by JCH Rigby
There’s no one in sight on the floor below. Beyond the terrace, the surviving aircraft are getting well out of it, launching decoys, racing for cover behind the nearest towers.
The Hoplite reappears and climbs up to hover just beyond the terrace lip. Shit! I drop to the ground covering my head with my arms. The Hoplite’s guns hammer at the shop doorway, ripping chunks off the face of the building while Andy bellows for someone to stop the bloody thing. After what feels like an eternity the Hoplite ceases fire but remains hovering there ready to reengage. I pull myself up looking over the low wall at the scene below. A couple of the guys have appeared from somewhere and are squirting foam over the spilled fuel from the platoon commander’s aircraft. My dispassionate soldiers eye tells me there are no survivors. I look away as my legs begin to shake and I slide down the wall, exhausted.
I spot little blonde Molly, sobbing and terrified, crying for her mom, tottering toward the travellator, past the remains of the shop where the missiles came from. Then, in a massive explosion, what’s left of the shop front disintegrates. Andy is knocked flying. Glass, tables, chairs, and a tiny figure sail through the air. The entire mall turns upside-down and drifts slowly down, then, another wall floats up to hit me. Something smacks my face. My chest and my arm don’t feel right, so I climb up the wall to the floor and decide to go to sleep.
Chapter NINE
Horizon Star
May
"Stevie? You awake?” Andy Norris’ question was a fair one. I couldn’t remember when I’d last moved. I hadn’t been interested in moving all day, so I was still here at two in the afternoon, sitting in the day room of the castle’s little medical unit, in the same chair I’d been in since breakfast. A bracing foam around my chest and right arm, my eyes full of some glop which gave everything a misty look. My face felt raw.
This was the first day I’d been out of bed. The afternoon sun was drowsy-hot, but that wasn’t why I didn’t move. I was trying not to think about Molly’s tiny body flying through the air. I’d been way too slow.
Andy pushed the door fully open and entered the room. My section commander walked awkwardly in a body frame, a clanking great thing with its own power supply that made strange wheezing noises as the pneumatics helped Andy move his legs. His face looked about as bleak as I felt.
“How’s it going, Steve?”
I pulled myself together enough to answer him. “Average too bad, thanks. When are they letting us out of this place?”
“You, next week, I think. Me, probably sooner but it’ll be a while before they get their hooks out of me.” He clumped over to the window, the frame’s servo motors whining slightly. We both watched as a Gallowglass and a couple of Pathfinders lifted from the grounds and climbed toward the north. The noise rattled the glass. “I’m on light duties and a medical downgrade until my hearing and legs are sorted.”
“Well, it’s a bitch, but it could be worse I suppose. We could have been with the others.” My face was itching, so I rubbed it and immediately wished I hadn’t.
“It was worse. I guess you haven’t been told…” Andy carried on staring out the window at the fields, pausing before turning around to look at me. There was something odd about his voice. He pulled a slate out of his pocket.
“What don’t I know?” I asked trying to keep the feeling of impending dread out of my voice.
“You do know it was aimed at us. The terrorists wanted to hit us because we’re part of their famous bloody Space Waste. That was Earth First’s big day—there was a shitload of hits, everywhere. It’s bad, Steve. It’s really bad.” Andy’s voice trailed off and I found it difficult to picture the confident section commander I had known.
Unrolling the slate into a screen, Andy activated it and the screen began showing me a vid report from a news channel. I blinked a few times to clear my hazy eyes. I made out a female reporter standing in front of the wreckage of one of our combat wagons, not that you could tell much from the charred, mangled remains. I recognized it from the markings on a wing stub. A lifeless human arm reached out from the hull door, pointing almost straight at the camera.
I realized with a shudder the arm belonged to Davy Hart, dead as a doornail in the corpse of our ’glass. Jonesy must have been inside the wreck; trapped at the controls, he wouldn’t have stood a chance as they dropped like a stone. They’d had fifty stories to think about their impending fate. I’d been hanging out of that same aircraft's door less than half an hour before; I’d given the pair of them grief all morning, moaning about the way they flew the thing. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t make the words come. Instead I returned my attention to the report.
Squaddies and police all over the place behind the female reporter. She gestured at the burned and crumpled vehicle, talking at high speed. Andy cranked up the volume.
“…and more coordinated attacks than in recent years. Here it was the destruction of a military vehicle belonging to the U.N. peacekeeping forces in central England. But the violence took place throughout the system in what the Earth First Party is describing as a day of rage. In Ghana…”
I’d stopped listening, but not stopped watching. On the screen, a trainload of hydrazine propellant burned furiously, sending a toxic cloud boiling upwards. The stuff was essential as launch fuel, though it’s one of the filthiest chemicals in routine use. Someone hit the train to make the point space wasn’t just wasteful, but bad for the planet as well.
The picture shifted to Rome, where a couple of bodies lay sprawled in a street near the base of some old pillar; something the slate called the Lateran Obelisk. Tape ran across the street behind a couple of fancy-dress cops. The voiceover came back, identifying the victims as space scientists working for the Euro space agency. Next, we saw a café on the Toronto waterfront. Well-known as a popular hangout for Outward Party politicians and staffers; the blood on the walls and the glass and debris across the pavement told their own story. The pictures came faster now: The Euros’ Kourou launch site in Guyana, with columns of smoke climbing from the pad where a burning lifter gradually collapsed in on itself. The attackers hacked into the controls of a pilotless cargo vehicle, ramming it into the spacecraft as it fueled up. How the hell had they got the thing past the air defenses?
Almost the same scene at Baikonur, but the Imperial News Agency wasn’t saying much about it; the Russian state news had provided images of the aftermath of a night-time attack, red and blue beacons throwing their flickering light across a launch dispersal littered with the remains of a dozen low-orbit craft. An ambulance flashed across the scene, siren wailing, then another and another. An angry Russian cop shouted and headed toward the camera crew, raising an arm blocking the lens. If this was what they’d allowed us to see? How bad was the stuff they were covering up?
The image switched to some shaky pictures smuggled from the Caliphate’s spaceport outside the Somali coastal town of Marka. A vast hangar burning smoke and flames visible for miles, drifting above the beaches toward the fly-blown small town. Then there was nothing more I could identify, just blurs and confusion and shouting.
“Anything to do with off-Earth, anywhere, they hit it. That’s not the worst of it. They attacked L4, mate. It’s gone, finished.” Andy’s voice cracked. I looked up from the slate, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“What do you mean, it’s gone?” How could the whole habitat be gone? “What are you talking about?” He pointed silently at the slate. Vague memories of Andy talking about a brother who worked on L4 as a systems tech. Shut it, Steve; he’s not joking.
“The bastards nuked it Steve. They’re all dead.”
TODAY, EVERYONE KNOWS THE story. It’s one of those events which feels like a hinge in history. Everything else just bends around it. Whoever you are, you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news. Well, that’s where I was, feeling sorry for myself in a comfortable chair in a sunny room in an ancient castle, completely unable to forget a t
oddler being blown to pieces as a side effect of some bloody maniacs’ efforts to make their political point.
At the time of the actual attack on L4 I was lying unconscious on a table in the operating theater, having the holes sewn up and being refilled with blood. So perhaps the way I found out about it took some of the immediacy away. I’m not sure. But you know what? With everything I’ve seen since then, after every dimwit with an agenda and a speech and a bomb, after every broken body I’ve seen and everyone I’ve caused, after every half-witted, political screw-up leading to every useless police action and every pointless war—after all of that, I still can’t decide which was worse. Tiny Molly dying, when only five minutes before she’d been a little demon, wanting her mom to play or to buy her sweets; or the vast torus of L4 with the gaping holes trailing debris where the two freight ships had been docked, diametrically opposite each other around the ring. The ships which carried the hidden neutron bombs.
THE BLASTS ARE FROM Earth First’s weapons ripping through the habitat, causing damage far beyond anything the self-repair systems could handle, and irradiating what remained.
The inbound ferry Lindum carried the images live, and they were picked up by the news feeds within minutes. The ferry company’s business development people used the feed to sell their transport services to new clients. Some clever bastard in sales saw their chance and they started flogging the pictures to all comers even as the attack happened, live on air. Every media outlet in the system interrupted its broadcasts to run the story. I bet they got a brilliant bonus that year.
You hear the horrified voices of the ferry’s crew, and you see the images from the docking camera. Frantic editing shows slo-mos of the ripples rolling out from the blast sites. They travel in both directions around the ring, and it looks like some awful accident. The ripples redoubled when they met each other. 100,000 people dying live on TV.
Hull fragments from the cargo trucks scatter out from the blast sites. The nearer truck, an autonomous AstraLift 73, loses its power panel which hurtles toward Lindum with much force. Reviewing the footage now, the panel appears a distant and trivial speck, a small, irrelevant thing compared to the disaster taking place beyond it. One tiny mote in a spreading cloud. But as you watch you see it starting on the long path which sends it closing on the ferry. The audio track picks up the alarms on the flight deck as the navigation system sorts out the inbound panel from the rest of the sudden clutter. You hear the ferry captain’s voice rise as she realizes too late the panels approaching on an intercept vector, and you hear her shouting for manual control as the flight crew tries to plot an avoidance solution.
You can’t view that footage and look away as the panel closes in; you can’t resist staring at the thing as it changes from a tiny dot, to a fragment, to something big and unavoidable coming our way. Even now, you focus on the approaching panel and almost forget about the multiple mega-deaths happening in the background. You flinch as the suddenly-massive panel fills the docking camera’s view, first blotting out L4 then revealing it again as the flashes past overhead, leaving the clear words “NO STEP” and “73-AL OUTBOARD” fixed in your mind.
It’s impossible not to feel relieved as it goes out of view. You feel as if it’s missed you. But the camera is mounted low on the hull to give a clear view of the docking cradle. So, although the panel passes out of the camera’s field of view, it’s about to crash into the ferry’s navigation deck.
The picture shows the distant L4 torus again. The audio track plays the sound of Lindum’s hull integrity being destroyed, the shouts and screams of the passengers and crew.
Of course, we know so much more now, but at the time it was bewildering. Lindum’s collision-avoidance systems overwhelmed by the cloud of fast-moving objects. They lock up, failing to avoid the panel, allowing the ferry keep going toward the dock. Lindum was so massive the impact of the panel didn’t even divert it. The ferry continued its path toward the ruined torus, and its dying crew couldn’t turn it away.
It took another forty-five minutes for Lindum to lose its final pockets of air. No one in any media company knowing what to do as they broadcast multiple deaths. Was it too painful to screen, or was it disrespectful to cut the live feed? I guess it’s easier not to make a decision than to make the wrong one. The result, nobody cut the feed, and the audio system on the ferry carried on transmitting the sounds made by the few people who avoided dying from decompression, living their last minutes knowing the collision was unavoidable. It took an hour for the ferry to reach L4 at docking velocity. Everyone on board had been dead for fifteen minutes.
Ships’ docking cameras are mounted so they can monitor the closing faces between vessels and dock edges, and they’re well shielded against heavy knocks because they have a hard life. So, when the impact finally came, when the Lindum hit the dock wall and the armored camera was forced slowly through the torn hull of the L4 torus, it still faithfully fed back its images of wrecked machinery, failed life support systems, ripped bulkheads, dead Four Siders, our quaint name for the habitats population, and the death of our first manufactured world.
I'M NOT STUPID, AND I’m not soft enough to blame myself for deaths I didn’t know about, or for the way that the Earth First lot hate anything to do with space, and I certainly don’t blame myself for L4. I know it’s not my fault; I’m not responsible for other people’s stupid, murderous ideas, however much they might try to put the blame on someone else. “We were forced to take this action; we had no alternative. You bear the responsibility.” The Earth First mouth pieces proclaimed to the world.
Bollocks! But I can’t forgive myself for Molly. If I’d taken either of the chances I’d had to end Yellow Jacket, I’d have put him on the ground before he’d ever got his hands on her.
That was my fault. I was too bloody slow—twice. If I’d dropped him when I should have he wouldn’t have dragged her up the belt, and she wouldn’t have been stumbling past the window when the self-destruct blew the anti-aircraft missile site hidden in the shop to pieces.
Oh, the missiles would still have launched, and we’d probably still have taken every casualty. Start firing weapons like that and people die, or sliced into painful pieces. You can’t have the gunfight at the O.K. Corral without the bodies.
The thing is, I could have done something, but I was too slow. If I’d been quicker, she’d still be alive.
IS THERE ANY MORE good news?” I asked Andy as I sat in my comfortable chair still trying to process the news about L4.
“The battalions on the move at the end of next week.”
“We’re being short-toured? Why, for God’s sake?” My anger and frustration came out in one mad rush.
“Think about it.” Replied Andy in a calming tone. “You reckon the government wants to leave a full combat battalion here where we’re not wanted, with L4 gone? We can’t have anyone taking a crack at us again. Screw this lot. We’re needed back home, man. Two weeks Five Side, then we’re going to Copernicus.”
“What’s changed?” I asked, regaining control of my own feelings.
“Earth First. Politics. Every time you put the vid on, there’s some suit saying how it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t overreacted. It’s all our fault, apparently.” That set me off again.
“What! Twenty-eight of us dead, two dozen civvies, half the tower wrecked by that bloody firefight, and it’s our fault? How do they figure?”
“You know what it’s like. If people sling enough mud, some of it’s going to stick. So, we’re an incitement to trouble wherever we go. We’re interfering with Earth First’s free expression of their legitimate political aspirations, and the mall was a justifiable economic target. So, the U.N. must decide if it’s worth keeping us here. If they think we’re a liability they’ll get rid of us.”
I let out a loud harrumph. If I could have folded my arms like some petulant child I would have. It ought to have felt like running away but I wasn’t sorry at all. Maybe we shoul
d go home and leave this lot to sort out their own problems.
Chapter Ten
A Pint at the Bull’s Head
“Never underestimate the capability of a highly-motivated nutter.” —Attributed to MI5 Agent, Britain, Twenty-First Century.
Thursday, August 16th
"I don’t get it. When the hell were the Romans on the moon?” Andy Norris did miss the point sometimes. How had someone that dim become a section commander? It made me fancy my own chances.
“Oh, for God’s sake, what are you going on about? Are you drunk already? They weren’t.” Personally, I was more interested in checking out the girls.
“Who’s drunk? You must be blind, Steve. Look at all the pillars and stuff, that statue over there of the guy in robes, all these bowls of olives and grapes.”
“I guess I thought it was just some leftover bits from a theme restaurant or something. Anyhow, it’s called the Bull’s Head, you halfwit; it serves beer, and how Roman is that?” I retorted.
“Like I said, I don’t get it.”
A squaddie-friendly little pub in a scruffy side corridor just off the main drag in Copernicus.
It was three months since Andy and I had rejoined our unit after being released from the medical unit and we had decided to sit over a couple of beers in here, putting the worlds to rights. After the Nottingham horror, I’d been bumped up to being Andy’s second in command. Lance Corporal Arden—I loved the sound of it.
“Same again, pal?”
“Yeah, cheers.” Andy picked up the empty glasses and headed over to the bar.