the destroyers had su
rvived long enough to get its shields back up…
She tried to imagine her father’s last thoughts as an enemy fighter locked onto him and transfigured him and his plane into a cloud of plasma.
Rain wasn’t even sure she remembered him—she had only been four. She thought she remembered his face, but that might be because of the photographs her aunt kept. She believed she remembered his voice, but that too might be something she’d dreamed up over the years, because his voice in her head sounded so much like her uncle’s. Of course, they had been brothers, so that might account for it.
She flew lower, almost skimming the nightmare surface of the dead monster.
All around the circumference of the destroyer she saw what appeared to be a swarm of ants, as if it was a titanic cookie, and they were biting pieces off to take back to their nest. Correcting for scale, of course, the ants were men and women—but the analogy wasn’t entirely inapt. They were recovery and mining crews, salvaging alien tech and materials from the crash. She saw a series of what might be some sort of chemical plants, storage buildings and structures for which she couldn’t venture a guess as to their functions. What she found a little surprising was that in ten years they had barely made a dent in the thing.
Then she saw them—first from the corner of her eye, coming in from her three o’clock. Jet fighters, a pair of them.
“Hi, fellows,” she said, waving, knowing that of course they couldn’t see her or hear her. She wondered what it was like to fly a jet, outpace sound itself. She continued to watch, wistfully, thinking that soon they would be beyond her sight.
Then she realized they weren’t just training or on patrol—it looked like they were headed straight for her. When she changed course and they corrected to follow, she became certain. One of them fired a burst of tracers across her twelve as it streaked by, the wind from its passage almost causing her to stall.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Are you serious?”
She turned on the radio.
“… final warning,” it was saying. “You are over restricted airspace. Land immediately.”
The jets were turning back.
She put the small plane into a dive. Everything went light. She knew if they fired their missiles there was nothing she could do, and she could only hope they didn’t think she was worth it.
Almost to the ground, she pulled up—nearly too late, but she whooped in delight as the field rushed by her at almost two hundred klicks an hour. The jets passed again, far overhead, but now they were turning to make a run at her. It was time to stop fooling around.
She gained a little altitude and spotted a dirt road. She lined up with it, then eased back, or thought she did, but her nose went high and she stalled. The plane struck the road, hard. The landing gear snapped and the craft was suddenly skidding on its belly. A wing struck a telephone pole, and spun the plane twice before it roughly settled into a ditch.
She unbuckled and climbed out of the crumpled aircraft and walked a safe distance away, in case it took a notion to catch fire. She looked around, and saw little but fields in every direction, although the top of the spacecraft was still visible on the horizon.
Nowhere to hide, even if there was a point in doing so.
She took a seat on the bank of the ditch, lit up a cigarette, and waited for them to find her. The first to show up were a couple of guys in the blue uniforms of the People’s Police, probably from some nearby hamlet. They examined the plane, and then looked over at her.
“You there,” one of them said. “Did you see the pilot? Which way did he go?”
She blinked. It hadn’t occurred to them that the only person anywhere near the wreck was the pilot—because she was a girl. She probably could just tell them she was on her way home from school, and that a tall man with a Minjiang accent had run off thataway. She’d be able to skate out of this whole thing.
But it irked her to be so easily dismissed. Why?
Because of her age? Because she had a skirt on?
“I’m the pilot,” she said.
“Don’t joke, girl,” the officer said.
“Not joking,” she replied.
He stared at her for a moment. “What were you doing flying a plane?”
“It seemed like a nice day for it,” she said.
About that time she heard the helicopters coming, and knew she wouldn’t have gotten away with the other thing, anyway.
“How old are you?” the policeman demanded.
“Thirteen,” she told him.
“Not such a good pilot, I guess,” the other man said, kicking at the wreck.
“I think I did okay,” she said. “It’s the first time I ever landed on my own.”
The helicopters began settling in the field. These weren’t locals, either.
“Man,” she sighed. “These guys really can’t take a joke.”
* * *
They took her someplace, confiscated her I.D. and everything but her clothes, which a female officer searched carefully.
“A girl your age shouldn’t be smoking these,” the officer told her as she took Rain’s cigarettes and lit one for herself. They took Rain’s fingerprints, and a little blood.
Then they put her in a little gray room and asked her a bunch of questions. She answered them honestly, trying to keep her composure, but the fact was she was starting to get a little worried. Her plan had been to return the plane—landing it somewhere near its hangar, and then proceed home on foot. She’d expected some trouble from the local cops, but this—this was starting to get a little scary.
Especially after two days passed. She hadn’t been charged with anything, and since the first day no one had spoken to her other than to offer her food and drink. The third day, a man in the uniform of an Earth Space Defense lieutenant showed up. He had a thin face and seemed very stern.
“Come on,” he said.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“You’re going home,” he replied.
He took her to a helicopter, and an hour later she was home.
* * *
Auntie Far was a mess. She couldn’t even talk to her at first. New Guy just kept comforting her and giving Rain evil looks.
Auntie wasn’t really her aunt. Due to the old one-child policy, if you had an aunt or uncle they were usually really old. She was lucky to have a real uncle. Of course the policy had ended after the alien attack, but it would still be a few years before aunts were commonplace.
Auntie Far was really a cousin on her mother’s side, but Rain’s mother and Far had been close. Rain had been visiting Auntie Far while her mom was attending a conference in Beijing. Her mother had died there, when the destroyer incinerated the city.
Rain went into the kitchen and cooked herself some noodles with preserved mustard greens and black bean paste. It had been a while since she’d had anything good to eat. She had just finished when Auntie Far came into the kitchen. There wasn’t much to it—a gas cook surface with two burners, a sink, and a small table with two chairs.
Her “aunt” joined her at the table. She was still a relatively young, nice-looking woman—as Rain’s mother would have been, were she still alive.
“I’m sorry, Auntie,” she said. “I’m not sure what I was thinking.”
Far took her hand. “I love you,” she said. “I know you didn’t want to come here. I know you liked the city. But I have family here, and work. We weren’t making it in the north.”
“And New Guy doesn’t like me,” she said. “He wants a child of his own.”
Auntie Far’s face became very still.
Rain was already regretting saying it.
“Auntie…” she began.
“No,” her cousin said. “Rain—I love you. When your mother and father died, I gladly took you in. But I cannot handle you anymore. You’re on a path that leads nowhere good. I have failed you, and so we must try something new.”
“New?” Rain said. “What do you mean?”
“Pack your thin
gs,” Auntie Far said. “Everything you think you’ll need. You leave in the morning.”
“For where? For how long?”
“I can’t talk about this anymore,” she said.
“Auntie!”
“Pack,” she said.
* * *
A car came before the dawn. The driver stowed her bags in the trunk without any comment. Auntie watched silently, until it was time to go.
“It’s for your own good,” she said, as they hugged goodbye.
Rain wanted to plead to stay, or at least part of her did, but on one level she was too angry. Whatever place her aunt was sending her to, it was less for Rain’s good than for her own, of that she was sure. Auntie Far wanted to get on with her life, and it was clear she couldn’t do that with the anchor of a teenager around her neck.
So Rain got in the car feeling stiff, and still angry, and she was sure she would feel that way for the rest of her life.
It was a very long car ride to the nearest real airport, and by the time she got there she had nodded off a few times. The driver escorted her in, made sure her tickets and documents were in order, and left.
She saw that she had three transfers, and that her final destination was a place called Jiuquan, in Gansu Province. She had never been particularly good at geography, but she thought it was in the northwest somewhere.
Then she was flying again. She liked it a lot less when she wasn’t at the controls, but it was fascinating to watch the landscape roll by and change beneath her, from the fields, plains, and snaking rivers of the heartland to progressively drier, rougher-looking terrain, until she began to see the bones of the earth poking through its green skin. Then there was more bone than green—just desert and the isolated swaths of vegetation surrounding rivers. She had never been to the desert before, and she wasn’t sure which she felt most—anticipation or apprehension.
She didn’t get to see much of Jiuquan—as she debarked a man in an ESD pilot’s uniform met her and escorted her to yet another plane, this one not much larger than the one she had stolen. Within twenty minutes they were back in the air, and the landscape became really severe.
“Where are we?” she asked the pilot after a while, not really expecting an answer. He was young, maybe no more than twenty, and had an accent she didn’t recognize. Pleasantly, he also turned out to be a little more talkative than the car driver.