The Last Hercules

by Ron Bender

  The intakes reopen, and the drives are fired up again. The steady, reassuring vibration has a calming effect. The illusion is destroyed by hard thuds on the hatch that slow to a long silence.

  I report an unsecured cargo incident, forward a fake manifest indicating a safe cargo, no toxins or hazardous goods aboard, and send a message indicating that crew is securing the freight and that they would be requesting a new lift window momentarily. The external com system quiets.

  As we wait, the corporal asks, “How cold is it back there?”

  “It’ll chill to minus sixty, and I have the evacuation fans running on high. It’ll take about ten minutes for approval on our next lift window.” I eye the view of the ocean and the clouds rotating beneath us. “Whatever we do, it has to happen before then. I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to let her sit back there for a few minutes.”

  We’d be a little late to the platform, but we could still make it.

  “All right, Corporal. The vents are closed, the fans are off. Pressurizing the hold. It’s going to be fucking cold back there. Get close enough to her that you don’t miss.”

  “Right,” he mutters, “Don’t miss.”

  “Removing the security bars.” Magnetics pull the steel sheathed composite bars aside. “Go get her.”

  “Like a rat in a bucket,” he says.

  He opens the hatch and a blast of cold air rolling forward has me sucking my breath.

  “She took out all the lights back here,” the corporal calls from behind me. “Goddamn, what a fucking mess.”

  “Just find her, Corporal.” I busily reset a request for a new lift window.

  The grunt, the gunfire, and the sudden warning lights sprinkled across my panel send my heart rate soaring. The warning lights are followed by a wheezing scream that rises in pitch and is quickly cut off.

  I know the corporal didn’t close the hatch behind him… I know there’s no way I can unbuckle, reach it, and pull it closed. A newer craft would have an automated door, closeable with a touch of a button on the console.

  The old bird and I have finally let each other down.

  I pull my pistol and, with my other hand, reach under the control screen to the concealed lever. The one that would close the loop. I hear wet slapping footfalls rushing forward out of the darkness.

  As the sun rises over the horizon, I think of my daughter and wonder if she’ll ever make it planet-side to see it for herself. Would she ever marry, ever have children of her own?

  A cold, blood-soaked hand clamps around my throat. A hard hammer-like blow on my forearm breaks bones and sends my weapon tumbling. My mind locks on the pain.

  I pull the lever.

  Through the portholes, I see the shifting curve of the planet beneath me, and the Californian islands passing by.

  “Land this craft,” the woman snarls through frostbitten lips. The corporal’s pistol glitters around its grip. A palmscreen implant glows in the woman’s hand as the weapon rises.

  “No,” I gasp. It’s all I can manage.

  Acidic gas washes its way along vents, compromising metals, searing skin, muscle, sinew, and bone.

  Sealed tubes hidden in the hull and filled with voraciously programmed nanites burst open. The disassembler swarm begins to follow its programming, digesting the LEO craft from the inside even as it flies. Fuel to the engines is cut, saved for a final explosion as the craft descends in a slow graceful arc. The ACP reconfigures the flaps and locates a remote area of the Atlantic for the wreckage to impact; the tiny bots would destroy whatever was left after the fuel detonated and then they, in turn, would be swallowed by the sea.

  As the shuttle streaks past the arid landscape below, it registers an encrypted covert beacon and sends out an emergency protocol code. Following its embedded subroutines, it makes one final flight adjustment.

  The LEO twists free of its original trajectory … and falls toward the dust.

  3.01

  Visitation

  “Daddy, what’s that?” Maggie says.

  I look over at her as I drop a handful of fresh-picked dandelion greens into a container beside me. She’s standing with her picking bucket in both hands, head tipped back, curly brown locks flipping about in the early morning wind.

  “What are you looking at, sweet-pea?” I’m holding onto the image of her more than worrying about what she’s seeing.

  “There’s a funny cloud in the sky.” She lets the bucket swing awkwardly to one gloved hand and points up at the heavens.

  I ease my back straight and push myself from all fours onto my knees. I look up, following her finger. A widening, smoking line is growing toward us at a sharp curving angle. “I’m not sure, sweet-pea.”

  The words are barely out of my mouth as the relay signal from my field truck repeats out to my com-link. The lines of unscrambled code stream across my vision. An acknowledgment of my ID, my rank, and my number….

  A rush of cascading emotion pours through me. I’d been sending out beacon pulses using covert emergency protocols for two years.

  The second pulse that comes from the shuttle is high priority, a warning…. The feeling of elation goes flat.

  “We need to be in the truck. OK, sweat-pea?” I stand.

  Maggie nods at me as I scoop her up in one arm. The smoking contrail is no longer moving across the sky. It’s only getting bigger around.

  I start to run.

  Maggie clings to me. “My bucket.” Her panic breaks my heart.

  “It’s OK, Maggie. We’ll come back for it.” I pull her close to my chest with my other hand. The heavy ram augmentations that I haven’t used in years cut in, and we fly over the terrain. Under the whine of the pumps from my legs is a low threatening rumble that’s building to a roar.

  The truck, responding to my summons, meets us halfway. Yanking the door open, I lift Maggie onto the seat. In her panic, she’s crying harder.

  “Stay inside, Maggie, don’t open the door.” I push the door closed.

  A program that hasn’t run in a decade has calculated everything for me. I don’t need to see how close I am. The impact of whatever it is won’t be very far away, barely far enough.

  I lift an arm behind my neck and the other over my eyes. The concussion slams me into the bottom of the high door and side panel. The truck heaves onto three wheels and drops back solidly onto all six.

  Thick clouds of churned earth billow around me, clods of sun-baked dirt rain down. My goggles are broken on one side, dust and grit getting into my optic mechanism. I keep one hand over the break. Crawling back onto my feet, I switch my breathing to an internal tank.

  “Maggie,” I yell, climbing the side rungs to look in the side window. “Maggie.”

  She scrambles upright on the bench seat and presses herself to the glass. Her fear, her tears, etch into me.

  “Stay in the truck, Maggie. Don’t open the door.”

  I can see her fumbling with the door handle. I start moving to the driver’s side. I know she won’t listen to me. As soon as she’s able to manage it, the door will pop open.

  I don’t know what kind of crap has been lofted into the air from underground; it might be plain dirt, or it might be toxic. All I know is she shouldn’t be breathing any of this stuff if I can help it, and we need to be far away from here.

  I limp around to my door and get inside as fast as I can. Maggie climbs all over me and doesn’t understand that the dirt on my clothes may not be good for either of us. I lift her off me and brush the dirt away as best I can, using clean rags from the toolbox on the floor at her feet.

  I turn on the truck’s com system. I have to risk it. Something this big is going to pull a lot of people into our territory.

  “Sal?” I pause. “Sal?” I’m not going to wait for an answer. “Damn you, Salvador, answer me.”

  “Slider? Slider, there was a crash out where you are. Are you close to the impact point?” His thick Puerto Rican accent is pronounced in his excitement.

 
“Near it?” I almost laugh. “It almost hit me and Maggie.”

  Sal pauses. “Maggie’s with you?”

  “It is Tuesday isn’t it, Sal?” I snap. Just by the way he’s acting I have a good idea what’s coming next.

  “She OK?” he asks quietly.

  “She’s upset, Sal,” I snipe. I run my hand over her curly mop, and she presses herself against my chest, stifling sobs. “How else do think she would be?”

  “Slider, you have to go to the impact point.” Sal starts off exactly in the direction I figured. “If we get a salvage beacon on it—”

  “I get it, Sal.” Mentally I’m cursing the Elders, the tribal council, the whole tribe, and my ex. “I’m just not very happy about it.”

  “I got to go and carry news over to the Elders,” he says. “I gotta go.” He’s waiting for me and forcing my actions by being polite. We both know he has to go.

  “Just go, Sal,” I mutter through clenched teeth.

  I convince Maggie to get into her seat, and in under a minute, the field truck is bouncing over the broken terrain leading up to the crater. I stop a dozen yards away from the hole in the buckled earth. Threads of inky black smoke climb over the lip to feather off in the wind.

  “OK, sweet-pea, I have to go and see what made that big bang.” I brush more dust off her rumpled knees as I speak. “I need you to be really, really good for me. Can you do that for me?”

  I dig through the console box and pull on another set of goggles. Having eye problems out here with Maggie along would be very bad.

  “My book, get me my book please,” she says, pointing into the box.

  I hand her the battered old book, a copy of Eye-Spy. It’s her favorite piece of salvage. We found it together in an old library.

  She grabs the book and starts reading the game.

  Goggles on, a fresh mask pulled up, I drop to the ground outside my door.

  The extent of my bruising becomes clear. What’s left of me is stiffening up under my chest and neck plates. I pull the beacon and my homemade boarding ax out from under the front seat, close the door, and clip everything onto my belt.

  I’m familiar with craters. A man-made object definitely made this one. That may be a good thing or a bad thing. If it’s a robotic cargo pod or a satellite, it’s mostly good. If it’s a surplus mine from the orbital war, that’s bad.

  I get to the rim of plowed and tumbled earth. Looking down, I can see the remains of a ragged-looking airframe. A light cargo Low Earth Orbiter. These craft are designed to withstand a lot of stress. An impact like this is hard on the airframe, but it shouldn’t have done so much damage. The angle of impact is all wrong for the extent of crumpled metal I’m seeing.

  Regardless, the beacon I brought is useless to me now. Whoever owned this craft, friends or not, they’d come to claim it all as evidence and then convert it to salvage after they had their answers.

  Part of me says just walk away from the wreck. The military part of me says execute due diligence. If these really were my people, would I go back?

  I scramble down the slope into the hole. Tactile sensors in my hands tell me that the soil under my fingers is hot.

  Training kicks in, replacing and overriding instinct. I crouch to look for registration numbers along the nose. I commit them to memory as I work my way along the hull on the starboard side.

  The fuselage is buckled here and there along the length of the craft. The plates are folded over themselves and have a corroded look to them.

  I can see the interior through torn bulkheads and outer heat shield skin: a complete breach. Nothing that’s flesh and bone will be alive inside the hull. I know a closed loop when I see it. I don’t touch the sides but peer in as best I can.

  The heavier parts of a vacuum suit are dismantled and scattered around the interior. I spot a glove gripping a lever on the underside of the main steerage console. The glove deflates as a trickle of silvery liquid oozes out of the cuff, eating it even as it spills through. My heart sinks. As the glove starts to dissolve, I make out a pilot’s insignia and the trace of a name on the cuff tag.

  Cpt. Mos. R.

  Rossalyn had been a senior airman when I’d seen her last. Infrastructure had to be in place for her to have been promoted.

  All this time….

  I cling to the idea that there are others left, that I’m not alone.

  The rising sound of mechanical thunder triggers more reflexive movement. I crouch as low and as tight as I can to the LEO as an older model VTOL rumbles overhead and drifts by the crater on the port side.

  I’m deep in a situation. A closed loop mission, the arrival of a VTOL … a VTOL that is here far too quickly to be an Emergency Response Craft.

  The vehicle has no discernible markings, and its approach to the impact point is too brazen. There’s a strong chance that the VTOL belongs to a corporate operations team, probably here covertly.

  It swings along to the shallow end of the impact crater and slowly settles on its landing legs.

  Maggie’s alone in the truck. I’m just over a dozen yards away from her. Both of us would be liabilities to their operation. As a nomad, I barely count as a citizen. Maggie would be a different matter, but dead is dead.

  I scramble out of the crater, using the scrub and brush for cover as I skulk back toward the truck.

  The glide rails of my optics on the left are covered with grit, and the lenses grind as they dial-in. The sound of their movement translates as raw vibration through my rebuilt cheekbones. I see three armed men in tactical gear approaching the truck. Their armaments are new, and their safeties are off. Their uniforms don’t have any insignia. Their boots have a foreign look to their pattern and design. Maybe African, or Middle Eastern.

  The point man has the most cyberware in him. I can tell by how effortlessly he handles the low rise and broken terrain.

  They fan out.

  It’s straight out of basic training. Two will go down either side of the truck to the doors, and the last will act as rearguard. He stops a few yards back from the rear of the truck ready to provide cover fire down both sides.

  I take a quick look over my shoulder at the VTOL. I can see the back ramp is deployed, and three more men are approaching the crater.

  My metal hands feel cumbersome as I pry open the salvage beacon’s case and delicately nudge the tiny switches inside. After tweaking the beacon’s settings to max output and changing its signal sequence, I clip it closed. When I look up next, the men are working their way along the side panels of the field truck. I push the beacon’s power button and throw it as far as I can away from me.

  The com-op in the VTOL would be on the beacon instantly. I know it will only be seconds before its location is isolated. Jamming it would be the harder part. On max range and full power, the salvage beacon will blast only two minutes of signal. It’ll have to be enough.

  The men by the truck halt their forward movement and turn their heads to look where their com-op would be telling them the signal was coming from.

  I crank my leg ram system to maximum, and I’m on the first target in three long bounds. My old boarding ax becomes an extension of my arm. The metal, when it all gets moving, is nearly unstoppable. The cut to the side of the guy’s head is aimed for the space behind his ear. His built-in com-link dies with him. I lower him to the ground and yank the ax free. As quietly as I can, I ease up to the rear of the truck.

  The man posted as rearguard dies silently as my thrown ax spins in. It sinks vertically between his eyes up to the shoulder of the blade. I don’t wait to watch him fall; I roll under the truck. As the last man doubles back to the rear of the vehicle to check on his teammates, I rise up behind him.

  His skull crushes between my hands, mastoid implant meeting opposite temple.

  I waste no time. The VTOL engines are cycling up. If I were their unit commander, I would have the other three men advancing on this location in an open ‘V’ formation with air support coming in wide from the right.<
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  I open the truck door. “Maggie, bad men are here. You have to remember what I taught you.”

  She nods and falls silent as I pull her out of her seat.

  I scoop her tight to my chest and run. I know I’ll make better time than the men on the ground. Modern grafts, augmentations, and implants are more reliable and lighter weight, but my old limbs can beat theirs on shear burst performance.

  The VTOL is another matter.

  Maggie is half crying in fear and half in elation as we move so fast.

  I dart into the cleft of a deep arroyo, the bottom of it bone dry. Long ago this area had supported whole forests. Then the rain pattern shifted.

  Dried dead roots jut and tangle. I dodge between them and drop to one knee.

  “OK, sweet-pea.” I dig a shallow hole in the sun-warmed gravel and sand, laying her into it. I have no choice now.

  I cover her legs, and she fusses and whispers. “It’s too hot, Daddy.”

  “It’ll be OK.” I smile at her. “It has to be hotter than you are, so you can hide from cameras, right?” I pinch her nose. “There’s my brave girl. You remember now, Maggie, you lie really still.”

  She sniffs hard and nods. I pull my mask off, set it for medium recycle, and pull it over her head. “I love you, sweet-pea. I’ll be right back.” I hastily cover her over. The rumble of the VTOL moving in a widening search grows louder overhead.

  I take off, following my same line of travel, trying to draw them away from her.

  I glance behind me. The VTOL is low and coming on fast with its nose raked downward. They’ve spotted me. They might be worried about what armaments I have on me. I can see the belly gun under the control cabin’s nose. It’s a light .50.

  The rear hatch is still open; that would have activated an automatic speed inhibitor. They’ll still be faster than me on foot. There was a slim chance the unit commander pulled in his troops before initiating pursuit.

  I hear the belly gun spit to life.

  As they break into a wide arc to fire at me, I take a calculated risk. The pilot is more likely to circle my position clockwise, nose in and down, in a variant pylon turn. I leap to my left at speed. I hope I surprise the hell out of them. I feel my neck muscles protest the movement.