He wandered to the other end of the cave, giving her space. Loneliness settled on him like the unbearable lightness of lunar gravity. Strangely enough, these were the only times he ever felt lonely.
He flashed his headlamp over the junk at the end of the cave. Looked like things had been rearranged since he was last here. Someone else had been in here. Half of CELL probably used these caves for secret assignations.
Something’s missing, said his pattern memory. What?
That J-shaped boom. It was leaning against the wall, now it’s on the floor.
And what was attached to its end, that isn’t there now?
That’s right. The antenna for the Ku-band radio dish, which now lay on the rim of Shackleton Crater, unused. That 12-foot dish wasn’t getting through any airlock. But it was useless without the antenna … and the receiver assembly. Which used to be right over there, and bingo, that’s missing too. So’s the cable.
Does someone think they can fix the dish?
Good luck with that.
There were always people up on the crater rim, working at the refinery and the waterworks, making the risky trip into the crater to tend the automated mining machinery. They’d notice anyone messing with the dish, and report it to Coetzee, who’d report it to Keelraiser.
Anyway, how would you set up and track the dish without its mount? That was still right here.
“I’m covered with bruises,” Linda said.
“What? Oh Christ! I’m sorry.”
His headlamp found her pulling her shorts on. She squinted in the light, then winked. Shook her head. She was talking to their unseen audience of rriksti. “Just look at this!” she said, holding out her arms.
Jesus, she was right. Oval shadows painted her wrists. His thumbprints.
“God, Linda, I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know your own strength,” she said, stepping into her coverall. She pulled his ear close to her mouth and breathed, “That’s so fucking hot.”
Jack pulled on his own coverall. His arms and shoulders stung where her nails had dug in. “It takes two,” he offered.
Before they left the cave, she fired up the iPad one more time for a ritual look at old pictures of her kid. Jack watched her face as her finger strayed across the images of a chubby toddler, who became a boy, who played baseball and kept turtles in an aquarium, who won prizes for his science projects. Linda smiled down at the photographs, and it was the saddest smile Jack had ever seen.
He remembered the crazy idea Harry Windsor had sketched in the soil of the potato patch.
It was still a crazy idea, because there was still no way to get back to Earth from LEO. But if that obstacle could somehow be overcome, Jack knew one person who’d go for it.
Counting himself, two.
CHAPTER 19
The van smelled like a farmyard. Not that Piper Taft had ever been to a farm, but she knew these smells, feathers and leaf-litter and poop, because Boston Common had turned into a farmer’s market. Not the old kind of farmer’s market that abounded with artisanal cheeses, green smoothies, and handmade jewelry. The new kind of farmer’s market, where they sold live chickens and killed them in front of your eyes if you were too squeamish. Piper used to shoot smack into her own arm but she couldn’t watch a chicken’s head getting chopped off. That was how she’d met Derek. He drove in from Wellesley twice a week with his van full of chickens and crates of eggs and crusty sheaves of onions and dirt-caked turnips.
Now Piper perched on the passenger seat of the van, with her brother’s scribbled instructions in her hand.
“It’s too dangerous to take the Mass Pike,” Derek said. “We’ll go through Brookline.”
“OK.”
Cate and Geoff, in the back, offered further suggestions as to the best route. They all used to travel with the Earth Party. So had Piper, until she lost her nerve and came home to Boston, just in time for the rolling blackouts and the looting. Might’ve been the aliens started that, might not. There were no aliens in Boston now, anyway. And Piper had no time to obsess over the news from Europe. She was out and about every day, scavenging food, bartering for meds, keeping her father and brother fed and alive. She sewed simple, hard-wearing clothes and sold them at the foot of the Boston Massacre memorial statue. She was happier than she’d ever been in her life.
Together, she and her friends were building a better world in the rubble of the corrupt old United States.
They drove past the gates of the Charles River Country Club. Piper remembered going to dances there as a teenager, but she kept quiet about that. Now, African-American teens lounged in an SUV parked across the gate, weapons out of sight but definitely there.
“They’re planting the golf course,” Derek said. “We need another big farm in the metro area.”
He started to complain about the pesticides used on golf courses, and he was still complaining as they drove across the Charles, so he did not see the thing floating in the river. Piper rolled down the window and craned backwards.
Autumn foliage hid the water. But she was quite sure that had been a corpse.
“Well, this is it,” Derek said, slowing as they reached the old General Dynamics building. “Hope they got what you’re looking for.”
The low-slung red-brick building went on for blocks. General Dynamics was long gone. This was now the headquarters of NBC Boston. But NBC had gone off the air when the aliens came, and the building looked deserted, like everything else on Boylston Road. Holes gaped in its glassed-in prow.
“Go into the parking lot,” Piper said.
Not many cars. All the useful vehicles had already been stolen. Piper’s heart sank.
“Oh! There!” She pointed.
You’re looking for an uplink truck, said Trek’s instructions. Big dish on top. NOT a C-band dish, those are 3m across. Ku-band dishes are smaller.
Derek parked behind the uplink truck. Fallen leaves clogged the windshield. No one wanted this ungainly vehicle. With Earth’s satellites out of commission, it was useless. But not to Trek.
Piper was about to suggest simply driving it away when she saw that two tires were flat.
Cate and Geoff climbed out with the toolbox. Piper said, “I need the dish. Can we just, like, remove it?”
“Give it a try,” said Geoff. He climbed up on the roof of the truck. Cate scuffled away to the nearest of the dividers where trees stood in robotic lines. She leaned against a trunk and lit a cigarette, watching the building, watching the road.
Piper jimmied the back doors of the truck. She’d learned a few useful things during the years she’d lost to smack.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t learnt the difference between a mixer and an audio board and what Trek wanted, which was the receiver that went with the dish. She stared in dismay at walls crammed with electronics.
Fine, just take everything.
She yanked out connectors, loosened screws, carried heavy equipment out to the van. Called up to the guys, “Don’t forget the coax cable,” whatever that was—
—and Cate shouted, “Got company, go go go!”
Geoff and Derek jumped off the truck, leaving the dish tilting, almost free.
“No, we need that!” Piper cried. She ran at the truck, sneakers gripping the windshield, up to the roof, kicked the dish and shoved it. Clang! The dish stung her hands. A dent appeared in it. She was twenty-nine years old, she’d gone to RISD, she could make cool-looking clothes out of curtains and sheets, she was building a better world, and someone was shooting at her, in a parking lot in Needham. Ping! Another bullet skipped off the truck roof.
Piper stumbled forward, her weight on the dish. Metal shrieked. The dish came free and crashed down to the asphalt, Piper on top of it. She heaved at it until Geoff dashed back and helped her lift it into the van.
Cate sprinted towards them.
Bulky figures ran after her, t-shirts flapping. One stopped. Gun held sideways. Blam!
Cate fell into the van, weeping. Derek gunned
the engine. Piper frantically tugged at Cate’s clothes, looking for the bullet wound. There wasn’t one. Cate was just crying in fright. She and Geoff and Derek were gentle people, farmer’s market people, walkers, origami-folders, what the Earth Party used to be.
All the way back to Boston, Derek ranted about the Nazis who’d taken over the Party. Piper nodded along mechanically. She guessed Derek hadn’t seen what she saw. Behind the people running across the parking lot, a tall figure standing and watching. As tall as Kobe Bryant, as thin as Edward Scissorhands. Holding a golf umbrella, of all things, over its head. And maybe that had been one of those made-in-Mexico silicone wigs blowing around in the shadow of the umbrella ... but there had been no wind.
They’re here.
Her hands throbbed, scraped bloody in her fall from the uplink truck.
They’re here.
Derek parked outside the Taft townhouse on Beacon Hill. Piper’s father opened the door. Piper launched herself at him like a little kid and hugged him like she’d never let go.
“Thanks for this, guys,” Avigdor Taft said as Geoff and Derek lugged the dish through the house. “How was the drive?” Piper cringed at her father’s awkwardness. It sounded as if he were talking to Derek, who was black, like a handyman.
Derek put the dish down in the junkyard that used to be the back garden. He turned to Avigdor, smiling tautly. They had agreed not to mention the shooting at the NBC building. “The drive was fine. But I have to pay for my gas. You know how much that costs these days?”
“Well, sure,” Avigdor said, glancing at Piper. “We can certainly compensate you—”
“No,” Derek said. “No, no.” He gazed at the French windows they’d just come out through. Piper became conscious again of how nice the house was, how full—still—of appliances and electronics that could be bartered, and furniture that could be burnt for heat. “We’ll just compensate ourselves,” Derek said, “if you don’t mind.”
Avigdor followed them through the house, nervously asking them not to take this or that. Piper stayed in the garden. Betrayal reverberated through her as if she were a struck gong. She had thought Derek, Cate, and Geoff were good people. She had let them into her house as friends.
Trek, indifferent to the pillage in progress, came out and frowned at the Ku dish. “It’s dented.”
“Sorry about that,” Piper said. “Want me to go back and get another one?” She was never, ever going back to Needham.
“No, this is fine. I can fix it. You got the receiver, too. That’s good. Now I just need to mount it and install the tracking motors, finetune the reception and polarization …”
“I saw one of them.”
“No kidding,” Trek coughed. “They’ve taken over Hanscom AFB. Apparently they’ve set up a hospital.”
He would have got this from the internet. Amazingly, there still was internet, even though there was no cell phone service, and the power kept going out. Modern data centers were tougher than the grid.
“What kind of hospital?” Piper said keenly. “Who for?”
Trek, as skeletal as an alien himself, spat phlegm onto the ground. “Who cares? I’d rather die.”
This was not a figure of speech. Trek had cystic fibrosis. And after today, Piper would not have a lot of stuff left to barter for his prednisone. Antibiotics already could not be had anywhere in Boston. They’d have no treatment options if he got a lung infection.
He grinned at her, dismissing his illness. “The moon is overhead for twelve hours a day.”
Piper looked up at the blue November sky. She found it hard to believe their elder brother, Skyler, was alive up there, no matter what the internet said. Much less that Trek could actually phone the moon with a satellite dish stolen off the back of an NBC truck.
“Figure tomorrow to get this set up. Day after tomorrow we could be talking to him.”
“What if you call him and the aliens pick up?”
“Then I tell them to gargle my balls.”
“Trekker,” Piper chided. But his confidence lifted her spirits.
To hell with Derek. She’d keep on keepin’ on. Tote her fabric samples down to the Common, take people’s measurements, make new friends. And try not to think about Nazis squatting in the NBC building, or the alien standing under an umbrella, like a football coach at the edge of the field.
CHAPTER 20
The Knucklebiter, the third of the Lightbringer’s shuttles, touched down with an unearthly roar on Oak Grove Drive. Same road Hannah used to take to work.
She flew down the steps even before the hydrazine byproducts had a chance to clear from the air. She gazed up with watering eyes at the buildings of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Everything looked the same for a minute. Then she saw broken windows. Banners hanging out. ONE GALAXY UNDER YSTYGGR. “God, someone’s done their research.” Smoke rose from behind the trees.
The cool, dry California air caressed her skin, delightful after the humidity of the Congo, where the second rainy season of the year was now drowning Lightbringer City in mud. Hannah was always getting requests to speak in various places around the world, but she usually turned them down. However, she was not about to turn down a trip to JPL.
The California government had laid on a parade and a fealty ceremony. Hannah limply took possession of the symbolic keys to California. The real keys to California were in a tequila bar a little way north of here, where she used to pound back cocktails to forget her stress … and end up forgetting her obligations. Forgetting her promises to visit her sister. Forgetting what really mattered.
It tormented her to know she was just a couple of hours’ drive from Pacific Heights. She told herself there was no way Bethany’s family was still there. I mean, look at this place. The buildings that once housed cutting-edge aerospace research had been looted and abandoned. The president of California, sweating through his dress uniform, asserted that research continued. When Ripstiggr asked to inspect it, they were taken to see a few people struggling to get the on-site generators working. The rriksti laughed with their hair. It always made them happy to see proof of human technical incompetence. Hannah wanted to tell them that right here, on this very campus, she’d calculated the burns that carried the Juno probe to Europa, but she kept quiet. She was doing a lot of keeping quiet these days.
“Hannah,” Ripstiggr said. She knew by the fact he called her Hannah, instead of Shiplord, he was going to offer her something to cheer her up. It would be as symbolic and meaningless as the electroplated keys that Joker was toting for her.
“We’d like to see where you used to work.”
That wasn’t a mood-lifter, it was lemon juice on an open cut. Yet she succumbed to the morbid temptation. “This was the mission control room.”
Computers gone. Faint smell of urine. On the wall, someone had spraypainted Imf, as it was commonly represented in graffiti: a banded sphere, white, green, black.
“I thought you built things,” Ripstiggr said, looking around the empty room.
“Not here.”
“Didn’t this facility build and pack satellites?”
“Oh. Yeah. That was over in the sat assembly building. Not my job.”
Ripstiggr turned to the president. “Hey,” he boomed. His new field radio covered one ear like a black crab, and projected his voice at earsplitting pitch. “We want to see the sat assembly building. Understand? Sat. Assembly. Building.”
That’s why they’d come to JPL. Satellite parts. The rriksti had been seeding low earth orbit with cubesats of their own design. They could build a lot of stuff in the new factories in Africa, but why build what you can steal? And, bonus, whatever the rriksti took, no one else could use.
Bored and depressed, Hannah begged off the tour of the sat assembly building. Ripstiggr and the other rriksti went with the president, ridiculous in their large conical sunhats, El Presidente equally ridiculous in his caudillo costume with the gold braid and the unearned medals. El Prez had been California’s
most powerful drug trafficker. Still was, Hannah expected. He hardly spoke English. In the hands of such as these lay the fate of her country, of her world.
Can’t we all just get along?
Si, si. Se puede.
When Hannah conceived her policy of making friends, she had failed to foresee just who would take them up on it. Opportunistic Russian generals. Narcotraficantes with imperial delusions. The government of Pakistan. Neo-Nazis.
She pushed the if-onlys out of her mind. She was only one woman. She couldn’t save Earth. But maybe, just maybe, she could save her family.
She looked around at her personal bodyguards, Tralp, Sivine, and Flifya. It would be impossible to give them the slip. Screw it. She’d lean on them not to squeal to Ripstiggr. “I want ground transport. Get me a car.”
“Why, Shiplord?”
“Because I say so!” She had to get away before Ripstiggr finished pillaging the sat assembly building. He knew she had lived near here, but not that her sister had lived in the same city, close enough that she could have visited every weekend—if only, if only …
They commandeered a Hummer from the president’s entourage and loaded it up with leftover gifts: medical packs, mundane stuff such as water filters, and a few of the shoulder-mounted blasters that the rriksti passed out like candy to their friends. These nasty weapons, although manufactured to lower specifications than the rrikstis’ own blasters, could be recharged simply by plugging them into an outlet, if you could find an outlet that worked. Maybe Bethany and David could barter them for stuff they really needed.
She glanced nervously out of the Hummer’s rear windshield as they bumped away from the Knucklebiter. Adoring crowds of locals surged around the shuttle, held back by coolie-hatted rriksti sentries. The Hummer progressed at walking pace.
“Gexlidda’s team will have a hell of a time getting back,” Tralp said in Rristigul to the others.
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 14