Hannah said, “Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t know they were going to do that.”
Gunmen had attacked the summit, mowing down delegates in a bid to take out the Liberator’s Shiplord. Tshaveg’s party had fought their way out of the cathedral, losing several rriksti to RPG rounds. Hannah had glimpsed some of the shooters. They wore civilian gear, but she knew they were American.
“You should have been better informed,” Tshaveg criticized. “What kind of Shiplord are you?”
“A human one. But I’ve done my best. Please, before you make your decision, let me show you what we’ve done in Africa. We’ve built greenhouses, factories, we were in the middle of building a pipeline to provide fusion energy to millions of people.”
“I will take a good look,” Tshaveg said, “from orbit. In order to accurately target your pathetic wreck of a ship.”
Hannah bit back horrified protests. Her family was on the Lightbringer. How could she warn them? She couldn’t. She was stuck in the back of a van with wire mesh over the windows, on the way to the airport.
The van progressed slowly. The tsunami warning had spread faster than they could escape. It turned out there were a lot of people left in Brussels. All those with vehicles, and many of those without, were heading for the hills. Tshaveg’s Krijistal fired into the gridlock, spreading panic. The van scraped through impossible gaps. Metal shrieked, wing mirrors crumpled. But even so they were barely moving at five miles an hour.
Tshaveg leaned back, apparently relaxed. She called to an aide, who brought, of all things, a magnum of Krug champagne. He managed to pour it into two beer steins, despite the jostling and bumping of the van.
“Share a toast with me,” Tshaveg said to Hannah.
Hannah gazed dubiously at the mug the aide offered her. $2,000 champagne in beer steins. How like the rriksti. “What are we toasting?”
“The destruction of the Homemaker.”
“What happened to it?”
“My agent destroyed it. The Darksiders had it coming.”
“Oh.”
“Oh? Is that all you have to say?”
“I’m a bit more concerned about the destruction of Earth.”
“But this is good news for Earth. That Darksider bitch, the Shiplord of the Homemaker, would have exterminated Earth’s native ecosystems by altering the climate. I will only exterminate Homo sapiens. So you may take comfort in the knowledge that your pretty animals and interesting vegetation will flourish under my personal care.” Tshaveg twisted the knife. “Your species was rapidly destroying them, anyway.”
Hannah gazed out at the grim, personality-free buildings of modern Brussels. She imagined them crumbling, buried beneath a green tide. The wolf and the bear coming back. No more music, no more art, no more champagne. No more human beings. Two big tears squeezed out of her eyes. “Guess I will have that drink,” she said.
Fifty meters ahead of the van, an office building exploded in a fireball.
*
Skyler’s seatbelt snapped taut across his chest as Kuldeep stepped on the brake. Their jeep crashed, gently, into the overloaded Volvo in front of them.
Further ahead, a building burned like a six-storey welding torch, impervious to the rain. Pieces of debris rained down on the traffic and the throngs on the sidewalk. The noise felt like someone had taken a cheese grater to Skyler’s soul.
Another building spontaneously combusted.
Something heavy fell on the jeep.
The windshield frosted over with cracks.
Kuldeep swore, gunning the jeep forwards, then reversing. Bumpers crunched.
Skyler braced his laptop—actually, Kuldeep’s laptop—on his knees and typed:
So, a couple of buildings just blew up.
The laptop had a dongle that turned it into a shortwave radio. Skyler was messaging with his brother, Trekker, thousands of miles away in Boston.
Yeah! Trek wrote. You’re gonna see more of that.
How’d you do it?
We hacked into the gas mains and increased the pressure. The membranes in the gas meters tend to rupture if the pressure gets too high in the mains. It's amazing how fragile they are. So you’ve got a lot of buildings with leaking meters. A few hours later, BOOM BOOM BOOM.
More explosions thundered through the city.
The whole city is going up, Skyler typed.
Well, you asked for a diversion.
“They’re trapped,” Kuldeep whooped. He was talking about the police van stuck in traffic a block ahead. Inside were the Shiplord and her entourage … and Hannah. “Out of my goddamn way, motherfuckers!”
He threw the jeep into reverse again. The rear bull bar tossed the Mini behind them onto its side. The jeep came from the Bundeswehr. Some remnants of the German army had joined the ragtag corps of US Army survivors who’d answered Flaherty’s call for volunteers. Kuldeep drove up onto the sidewalk, squeezing between lamp-posts and the hedge of the Parc du Cinquantenaire. People reeled out of the way, not that Kuldeep would hesitate to run them over if they didn’t, Skyler thought. Kuldeep only looked like a mild-mannered Indian programmer. He was cut from the same cloth as Lance Garner. Skyler had seen him personally shoot several summit delegates as they hustled Flaherty to safety.
Trek, Skyler typed. Thanks for the diversion. It’s awesome. Flaming clots of roof insulation landed on the cracked windshield. He flinched and hunched over the keyboard. But I actually called to warn you. Get out of Boston.
Why?
Tsunami. The East Coast is going to get a pasting. New York will be hammered. You might be OK up there in Beantown, but 10 meters is one big mother of a wave.
OK, Trek wrote back after a second. You’ve been right about everything else, so I believe you. Piper has a friend with a van.
Sounds good. Get on the road ASAP. Go inland.
Will do.
Give my love to Piper and Dad. Bye, Trekker-Wrecker. A nickname from their childhood.
Skyler shut the laptop. How long before the tsunami reached America? It would get here first, anyway.
But he had already decided he wasn’t going anywhere without Hannah.
“Aw fuck,” shouted Kuldeep, and the two SEALs riding in the back. “It’s moving!”
The police van had forced its way out of the traffic jam. It swung onto a side street.
Kuldeep drove after it, through falling gobbets of flame.
*
The cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula was empty.
Rain wept through shattered stained-glass windows.
Corpses strewed the floor.
Not all the corpses were actually corpses.
Giles searched the nave, righting the fallen tables and uncovering terrified politicians who had hidden beneath the tablecloths.
By and by he found the Grand Marshal of the EU, formerly the director of the ESA.
“Do you recognize me?” Giles said in French.
The man shook his head, near-catatonic with terror.
“Stand up, like a human being,” Giles said. “Look at me. I have seven toes on each of my feet, yet even I can stand.”
The man obeyed the steel in Giles’s voice. He tottered backwards and leaned against the pulpit, where the ONE GALAXY banner hung by one corner, bloodstained.
“My name is Giles Boisselot. You sent me to Europa to discover the secrets of the alien spaceship we called the MOAD.”
Eyes widened in recognition.
“You—all right, let’s be fair, I, too—believed the aliens would save humanity from destruction.”
Giles prowled closer. The man started to babble about how good it was to see him. Giles wondered if this was how he’d behaved when the NAA overran Europe. Probably. And he’d been rewarded for it.
This time, he would get a just reward.
“They cut off my hands and feet,” Giles said. “They stuffed me into a spacesuit and left me to die.”
“Please—”
“I did not die. I grew these.” Gile
s held up his hands. “Later, I grew to like the rriksti. Isn’t life strange? But it is not true, it was never true that they could or would or even wanted to save us.”
“I beg you—”
“We have to save ourselves.”
Giles took hold of the Grand Marshal’s neck and strangled him with his seven-fingered hands.
He dropped the body on the floor.
Then, despite what he had just said, he climbed the steps behind the pulpit to the altar. He knew he could not really save himself. The alabaster reredo depicted the Passion of the Christ. He fell to his knees, then sprawled full length, his face on the cold stone, weeping.
*
In the sacristy of the cathedral, President Flaherty was waiting it out, guarded by special forces and Army grunts who had rounded themselves up from across Europe and the Middle East. He burnt with love for these Americans of all colors who had stood up when duty called.
They’d been about to hightail it to Antwerp when the city started blowing up. Now they were trapped. On the bright side, this was probably the safest place in Brussels to be trapped. The 13th-century gothic cathedral did not have a gas meter.
Raised voices came from the sacristy door. One of them was female. Flaherty lifted his head. “Let her in.”
A woman in a wheelchair rolled into the room. Passion hardened the lines of her pretty face. The operative behind her said, “Mr. President, she had a gun.”
“Hi there, Linda,” Flaherty said.
Linda Moskowitz rolled her wheelchair right up to him. Her voice quivered with fury. “Take me to my family.”
“They’re back in the States,” Flaherty said. “In the bunker at Cheyenne. Safest place in the world.”
“Take me to them.”
“The city’s on fire, in case you didn’t hear. No one’s going anywhere right now.”
“Yeah, and also there’s a tsunami coming,” Linda said. “Good thing this church has high towers.”
“Chopper’s on its way,” Flaherty said. “If possible, they’re gonna land in the square out there. You will be on that bird, if I have to give up my own place to you.”
Linda’s face softened a touch. “So was it worth it?” she said. “Did we win?”
“That I don’t know yet.” Flaherty turned to his people. “Call Kuldeep and the other pursuit teams. Make sure they are providing updates on the target’s position.”
He hadn’t told Linda that the Chinooks on their way to him would be diverted, if necessary, to take out the Liberator’s Shiplord. Flaherty was not only prepared to kill for Earth’s freedom. He was ready to die for it.
*
Kuldeep said, “We’re not gonna catch them.”
One of the SEALs in the back repeated into the radio, “We’re not gonna catch them. We are on the freeway, in heavy traffic. Target is about one klick ahead, going like a bat outta hell.”
“Stay on them,” the radio crackled.
A sign whipped past: AÉROPORT DE BRUXELLES-NATIONAL.
“Get over in your lane,” the other SEAL said to Kuldeep. “We gotta get on that cloverleaf overpass.”
Skyler sighed. He felt failure blowing in, like the rain coming through the hole in the windshield that Kuldeep had knocked out so he could see to drive. They weren’t going to make it. Tshaveg would reach her shuttle and take off, leaving humanity to burn and drown in its own mess.
At least Hannah would be safe on board the Liberator. Maybe.
The radio squealed urgently.
Skyler turned in his seat.
Out of the back, he saw it.
Looked like a white line of smoke across the freeway.
Until he saw the cars and trucks being carried along like so much rubbish on its seething crest.
“It’s coming!” he yelled.
“What?”
“The tsunami! It’s here!”
“We were supposed to have five hours,” Kuldeep shouted.
“It wouldn’t be the first time the fucking rriksti were wrong.” Speaking of the rriksti, Skyler thought: where’s Ripstiggr? The bastard had just vanished in the middle of the action. The thought tore through his brain and away like a neutron. “Just fucking drive!” Entire houses were coming after them. Ripped off their foundations, swaying along like blank-eyed train carriages.
Screaming curses, Kuldeep floored it up the ramp onto the overpass.
*
Thunderous booms rolled through the rain, one after another.
“What was that?” Hannah cried, as the van charged along the overpass towards the airport. “It sounded like shuttles taking off!”
“Well,” Tshaveg said, “this airport is surrounded by low ground everywhere. It is barely above the level of the ‘sea.’”
“And?”
“The airport is now completely surrounded by water.” Tshaveg pointed down off the overpass. Hannah reeled at the sight of a flood tide sweeping under the overpass, laden with cars and pieces of houses. And bodies. Oh God. Bodies.
“Northwest of here,” Tshaveg continued, “the wave rolled up the estuary of the river Scheldt, and into the large canal that runs through the city. The cargo area of the airport abuts the canal. It is now underwater. The runways are being flooded as we speak.” Tshaveg lifted the magnum of Krug by the neck and drank straight from it.
“The shuttles?” Hannah said.
“Were forced to take off. Water is not good for spaceship engines. Not even water plasma ones.”
The Shiplord had made a joke. Hannah smiled a tiny bit. She took the offered magnum, emptied it.
“There is another bottle,” Tshaveg said reassuringly.
“So what happens to us?” Hannah said.
“We occasionally had floods on Imf. When a large chunk of a glacier breaks off, it can cause a river to overtop its banks. So we know what to do when this happens.”
The van swung off the overpass, onto a bridge. It crashed through a barrier and accelerated into a multistorey car park.
“One gets onto the roof of the nearest steel-reinforced building,” Tshaveg explained, “and waits to be rescued.”
“Um. By who?”
The Shiplord’s hair twitched, but she said nothing.
She doesn’t have a plan, Hannah thought. She’s just putting a bold face on it, like I used to do. Heading for higher ground and hoping.
The van rocketed up through the nearly empty car park, scraping the walls as it climbed the spiral ramps.
“Anyway, in the meantime,” Tshaveg said, “I will commence the extinction of your miserable species.”
Hannah contemplated hitting her with the empty magnum. She decided against it. “With what, the power of wishful thinking?”
Tshaveg laughed. “A filovirus, engineered to be highly contagious during the infectious period, and long-lived outside the human body.” Her eyes widened. “You didn’t think I was collecting all those specimens for fun, did you?”
The van shot out onto the roof. A few abandoned cars stood around, caked with volcanic ash. The van parked near the edge of the roof.
“The virus has been loaded into aerosol tanks,” Tshaveg said. “It will be hand-delivered to all major population centers … well, those that are left, after this.”
CHAPTER 48
“I’m not sure there’s any such thing as human culture,” Jack said.
“Michelangelo,” Keelraiser said. “Shakespeare. The Bible.” He continued to slice pieces off his sister’s semi-frozen face.
“Yeah, but that’s my point. That’s not human culture, that’s the culture of some humans. Mine, I suppose. But it’s not everyone’s. Rriksti must have various cultures, too, apart from this fake distinction between the Darkside and the Lightside.”
“Maybe we once did. The Temple erased them. Anyway, it is a universal practice to consume the flesh of the dead.”
Jack had to look away. Keelraiser had brought his sister’s body into the turbine room of the Dealbreaker to conduct this gruesome ritual.
“Right,” he said. “Well, don’t take all day about it.”
Keelraiser muttered to himself in Rristigul, hacking away at the corpse. He had never looked more alien.
Jack went back to the cockpit and watched the Cumbre Vieja tsunami creep over the coastline of Belgium. It had already inundated northern France and was lapping at southeast England. He did sums, trying to estimate how far the surge would travel up the Thames.
Keelraiser reappeared in the cockpit, wearing his EVA suit. “I’ve finished. You’d better go.”
“Yup.” Jack kept it monosyllabic, fighting to stay focused. “Have you unloaded the pod?”
They’d agreed that Jack would have to take the Dealbreaker away from the asteroid chunks to deliver their ultimatum to the Liberator. It would defeat the whole exercise if the Liberator could pinpoint exactly where the threat would be coming from. Keelraiser would be able to survive in the mobility pod until he got back.
“Yes.” Keelraiser lingered.
“Right, then …”
“Jack, I do not want you to come back.”
“You don’t want me to—”
“There are two reasons,” Keelraiser said rapidly. “The Dealbreaker hasn’t much reaction mass left. You can come back here, or deorbit. It’s got to be one or the other.” Jack was silent, knowing this to be true. “And I want you to deorbit. Land on Earth and organize a resupply flight for CELL. They are stranded, helpless, they haven’t even got comms. And you know what their life-support situation is like. So you must resupply them with the Dealbreaker. After that, if the Lightbringer survives, you can use its two remaining shuttles to organize a supply chain, using Sky Station as a fuel depot.”
Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. He smelled blood on his hands.
“If we lose …” Keelraiser said.
“I thought the whole point was winning.”
“The odd are great that I’ll have to destroy the Liberator. Is that winning, or losing? But even in the best-case scenario, if our ultimatum succeeds, things are likely to drag on. It’ll be contentious, chaotic … and no one will be thinking about the moon. Except us.”
Killshot: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 4) Page 33