Slipping on sunglasses, Flaherty walked towards the barricade, followed by his Secret Service detail. Yes, his Secret Service detail. He had finally given in. But he didn’t let the men in black cramp his style. Police officers looked around from their huddles to greet him. He bumped fists, slapped shoulders. My legionaries.
Helicopters clattered high overhead. Radios squawked. Steam wafted from paper cups of coffee. Those takeout cups with the Greek design—one little piece of New York that hadn’t changed.
Everything else had.
Flaherty swung up on the step of a prisoner transport van. He looked across the line of crowd control barriers in front of the vehicles, at a mass of ordinary Americans who had woken up this morning and decided they had to be in Manhattan, because the aliens were coming. Because they were scared. Because New York, New York, is the very heart of it. Join the Party.
This particular crisis had started with a meme purporting to come from the Lightbringer, which promised that the alien ship would actually land in Central Park. Despite the fact that it was an obvious rip-off of the movie Independence Day, thousands believed it.
The ETA of the Lightbringer was still three months away, but every park in Manhattan had turned into a shanty town. When looting threatened to rage out of the NYPD’s control, Flaherty had decided they had to stop the influx.
Yet the thin blue line of riot shields behind the barriers looked terribly fragile, in contrast to the tidal bore of humanity pressing onto the bridge.
A flurry of paper airplanes fluttered towards the barricade. Jumpy police officers reached for their weapons, then relaxed.
As if the paper airplanes had been a signal, the crowd surged forward. Barriers scraped across the asphalt. The riot cops threw their weight against the crowd.
Flaherty saw to his horror that the walkers were squeezing onto the bridge like toothpaste squeezed through a tube … but this tube had holes in the sides: the gaps between the struts of the bridge. People climbed up on the guardrails, whooping in excitement, hundreds of feet above the water, their silicone wigs blowing in the wind.
*
“Hriklif. Calm down. It’s OK.”
The rriksti engineer had been getting very jumpy as the SoD thrust deeper into its flyby. Jack suspected Keelraiser was nervous, too, although it would never admit it. He racked his brains for something to say that might help.
“Have you ever seen dirt track racing?”
The SoD vibrated. The bass rumble of the drive turbines combined with the scary sound of creaks from the truss tower. Martian gravity, atmospheric drag, plus the combined thrust from the SoD and the Cloudeater, added up to one hell of a structural stress. They might come out of this with bent truss members. But they were not, not, not going to die.
“Where was I? Right. Dirt racing.”
When Jack said dirt racing he was thinking of the motocross track near Bristol where he and Oliver Meeks had spent many happy Saturdays when they were in uni. Jack hadn’t been able to afford a bike of his own, but Meeks, who came from a well-off family, had had a top-of-the-line Yamaha.
“When you’re riding into the curve, see, you’re typically going far too fast to make it around the curve. So you set up a skid and you accelerate radially to the curve.”
In his mind’s eye he saw the dirt flying up from the wheels, Kevlar-clad knees scraping the ground. He smelt the exhaust fumes, and chip fat from the van that always set up near the little grass-edged track. He heard the spectators screaming, straining to see which riders made it round the curve.
The Lightbringer had made it around.
The Victory had made it around.
The SoD had to go lower and faster than either of them.
“So that’s what I’m doing. Skidding. We’re just trying to stay in the groove as long as we can …”
*
The noise from the other side of the barricades redoubled. The Secret Service guys tried to hustle Flaherty back to the SUV.
“Mr. President!”
Oh yeah. That’s me.
“Mr. President, we need to get you out of here!”
Meaning they thought the barricade would break. But they were wrong. Flaherty’s legionaries would not break.
He stiff-armed the SS goons away and strode between the cop cars. A SWAT team had arrived, fresh from skirmishing with looters on Fifth Avenue. Better late than never. They took cover behind their BearCat, aiming their MP5s at the walkers. Flaherty could remember when the MP5 was the most bad-ass, reliable assault weapon on the block. But the last ten, twenty years, H&K’s quality control had gone to shit. The new MP5s were under-engineered, liable to overheat and fail in rapid-fire situations. Flaherty had seen it in Montana, in Louisiana, and in Washington DC, where walkers had occupied the Mall and stormed the White House. The whole world had assumed that was going to be America’s Paris, the moment when the country fell into the Earth Party’s hands. But Flaherty’s legionaries had not broken. They had fallen back in good order and the mob had captured a figurehead who was not president anymore, Flaherty himself having been secretly sworn in overnight.
Since then he’d been trying his damnedest to minimize cop-on-citizen confrontations. But here he saw no choice. No more people could fit into Manhattan.
No more people could fit on this damn bridge!
A chopper circled low overhead. Not the NYPD. One of those ‘independent’ news organizations. Not satisfied with being the news, the Earth Party now wanted to make the news, too.
Thousands of paper airplanes swirled out of the chopper’s side door. The downdraft from its rotors scattered them into a multicolored cloud.
Flaherty knew what was going to happen before it happened.
The ‘attack’ compressed the nerves in someone’s trigger finger, and when the guy next to you starts firing, you start firing, too.
Gunfire hammered the air. Flaherty threw himself flat on the tarmac, thanking God he wore his Kevlar today. He craned to see past the Secret Service guys crouching over him.
Men and women standing on the guardrail of the bridge jerked, collapsed, and fell like un-aerodynamic paper airplanes, down to the East River.
Their screams came thinly over the racket of gunfire and helicopter rotors.
“Mr. President. Please. Come on.”
The Secret Service hustled him back to the SUV.
“DC wasn’t our Paris, and this ain’t, either,” Flaherty grunted. “It’s our own personal Tiananmen Square.”
*
“O Gospodi,” Alexei muttered. “If I have a bomb I can drop down crater of Mount Olympus!”
But Jack wasn’t looking at Mars. He was seeing Meeks screeching up to the finish line, tearing his helmet off, his black hair sticking up, his face alight with happiness. OK Jack, your turn…
Meeks’s motocross obsession hadn’t lasted long, of course. Bikes didn’t deliver enough speed or danger. He’d moved on in short order to auto racing, and then started building his own cars, culminating with the rocket-powered suicide machine that slammed him into the side of a Welsh quarry and disabled him for life.
OK Jack, your turn …
*
On the way back to Trump Tower, which he had inherited as a New York base of operations, Flaherty found a paper airplane on the floor of the SUV.
A message was written on one wing in a girlish hand with heart-dotted i's.
The weekend is coming!
Flaherty snarled, recognizing a direct quote from Hannah Ginsburg. In the latest episode of the Hannah Ginsburg Show, she and her squid buddy had discussed what a fun-loving people the rriksti were, and how they devoted every weekend to partying. Hannah had closed out the transmission with this quote: “Get ready, everyone, because the weekend is coming!”
Kuldeep insisted on reading layers of meaning into this, like he did with all the transmissions. But Kuldeep sometimes overthought things. To Flaherty, the message was simple.
We will annihilate your civilization and ensla
ve your people.
The squids had already made headway on the first half of that, despite not having reached Earth yet. New York had ceased to function as a center of finance and culture. Wall Street had relocated to the secure data centers Flaherty’s people set up in the Midwest. Broken windows and steel shutters lined Fifth Avenue.
But even with a hundred people lying dead on the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Coast Guard fishing more bodies out of the East River, Flaherty refused to give up.
Instead, he’d double down.
On the Victory.
Jack Kildare wasn’t going to have it all his own way much longer.
CHAPTER 25
The bridge hadn’t melted off, the welds hadn’t given way, and most importantly Jack hadn’t smeared the SoD across the side of Olympus Mons, so all in all, not that interesting a maneuver.
As he rose from his seat, Alexei stopped him. “One to ten.”
“Oh, God. I don’t know.” Jack interrogated his own body. Various muscle aches presented themselves for inspection, as did the pain in his lower spine which he’d been ignoring for weeks. “Six?”
“Do something about it.”
“Yeah, yeah. OK.”
Once upon a time, the crew had gone through rigorous weekly medical examinations. Now their medical examinations consisted of: One to ten? I guess about six.
And their treatments consisted of this:
Flat on his stomach on the floor, in the main hab, beneath an oak-sized yfrit plant, amid the sound of water dripping from irrigation pipes, Jack closed his eyes and braced himself against the waves of cool relief rolling through his back. Brbb squatted beside him with one hand on his lower back. Difystra and Rockshanks, two of Brbb’s friends, knelt on Jack’s other side, pressing their palms to his kidneys and nape respectively.
All the Krijistal were very extroverted.
“Spine cancer again,” Brbb said. “No worries. Feel the wrath of Ystyggr, despicable little cancer cells!”
Brbb’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. Jack still found it embarrassing and shameful to submit to this procedure, as if he were letting them see something that was no business of theirs: the seeds of cancer sprouting here and there in his body, as a result of the staggering amount of radiation he’d absorbed in the last three years. It wasn’t any business of theirs. But he couldn’t say no to a cure for cancer, for God’s sake.
He drifted off on the cool tide of relief, and woke with the taste of garlic in his mouth. He’d gone to sleep on his front but now he was lying on his back. He felt a thousand times better, but still drowsy.
Someone, squatting beside him, said, “They are completely misrepresenting our culture. Parties every weekend! Fun for one and all! What planet do they come from?”
Still half asleep, Jack heard only the cross, intense tone of voice, not the words. He prised open his eyes and thought that the person squatting beside him was Oliver Meeks. The shock of black hair, the busily gesticulating hands, the sharp pale jawline—seen from beneath, it was Meeks, in the act of taking life by the throat and turning it upside-down to see what it had in its pockets.
Then the illusion broke like a soap bubble, and Jack realized that in the dim sulfurous twilight, the person he’d taken for his dead friend was Keelraiser.
“Oh, I know I’m being an elitist. But honestly. Most of us do not behave like that. You’ve known us for years. Have you ever once seen the faintest suggestion that we might feel an urge to abandon our duties and have—have orgies?”
Jack propped himself on his elbows. The really embarrassing thing about accepting extroversion was that one tended to wake up with a stiffy. Glancing down at his underpants, he said ruefully, “No, but I have. Felt the urge, I mean. Hang on until I take a cold shower … oh wait, there are no cold showers. Right. Where were we?”
“Five million kilometers from Mars,” Keelraiser said, getting to its feet. “Our positioning looks good. We will overhaul the Victory in thirteen days, although the rendezvous will ultimately depend on successful attitude adjustments by both craft.”
“Perfect!” Jack jumped to his feet. “We did it.” He raised his hand for a high-five, but Keelraiser backed away.
“That’s all I came to say.”
Confused, Jack watched Keelraiser stalk away between the saurian stands of yfrit and gnarled bushes of jgzeriyat.
This was the first time Keelraiser had left the Cloudraiser since the spring of 2022.
Had it really just come to the SoD to report on the success of their maneuver? It could have done that over the radio.
Well, maybe it had come to have a look at the garden.
If so, it must have had the surprise of its life.
This was what a rriksti food garden should look like.
Something out of the Cretaceous.
Jurassic Park, the Lost World, fountains and mountains of foliage, all sunk in a gloom that leached the amazing colors from the vegetation. The plants had recovered from the trauma of the water crisis. It also helped that they were no longer exposed to UV light.
Now, orangey-red filters covered the growlights overhead. A torn filter flapped in the breeze from the fans, letting a single star of bright white light shine out. You could have stood a spoon up in the humid gloom, but Jack wouldn’t have had it any other way. He walked aft, through the rriksti village. The shelters were no longer needed as refuges from the light, but the rriksti still lived in them for privacy’s sake. Wouldn’t you? Their numbers had shrunk from 306 to 288 in the last six months. Jack nursed every one of those deaths like a personal slight.
It had taken him far too long to work out that the SoD’s powerful growlights were killing the Imfi vegetation. Yes, Brbb had kept asking him to make the days shorter, but he hadn’t understood why. Nor had Brbb, to be fair. It had just been repeating what the smarter civilans told it to say. At last, the penny had dropped: the crazy growth rates of the plants were causing endocrine imbalances. The beautiful bio-fluorescence phenomenon was a symptom of over-stimulation. On the third or fourth generation, the plants had stopped flowering, which meant no more seeds.
The experiment of raising Imfi plants in a terrestrial environment had come to a screeching halt. They’d made filters for the growlights out of recycled upholstery (those Darkside military colors!), and cranked up the heat and humidity even more, coddling the surviving plants until they recovered.
It had been a hungry couple of months. And the crop losses had exacerbated the underlying problem of nutrient shortages.
Jack stopped in the village to chat with the Mars documentary crew, who were editing the footage they’d filmed during the burn. What do you do when you’re dying of malnutrition? If you’re a rriksti bureaucrat, you make art. Films (‘ports’—whatever), poetry, drawings … they’d even organized a band. Skyler played lead guitar.
Jack came to a circus tent made of stitched-together suizh textile. He lifted the flap and ducked into the light of ‘day.’ The men had removed two banks of growlights from the axis tunnel and set them up on an aluminum-alloy scaffold above the kitchen table. (Those chopped-up seats really were coming in handy.) Water and electrical lines looped overhead. Towers of spinach and kale, root vegetables, and legumes framed the pantry shelves like bleachers. At the table, Giles was chopping carrots and watching TV on his laptop.
Their original television had had an LED display; that had been eaten. Jack drew the line at letting the rriksti dismantle any of the screens on the bridge, but he saw no harm in letting them have the europium-doped phosphors out of the TV. Everything on the air was crap now, anyway.
He squatted and knocked on the side of one of the fish tanks underneath the table. A tilapia nosed the glass. “Hello, Finny. Shall we have you for lunch today?”
“It is not fish day,” Giles said. “I assume we didn’t crash into Mars?”
“You assume correctly.” Jack straightened up and glanced at the laptop. It had an LCD screen so it was safe from being eaten. He did
n’t recognize the chyron at the bottom of the screen. The images, however, produced a scowl of recognition. “This must be that video Keelraiser was talking about.”
“Tokyo Rose has nothing on la Ginsburg,” Giles grunted.
“Don’t let Skyler see it.” Jack popped a chunk of carrot into his mouth. “I was thinking, though. We should have a party.”
“A party?”
“A proper blow-out. After all, we’re really at the end of the line. If we make the rendezvous, we’ll live. If we don’t, we’ll die.” By we, here, Jack meant the rriksti. “So we might as well lift the rationing restrictions and let them eat all the things.”
Giles looked at Jack’s rosary.
“Nope, they’re still not getting this.”
“I’m not sure the timing is right for a party,” Giles said. “It would be depressing. We have so little of everything left. Perhaps we should wait until we get the Shit We Need.”
“Yeah, you could be right,” Jack said. He felt a bit intimidated by Giles’s calm confidence that they could pull off the rendezvous. It wasn’t the technical aspects he was worried about. It was that glimpse of the Victory’s longitudinal profile he had seen on the Cloudeater’s radar, which had never been explained. When he asked Mission Control about it, their silence had been deafening.
CHAPTER 26
Twelve days passed in tense anticipation as the SoD crept up on the Victory. Jack finessed their position, using the SoD’s hydrazine-fuelled reaction control thrusters and the Cloudeater’s off-axis thrust. The Victory matched his every move. Those NASA programmers were doing an amazing job, despite the five-minute lightspeed delay to Earth …
And pigs roosted in treetops.
Whoever was flying the Victory, it wasn’t a computer. Jack felt pretty certain of that now. The other men shared his conviction.
By December 13th, the SoD was just a few hundred kilometers behind the Victory. Their lateral separation had narrowed to thirty klicks.
Jack brooded over the Cloudeater’s radar returns. On the forward wall of the cockpit, the sun shone bright, almost the same size as when seen from Earth. Earth was a notation bobbling behind the sun, like a small person jumping up and down, trying to be seen. A red polygon winked off to the left, hurtling away from Mars, towards Earth.
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 17