“I say human vision is limited. Our eyes will see a fraction of what’s happening up there. You guys sit back and soak up the heavenly glory if you like. Me, I want a front row seat. I want to see the whites of these asteroids’ eyes before they’re blasted into a billion pieces.”
“Well, I don’t mind saying, she’s convinced me,” announced Tynedale, raking his fingers through his generous combover as he bent forward to address Jan. “Which satellites have you tagged?”
She gave him the ID numbers, then suggested he “alternate between orbital angles and the surface hub telescope’s view, then pull back to natural vision when the firing stops. Why not make a full live show of it?” She addressed that last part to Ruben, who shrugged and replied superciliously, “Whatever blows your skirt up, I guess.”
“Exoplanetary scientists who object to telescopes? What next?” she added with shrewish indignation.
Jan disliked pettiness, but her preening opponent’s every gesture seemed designed to challenge her, to reduce her, to draw her claws. She was already prickly by nature; over the years she’d learned to temper her competitive instinct around people, and to channel it into her scientific work. Ruben Intaglio, however, embodied everything she found disagreeable about herself and the other ambitious, hyper-intelligent over-achievers who carved out their own pioneering niches in these far-flung systems.
She’d long become territorial, intensely jealous of her right to decide how humans should conduct themselves on the Hesp. She’d even served as Governor under her original name, Juanita Corbija, before her and Stopper’s agelessness – a miraculous side-effect of their fatal wounds being healed by a biotech creation known as The Golden Fleece – had become too conspicuous. Rangers had begun to question why they never seemed to look any older. So she’d had to change her identity and relocate from her idyllic island home in The Keys to this part of the planet, with help from her congressional sponsors and personal friends, Congresswoman Molly Schaeffer and her daughter, Congresswoman Dorcas Lockwood. The latter owed her life to Jan and Stopper after a rescue odyssey two decades prior, when Dorcas had been a young girl on safari on Hesperidia. Jan’s current role, as a freelance researcher and safari guide, kept her plenty busy. But it also filled her with dismay to see Governor Nabakov’s laissez-faire leadership style permit the whole Alien Safari enterprise to grow too big and unwieldy. Rules relaxed, improvisations and detours encouraged, all to keep things “interesting” for the punters. Respect for the sanctity of these precious ecosystems was slowly eroding. It wasn’t a concerted or even conscious effort to do harm, but human presence needed to be very carefully managed here, and Nabakov was not being careful enough.
“It’s almost a shame,” said the Governor, activating his stargazer program. “They’ve been stuck in that asteroid belt for God knows how many millions of years, they’re finally wrenched free by a passing super comet, and what do they have to look forward to a short way into their yearned-for flight of freedom? A firing squad.”
“I know,” replied Tynedale mournfully. “Some will get to be shooting stars; most will just get shot to bits – all for our viewing pleasure.”
“They’re rocks,” Jan reminded them.
“And they’re here,” added Ruben, adjusting his visor. “Sat one-four-seven-one is at bat. Here comes the first pitch.”
Jan rolled her eyes, gave Stopper’s jowls and ears a quick massage, then gazed skyward. Sat 1471’s feed automatically popped up in a secondary window. A tumbling hunk of rock, lit from below, resembled a worm-eaten potato. She couldn’t guess its size because there was nothing to compare it to – it very well might be as small as a jacket potato. Then the satellite’s instrumentation readout flashed below the image: the object measured 63 meters in diameter and weighed over 10,000 tons. The hairs on the back of her neck bristled, and her skin goosed all over. The spud was the size of a freighter! A meteorite that big, travelling at that velocity – 54,048 kph – would be like a 500-kiloton bomb hitting the planet’s surface. A good thing Hesperidia had a persuasive deterrent…
Only the sat net didn’t destroy it; the planet’s atmosphere did. A tremendous shimmering silver-white trail spat fiery smithereens, as though an invisible blacksmith were following it with feverish swings of his hammer. Its path blazed southwest. For several horrible seconds Jan was sure it wasn’t going to burn up in time, that a full impact was inevitable. She leaned forward ready to jump down and…do what exactly? Then a stuttering white flash, followed moments later by a double thunderclap, told her it was safe to breathe out again. No ground tremor. No debris cloud. The projectile had been vaporized in the lower atmosphere before it hit.
She looked at Ruben. He swallowed as his glance met hers.
“Something’s wrong here,” she said, and even louder for the others to hear: “something’s very wrong.”
“That should never have got through,” Ruben pointed out.
They all watched in silence as the next few meteors flew harmlessly through the net of satellites and burned up in seconds. Much smaller rocks. The net was programmed to let chunks that size through if they weren’t on a collision course with any satellites. But bigger rocks were also getting through unmolested. No shots were being fired. None. It was a great show for the naked eye. Maybe the computers weren’t miscalculating, maybe they’d worked out which rocks would incinerate before cratering…
Jan gave this state-of-the-art system a couple of minutes’ benefit of the doubt. Meteors were really showering now – most no bigger than basketballs, but a handful boasted dimensions that would have any insurance company massaging its rosaries.
One headed straight for 1477. A monster. Over 87 meters in diameter. A few of its little cousins skimmed the satellite – the image shimmied, lost its focus a tad. Jan waited for the patented energy blast. Any moment now and this bad boy meteor would be charcoal and dust, enough to fill bags for ten thousand barbecues. But it continued to fill the frame instead. In one piece, unaccosted. Bigger and bigger it loomed, its every shadow-fringed contour discernible. Jan involuntarily jerked her head back as the image blinked to static. A catastrophic collision with 1477. And as she flicked through the catalogue of activated live feeds, numerous other satellites were either out of action or in the path of imminent destruction.
The firing squad was armed all right, and had even taken aim. But the order to fire had either not been given or been lost in translation.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Tynedale. “We’re sitting ducks…”
“I don’t know what could have—” Nabakov lost his footing and toppled forward off the fence, landing in a heap right next to Flavia, who sprang up and barked her head off at him. The vexed Governor simultaneously opened a channel to his operations hub while fending off the ballistic husky as she attempted to drag him across the lawn by his boot. This, in turn, incensed Stopper. He didn’t weigh in physically, but his devilish dance around the fracas and his deafening bowowow seemed to egg Flavia on even further. Before Ruben managed to pull her off, she’d dragged poor Nabakov over a couple of furlongs.
In the meantime, at least two more oversized meteors gained promotion to meteorites and exploded well inside the atmosphere. One quite far to the south, another way off to the east. Both times the ground shook, suggesting they’d landed. It was too dark to make out any dust plumes in either direction, but Jan quietly seethed, somewhere between fury and self-disgust, at the thought of any life on her beloved world being decimated on her watch, all because of a program failure. All because of incompetence.
The odd scream from around the green reminded her that the tourists would be terrified right now. With nothing to protect them, they were subject to a celestial lottery; its spinning balls from the heavens could just as easily pick out Miramar as any other spot on Hesperidia. Jan looked across to Stopper, still dancing and racing around Flavia, and experienced a clarity she hadn’t known for a long time, maybe not since their last encounter with the hydra. It was a kind of acce
ptance – total, matter-of-fact – in the eye of inevitability. There were some things you couldn’t escape, like a sense of purpose, of belonging, of fate, or a meteorite predetermined to land on your head. She had to be here, with Stopper on the Hesp. That meant she was by definition in her element and out of it. With that, over time, had come a greater sense of herself and her place in fate’s design. There was a lot she could exert control over in order to carve out her niche on this alien world. But there was more, far more, over which she had no control whatsoever. And that was okay. That was her lot. Dicing with death had always been part and parcel of her vocation.
But many of these tourists had not been exposed to raw naked Nature to anything like the extent she had. So they freaked as the rocks rained down. Some people fainted. Another large meteorite withstood the heat and friction of the atmospheric foundry and crashed hundreds of miles to the north. Of the stargazers assembled on Miramar green, only Ruben stayed out with Jan. The rest flooded to the imagined safety of the HQ building and the bunkers there. She sensed it was his macho competitive instinct that wouldn’t let a woman – and a rival xenozoologist – show more courage than him, but Ruben crouched there, petting Flavia, as though there was nothing but a spot of inclement weather on the way.
Jan and Stopper watched the sky as well. She whispered reassuring words he loved to hear, snuggled against him, and let him lick her ear and neck. Fiery streaks cascaded from the firmament like lit fuses that fizzled out at random altitudes. Very few made it anywhere near the surface. Dozens of satellite camera feeds were knocked out, and as far as she knew not a single defensive shot had been fired.
Both dogs reacted first to a loud screech of crushed metal from the left. They shielded their respective owners, stood tall and barked in the direction of the landing zone. A greenish miasma, lit by licks of crackling electric discharge, rose from the western edge of the compound where several shuttles had been parked. Jan and Ruben made their way across, the latter at an ever faster pace, almost daring her to keep up with him. She obliged, and even vaulted the lawn’s perimeter fence. Ruben got there first, though, warned her not to get too near the crater.
“A ruptured engine core?” she suggested.
“Yeah. A direct hit from the looks of it. No explosion, just a good old-fashioned coolant leak. We’ve seen worse. How big do you reckon the meteorite was?”
“Hard to say. That’s a pretty big crater. Bird’s completely crushed. Depends how dense the rock is, I guess.”
“I get first look.” He glanced at her askance. “Hey, I was here first. You snooze, you lose, right?”
“Knock yourself out, Bub.”
“There might be more on the way.” His quick scan of the sky didn’t appear to alarm him. “You don’t think we’re reckless for staying out like this?”
“No,” she replied.
“Long odds, right? Yeah, that’s what I figured. It’s not exactly raining surface punchers.”
“It’s more than that,” said Jan. “There’s nowhere to hide from one wherever it hits. You’re in its path, it’ll crater you along with the roof you’re under. So why run?”
“Damn, you’ve got sangfroid, girl.”
She didn’t respond.
“So what do you reckon will happen after this?” asked Ruben. “A screw-up this big, someone’s ticket’s bound to get punched.”
“Whoever it is deserves it. Costs a fortune to replace one downed satellite, never mind dozens. They might even shut us down till it’s paid for.”
He waved the notion away. “On the contrary, they’ll up the traffic. How else will they raise the revenue?”
“Not on my watch. We’re over capacity as it is. I’d rather shut down the whole operation and pull every last ranger out than tip the balance the other way. We’ve lost sight of our objective, the reason we came here in the first place.”
“Agreed,” he said, “but neither you nor I are in charge, Jane. There’s nothing we can do.”
“We’ll see about that,” she muttered under her breath.
The odd squeal or cark of condensing metal inside the crater, and the gentle crackles of electric discharge in the smoke, were offset by distant, high-pitched whistles, like the screams of firework rockets. The latter set the watchful canines off on crazy, targetless howling fits every time. But there were no more impacts evident, and after about five minutes the meteor shower petered out to a handful of dim stragglers.
Stopper lay at her feet and heaved a big yawn.
“I’m gonna wait around till the smoke clears altogether,” said Ruben. “Maybe I can get—”
“’Kay, good night then. Have fun.” And Jan headed straight back to her cabin by the river, nursing a wound without center somewhere deep inside. Its pangs had begun to gnaw at her a while back, soon after the satellite misfires. She’d managed to hide them under her artful veneer of equanimity. Possessing sangfroid was not the same as being invulnerable. It just gave her a little more breathing space before the reality shock hit home. Tonight’s screw-up had been far more serious, and might have far bigger consequences, than she’d let herself feel. But she was beginning to feel it now, that disgust, that helplessness, that betrayal. Letting the meteors in like this could have been truly catastrophic. She didn’t yet know how much damage had actually been done across Hesperidia.
One thing she did know: with a funk usually came hunger. A quick detour to the food tent netted her and Stopper three well-done hotdogs apiece, with mustard and extra crispy onions on hers. Supper or breakfast, it was all the same. Vodka McCormick’s washed it down just as easily.
Chapter Three
“So you’re what – above the law now? Aslant it? Making it up as you go? Which is it?”
Though Kyra continued to bristle with impudence, Vaughn no longer heard criticism of him. She was deflecting, that was all; her frazzled mind needed an easy target to toss its barbs at, barbs that would otherwise quietly prick her to distraction. He knew all about deflecting. He knew all about passive-aggressive behavior when one felt helpless and guilt-ridden and determined not to reflect on what was really going on inside. For years he’d pretended the problems lay out there somewhere, and if he could only solve them then he could return to that calm center he’d yearned for – that peace of mind he’d known before the thing that had turned his own world upside down.
“We don’t know who to trust,” he replied, flipping a switch to encrypt his ship’s ID signal so that the warp gate’s traffic board displayed him in the queue as LX-ANON-79, a nondescript diplomatic tag. “Until we do, it’s just you and me.”
“So we’re inside the law? I mean you have that badge.”
“If it helps, think of us as so far inside the law that we’re hidden from everything else.”
Slouched in the co-pilot’s seat, with her bare feet pressing on the bulkhead, she walked herself around the cockpit until her arm rest clanked against Vaughn’s. The seats’ gimble arms shimmied, and the vibrations rattled something in the ceiling manifold. Vaughn pushed her away. She smiled and lowered her feet, letting the momentum glide her across the ancillary dash, where he glimpsed a row of flashing impetus lights in the rearview monitor – the ship behind signaling he needed to wake up and get his ass in gear – the queue was on the move again, didn’t he know?
Vaughn levered out of autopilot and descended forward half a klick along the brightly marked relay loopway that guided arrival traffic around the massive warp gate. Some ships entered the queue from this very star system, but for the majority this gate was merely a waypoint on a much longer journey. The Hail Mary was one of the oldest, largest and most frequented gates in the entire interstellar infrastructure. Lanes within the loopway guided ships into queue for their respective destinations, with a kind of traffic light system letting a specific number make the trip to one warp gate before closing that lane and, after adjusting the warp field lensing, opening the next lane for its destination. The huge energy build-up required for each lensing m
eant that waiting times between entries into the Hail Mary were some of the longest anywhere. Especially for lawmen, for whom expedition so often played a crucial role, waiting in a queue behind civilian taxis and commercial haulers chafed. But unless you had a sanctioned expedited pass – rare outside military circles – in which case you were allowed to jump the queue to the front of your lane, your life slowed to the stop-start rhythm of the crawling loopway circuit.
“Kyra, listen to me. This is important. I can protect you and your fiancé, but not for long. I can keep you off the grid to buy us some time, but sooner or later you’ll have to make a decision. Witness protection does not apply to those who withhold testimony or evidence. What you know incriminates powerful people on both sides of a cartel war. Whoever sent Sixsmith, it doesn’t matter. You’ve been seen with me, so you’re compromised now. Any friend is potentially an enemy, and every enemy is either hoping for your assassination or actively pursuing it.”
She re-wrapped herself in the gray cotton blanket and pulled the corners tight together under her chin.
“So the first thing you have to do is accept that fact,” Vaughn went on. “Your old life is done. Friends, contacts, favorite hangouts, ink ID, mortgage, home, vehicles, yoga classes: they were yours and now they’re gone. Memories. Pick your favorites later. No one can take those away from you. But for now it’s just immediate family and pets - that’s the only continuity you’ll have into your new life, wherever that is. It won’t be anywhere you’ve been before. This is a reset, a second chance, a do-over, whatever you want to call it. You’ll never be able to rise high or make a splash again, but with hard work and a little luck there’s no reason you can’t be comfortable, even prosperous. What does your fiancé do? Cleeve, is it?”
“Cleeve, yes. He runs a few small businesses – fancies himself as an entrepreneur.”
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