Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  Now this would be the tricky part, the part where everything could go south quick. I took a deep breath, muttered a prayer and fed power to the turbines. Air was drawn into fans in the front of the Raven’s delta wings and funneled through the fusion reactor to heat it up, then expelled from variable thrust nozzles in the belly of the ship. I could feel the vibration through the deck and the acceleration couch as the ship rose up on columns of fire, the view from the cockpit display changing from the dull grey slabs of the surrounding buildings to a panorama of the city.

  Tartarus was as ugly as it sounded, built with a very military utility and lack of imagination. Everything was boxy and drably uniform and it stretched out for kilometers in every direction, broken only by “green belts” that were more brown than anything else. And the rest of the planet was worse: dark and tangled jungle, trackless deserts, shallow salt seas and rocky, barren mountains, along with the military installations jammed into convenient locations.

  At least if I died on Canaan, I’d never have to come back to Inferno again.

  A readout blinked in the corner of the holographic display of the viewscreen, a scrawl of text telling me that the automated traffic control systems were making an inquiry into my clearance and flight plan. I’d never seen the inquiry before; the AI always handled those details. Thankfully, we’d thought of this beforehand. I manually keyed in the clearance code Jason had acquired for me and hoped that no one in Colonel Murdock’s office was paying attention to the departure logs. If Murdock or Huntington or Mat M’voba were seeing this, they’d know I didn’t have clearance and they’d remotely activate the AI and force it to land the ship.

  There was a blinking green icon as the system accepted the code; I didn’t waste any time celebrating, just fed power to the main jets and headed for orbit. No one haled me, no computer override took control from me, no interceptors moved to block my flight path. The cockpit was silent as the view on the screens changed from dinge-white cloud to deep blue to black and 82 Eridani transformed from a hazy glare to a startlingly close monster of roiling fusion fire.

  I didn’t have the luxury of wool-gathering on this flight; I was totally involved with manually inputting the coordinates for the Transition while simultaneously switching from the fusion drive to the warp impellers and keeping an eye on the tactical board. I’d done it all before, in training simulations, but I’d never thought I’d have to do it for real. It was mentally exhausting, even with my headcomp doing the calculations for me, and by the time Raven had reached the Transition point, I could feel sweat trickling down the small of my back.

  I finally hesitated in that single, still moment when the work was done and the ship was in position and I had the time to think. This was it. There was no turning back when I hit that control and sent the burst of energy to the warp unit. Would there be anything I’d regret leaving behind on this side of the Rubicon? I’d miss Deke and Holly; but I knew they’d understand. There was nothing else left.

  I touched the haptic hologram and felt the twisting of reality take me towards home.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I tried to shake my head clear, felt water droplets scatter from my hair with the motion. I kept trying to remember where I was and what I was doing here and my headcomp kept telling me but I kept forgetting. All I could perceive from moment to moment was that I was restrained somewhere dark and wet and everything hurt.

  There it was again, the knowledge that answered my questions, and this time I tried to latch onto it, gritting my teeth with the effort. I was on Canaan; I was home. I knew that, I could feel it in my gut. I had flown here in a starship, in the Raven. I was still on the ship, strapped into my acceleration couch in the cockpit.

  But why couldn’t I see? Why was I wet? And why did I ache everywhere, why did I hurt so bad that not even the painkillers my pharmisac organ was dosing me with could numb it all?

  Then it flooded back to me in a rush of disconnected thoughts and images: Canaan looking so beautiful in a flood of greens and blues on the viewscreen as I came in towards the Day side, seeing the loose collection of little islands on the opposite side of the planet from Harristown and my home. No one lived there except a few Commonwealth scientific researchers because there was no fresh water. I’d met the scientists assigned there once, when they had dinner with the Chens. I wondered if the Tahni had bothered to kill them.

  I’d cruised in on impellers, then road the rest of the way on my pre-jump velocity before I entered orbit with a nudge from my coldjets. I remembered gliding over the Day side like it was a dream, sliding lower as I approached the Night.

  Then the lightning and the storms, thunderclouds kilometers tall, rotating hurricanes kilometers across, buffeting the Raven like a toy airplane as I descended to avoid the Tahni sensors. They had pickets in orbit, and remote drones at various levels in the atmosphere, but those drones couldn’t see shit in the storms. Unfortunately, neither could I. I couldn't use active sensors, so I was running on dead-reckoning using Fleet maps loaded into my headcomp, and the winds were forcing me lower still and closer to the mountains outside Harristown.

  My hand had hovered over the control to activate the turbojets, but if they spotted the thermal signature... I decided to wait, to save that for a last resort, for an emergency. Somewhere about fifty kilometers northwest of Harristown, I had that emergency. A massive downdraft hit the Raven like a sledgehammer and I felt my restraint straps biting into me as she was sent into a nosedive straight towards the jagged peaks below. I grabbed at the manual control for the turbojets and felt the thrust push me into the acceleration couch. I pulled up on the steering yoke, the control surfaces biting into the air and gradually, painfully pulling the nose up.

  Then the portside wing clipped the mountainside. I felt it like a gut-punch, felt the ship going into a flat spin and my vision began to blur. My headcomp was providing me with a variety of ways out of a flat spin, but most of them required not being surrounded by mountains. I went with the one that didn't and fed a burst of power to the landing jets. The ship groaned. It had never done that before, and it wasn't a good sound. The g-load pushed at me in ways the acceleration couch wasn't designed to compensate for, and I felt consciousness slipping away.

  I pried my eyes open, seeing flashes of light flickering off to my right through a crack in the cockpit, feeling the rain blowing through that hole to splatter against me. The ship had crashed, I understood that now. The hull had splintered and my acceleration couch had actually ripped free of its moorings. I was lying at an angle, propped precariously up against the bulkhead near the back of the cockpit, and I began to receive a laundry list of the various things broken inside me. I concluded there was nothing wrong that the nanites wouldn't be able to fix within a day if I got some food, so I ignored it all and started trying to find the quick-release for my restraints.

  It was jammed and I didn't feel like wrestling with it, so I extended my right-hand talons and sliced through the webbing, putting out a hand to stop myself as I tumbled off to my right, which appeared to be down now. I knelt there for just a moment, trying to compartmentalize the pain, and I began to realize that it was so hard to see because it was dark as shit outside and not a single light was working in the cockpit. The only illumination was from flashes of lightning every few seconds sending intermittent flickers of light through the breaks in the hull. Infrared was useless when there wasn't any ambient light in any spectrum, and thermal wasn't going to do me any good when everything I was looking at was cold plastic and metal.

  I oriented myself to the new slant of the cockpit and felt around for a small compartment set in the bulkhead near the rear entrance. It opened to a strong yank and I reached in to retrieve a couple of the ration bars we kept there. I ripped the wrappers off them and ate them with Machine-like intensity, ignoring the metallic tang of blood mixed with water dripping into my mouth as I chewed. I couldn't stay here. The Tahni might have detected the thermal signature from the atmospheric jets fi
ring and if they sent out drones or worse, a High Guard patrol to search the area, I couldn't be here. The calories from the rat bars would give the nanites some fuel to fix me on the run.

  I dropped the wrappers and levered myself to my feet, the bulkhead slippery and cold with rainwater under my bare hands. I scrambled through the short passageway back to the utility bay, then climbed over the landslide of loose weapons crates that had broken free in the crash. I wasn't worried about the guns or the ammunition; they were a lot more durable than I was. I had to push a few of them aside to reach the equipment locker, and I had to put some serious muscle into prying it open because the door had been bent inward.

  I slipped a tactical vest on over my Reflex armor, fastening it in the front and adjusting the oversized chest pouches full of plasma gun mags before cinching it tight. I belted on my Gauss pistol, then pulled on my gloves and tucked my face hood in a utility pouch before I hefted the plasma gun and squeezed through to the service airlock, a small infrared light on the vest finally letting me see where I was going.

  The airlock wasn't powered up; nothing was. I had no telemetry with the ship at all via my headcomp but I guessed that the reactor had flushed. I pulled open a panel next to the lock and worked the emergency hand crank to slide the inner door aside, then dropped through and had to do the same for the outer door.

  The outer hatch slowly opened with a metallic scraping and a gust of wind blew rain mixed with dirt into the lock; I could see shadows on the ground from the flashes of lightning above the ship, but I couldn't see the sky. The airlock was angled sharply to portside and there was a two meter drop straight down to the rocky ground. I jumped out and fell into a crouch there, holding the plasma gun at the ready and scanning the area around me for threats.

  Thunder echoed through the narrow mountain pass as forks of dazzling white crawled across the black sky, and I saw the jagged, grey peaks of Mount Moriah and Mount Pisgah stretching up into the roiling sky above me. The Raven, I saw with a start of recognition, had crashed along the Heaven's Gate Pass, a road through the mountains that led from Harristown down through the great plains hundreds of kilometers to the western seacoast. It hadn't seen regular use since the colony had first been founded, but the road still endured as a rough, rocky pathway through the mountains. Bits of green sprouted here and there, where hardy local growths defied the cold and the wind, but I was far above the tree line and probably just a few days from the snowstorms that accompanied the Night up here.

  I was about two thousand meters up and maybe thirty-five or forty kilometers from Harristown. Less than that from home. I'd try there, first. The Tahni would be in the city, if they'd left it standing, but maybe the farmsteads would have escaped their notice. That was where I'd have to start, among the people who'd known me. That was where I'd have to go to build an army.

  ***

  It felt strange being back in 1.65 gravities again after years living at Earth Standard or even lighter. Between the augments and the Reflex armor, it didn’t drag at me the way it would have a Normal; but I could feel it, like mud under my feet. I could feel the actual mud under my feet, too. It was a standard week into the Long Night and it looked like it had been raining the whole time; the road down out of the mountains alternated between slick rock awash in a river of run-off, and dirt turned into a boot-sucking morass.

  Between the gravity, the mud and the nanites sucking at my calories to repair cracked vertebrae and bruised organs, a hike that should have taken me a couple hours at a trot on an average day dragged on for twice that. I stumbled down out of the foothills into the Valley of Elah over five hours later, weariness dragging at my shoulders and the plasma gun weighing me down more than I could ever remember. I didn’t dare give myself a boost of adrenalin or any artificial equivalent because I didn’t need to start my internal injuries bleeding again.

  I sat down under the canopy of a Funnel tree and force-fed myself another rat bar, despite the roiling of my stomach. The forest crowded either side of the narrow dirt road: Old Growth native trees, not the bioengineered versions of Earth flora that you found closer to the city. They huddled under giant, flat leaves pulled tightly closed against the Night to conserve heat in the gloomy, wet darkness. When I was a kid, I thought they looked like trolls from a scary story and I’d been afraid to walk among them in the dark.

  They seemed just as forbidding now, but more for their isolation than their appearance. There was no sign of people out here and there should have been. Even during the Night, there were patrols up the old Elah Valley Road by the constabulary; animals got loose, children got lost, vehicles broke down and during the storm season any one of those could be deadly. I hadn't seen a soul, hadn't detected a surveillance drone or an overflight by Tahni aircraft. That meant that the people weren't able or allowed to patrol and the Tahni weren't bothering.

  I sucked in a breath and pushed back to my feet. Only a few more kilometers to go before I reached the first farmstead on the road. That would be the Lowenstein place: Rachel's family. I missed a step as the memory of our last time together slammed into me from my blindside. I was surprised; did those old memories really still hold that much power over me? It all seemed like someone else's life now, like a story I'd told myself more than anything that had ever been real.

  Walking through the Night all alone didn't make things seem any less dream-like. I could half convince myself that it was a nightmare I was having, that I was actually still asleep back on Inferno...or still asleep back on Hermes, next to Jenna, and everything this last year was nothing but a long, bad dream.

  As I got closer to the Lowenstein house, the nightmare only deepened. The fields had gone unharvested here, the genetically modified wheat broken and tramped down by the wind and rain, and rotting where it lay. As I rounded a curve in the road, I could see two of the Lowenstein autoharvesters standing motionless out in their tracks, bare rows out behind them where they'd been chugging along, doing their lonely, robotic work. They were charred and twisted wreckage now, blown apart by a missile or an energy weapon months ago, and left to rust and corrode.

  Another kilometer of stolid walking and I could see their house. Rather, I could barely see what was left of their house, in the glow of the flashes of distant lightning. It had collapsed into a mass of blackened and burned rubble while the barn stood intact, a headstone to a grave not dug. I staggered a step and caught myself.

  You knew it would be bad, I told myself. Maybe Rachel wasn't there. Maybe no one was there. Maybe they evacuated before it was destroyed.

  Maybe.

  I passed by on the road without turning off towards the house, not wanting to see what I'd find in those ruins. The next place along was the McCarty house, and it wasn't damaged too badly but it was dark and abandoned. I actually went inside this time; the doors were wide open and the interior of the house was flooded from the rain. Past the entrance hallway it was as dark as the inside of a tomb and I had to use the infrared lamp on my vest even with my vision enhancement.

  There was a smell of mold and decay that pervaded the house and nearly made me gag as I stepped into the family room. Water splashed and sloshed under my boots and I saw pieces of broken pottery floating in it. Mrs. McCarty, I recalled, was a potter who sold her artwork all over the planet and even offworld. Rather, she had been a potter. I found her bloated and rotting body in the back bedroom. The only way I was sure it was her was the locket she wore around her neck; it was unmistakable, made by her husband. His body was next to hers.

  I stumbled out of the bedroom, fighting not to vomit from the smell. I made myself check the other rooms, even down in their storm cellar, but there were no more bodies. They'd had five children, ranging in ages from toddler to teenagers, though I had to adjust those for the time I'd been gone. The youngest would be almost nine years old now. None of them were in the house or anywhere else around it.

  The Tahni hadn't just come in and killed everyone, I told myself. Everyone wasn't dead. But where wer
e they?

  I got back on the road and kept walking. It was another three kilometers to our property. I could have run that in minutes, but I walked slowly and deliberately and let it take nearly half an hour. It got lighter as I walked, the clouds clearing above me as the storm system passed over and the persistent rain stopped, but still I didn’t speed up my pace.

  I slowed down even more when I saw the wreckage of the barn. It had taken what had to have been a direct hit from a missile. It was gone, bits of charred and shredded buildfoam and long shreds of twisted aluminum scattered around the blackened foundation. Four-wheelers and tractors and harvesters were nearly unrecognizable lumps of molten slag.

  I grunted like I'd been punched. It felt like something was squeezing my chest and breathing was a chore. I forced myself to keep walking, pushing on along the path that ran past the barn, through the stand of trees that separated it from the house.

  The house...my house, my home where I'd been born. It had been built by hand, over a century ago, made from native stone and wood fastened together with modern sealants and adhesives. It had seemed to me like a part of the natural landscape, a mountain or a pond or an old patriarch tree that would always just be there.

  And yet it wasn't. There was a verse from the Book of Life that floated across my memory then, like it had been sent: See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

  Whatever had hit it had blown everything backwards from the front door. There was nothing but bare foundation the first three meters from the front step, burned black and potholed from hot plasma. Behind that were the broken bits of slate-colored stone that had been the walls, mixed together in a pile like the remnants of a toddler's building blocks. The wood support beams were gone, burned away along with everything inside. Everything was rubble and ashes, sunken into the mud, slowly being swallowed up.