by Barry Kirwan
Louise tapped her rifle. “I can save her with this.” Louise stood up, partly doubled over.
Micah stared. There should be no way she could stand after a pulse round to the body. He glanced at her rifle, his pistol arm steady.
Louise tossed her head back, swallowed. “You want her to live, you throw your gun over there. I save her, I leave.”
“No!” Petra groaned. “She killed Chahat-Me right in front of me!” Her last word choked off as she lay shivering with pain on the floor.
Micah waved the pistol at Louise. “I can’t trust you, Louise. You’ll just kill us both afterwards.”
Louise had regained her composure, the sweat dried from her face. “Your choice, Micah. Your little friend has about twenty seconds of life left. Then you get to feel what I’ve lived with for the last eighteen years after I lost Vince.” She looked him in the eye. “I still miss him, you know.”
It was the flash of sadness in her look that convinced him she just might be telling the truth. He glanced down at Petra. He’d lost too many people through the years. He imagined his niece dead, cold, still, silent, then with a growl tossed the pistol aside. Louise angled the rifle towards Petra, stroked her thumb across a patch on its handle, and pulled the trigger. A blue glow encased Petra, then shut off.
Micah bent down towards her, placed his hand on her shoulder. Petra was crying.
Louise dropped the rifle and walked away, leaning on the wall for support with her remaining arm. “Relish the brief time you have left, Micah,” she said, and turned the corner.
He recalled Louise had brought back a ‘surprise’. No doubt she intended to leave and then blow up the Crucible behind her. That was her style.
Micah cradled Petra in his arms, but although still weak, she thumped his chest as he held her. “You… idiot! You should have killed her. She’ll take the hostages. Go after her!”
But although his legs were beginning to recover, he knew he could barely stand let alone walk, his muscles traumatized after that lunge to save Petra. He held her tight, thinking about what he had done. He’d wanted to kill Louise for so many reasons, for betraying humanity, for nearly killing Antonia, for sending two thousand men, women and children into the heart of a sun, and for Hannah, eighteen years ago. And for the crimes Louise was yet to commit, including stealing the human captives away. But Petra had been like the daughter he’d never had, and she was alive, her heart was still beating, her flesh was still warm, and that was all that mattered. She cried some more, and he held her.
After several minutes, two Ossyrians arrived with two Alician prisoners. One of the Ossyrians indicated that they should kill them, but Micah shook his head – he needed to know what this had all been about, where the human captives would be taken. A minute later Kilaney arrived, looking like hell, using his rifle as a crutch. Four Mannekhi accompanied him.
“Micah, you look like –”
“Status?” he said, interrupting someone who far outranked him in every way.
Kilaney raised his chin. “All the Q’Roth are dead. Planet-cutter operations have been terminated, but rockfall on Esperia is in forty-five minutes. This is Commander Xenic, by the way,” he said, nodding to the gaunt Mannekhi, “and all that remains of his crew. They’re on our side now.” He stroked his stubbled chin. “Long story.”
Micah struggled to his feet. “We have to go to the Raptor hangar while there’s still time.” He answered Kilaney’s raised eyebrow. “Louise is leaving us a going-away present.”
While they made their way along twisting corridors and down several levels via spiral rampways, Petra addressed him sternly. “You made a serious tactical error, Uncle.”
Micah didn’t stop or slow down. And I’m going to pay for it very shortly. “One step at a time. First we have to prevent an environmental catastrophe.” He imagined an avalanche of billions of tons of rock sliding towards Esperia.
Micah and the others reached the hangar where three Raptors sat, aside three empty berths; Louise had escaped with the captives. One of the Raptors had a large missile slung underneath it, its external casing glowing violet. Armed, no doubt waiting until Louise and the others had steered a safe distance away.
Kilaney, Xenic and Micah walked over to it. “Any ideas?” Micah said, fully expecting none.
“Only the obvious one,” Kilaney offered. “We get the hell out of here.”
But as they checked each remaining Raptor they quickly found they had been put into sleep mode – it would take twenty minutes for them to fire up. As the others tried to speed up the start routines, Micah double-backed to Louise’s, the one carrying the Nova bomb. Petra saw him and shouted after him but he ignored her. I let Louise live. This is my responsibility.
He sealed the hatch and got to the cockpit. His resident translated the Q’Roth console displays, and he powered up the ship. His resident also detected a countdown for the missile: 64 seconds.
On one of the monitors he saw Kilaney and Petra running over but he gunned the thrusters and the Raptor pitched forward, initially scraping along the hangar floor before he got used to the controls. A holo appeared showing fine, white striations in front of him. He had no idea what they were but decided it was wise to avoid hitting one.
Kilaney came on line. “Micah, get the hell out of there!”
“Look after Petra,” he replied, and shut off comms; he needed to concentrate and get far away fast. He snagged a filament and heard a grinding noise then a thunk, neither of which sounded good. His resident supplied the countdown so he didn’t have to look away from the holomap as he slalomed through the field of filaments into the void of space.
45 seconds.
His hands were steady, not shaking as he thought they might. In his mind images flashed of Blake, his parents, Antonia, Petra, and Sandy. That last face lingered. So much he should have said in the past eighteen years. “Goodbye everyone,” he whispered.
30 seconds.
Comms re-activated on an emergency channel, and a voice barged into his thoughts. “Micah, is that you?”
The man’s voice was oddly familiar, but Micah couldn’t place it; it sounded synthetic.
“Who is –?”
“It’s Pierre, Micah. No time to explain. You must eject now!”
20 seconds.
Micah nearly gashed the ship open on a knot of filaments. The resident said he was far enough from the Crucible.
15 seconds.
“Micah, I said eject!”
He looked around feverishly. “I don’t see how!”
“Just blow the hatch, you have very little time!”
He swung around to the cockpit hatch release lever.
10 seconds.
“But I don’t have a helmet.”
A deep, gruff voice he’d never heard before, nor wanted to again, bellowed at him. “LEAVE SHIP NOW!”
Micah grabbed the release.
5 seconds.
He took a breath, squeezed his eyes shut and yanked the lever downwards.
For an instant he heard the roaring noise of decompression followed by an implosive silence. Stinging lashed every millimetre of his flesh, at once both boiling hot and freezing cold. His lungs ballooned inside him, his throat expanded and his eyes bulged inside his head, his elbows and knees bloating with excruciating pain. Air burst from his mouth in an anguished scream that made no sound whatsoever. Then there was sound, something snapping closed, cocooning him in darkness, a fraction of a second before incredible brightness flared through his still-closed eyelids.
“You can open your eyes, Micah, you’re safe now, you’re on our ship. Another second…”
Micah’s eyes however, were frosted shut. “Pierre?” He reached out and a cool metal hand took his own. He gripped it with both his hands and squeezed hard.
“Fix him quickly,” Pierre said, though Micah couldn’t see whom Pierre addressed, and he didn’t much care.
The Ice Pick dropped Micah off into the hangar and left straightaway. Kil
aney, Petra and the others were all huddled together.
“Nice firework display,” Kilaney said, then placed a hand on Micah’s shoulder. “Good job, Micah.”
Micah wasted no time. Pierre had told him the Crucible was highly unstable, a space wreck in progress. “Commander Xenic,” he said, pointing to one of the warmed-up Raptors, “take that one with your crew, we’ll take the other one. We’ll all need the tripwire detection algorithm.”
Xenic nodded, clearly happy to be given his own ship.
“To what end, Micah? What about the rockfall?” Kilaney asked.
Micah glanced to Petra. “Pierre said he would take care of it.”
Petra’s eyes grew large. “Did you say Pierre? You don’t mean…?” She couldn’t complete the sentence. She’d never met her father, never had the opportunity to even speak to him. Micah held out his hand. Petra moved to Micah’s side, hardly breathing.
“I want to watch him… my father,” she said, swallowing. Her eyes locked onto Micah’s, making it clear she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer.
Micah turned to Kilaney and the others. “Change of plan. You’re all in the other Raptor. We’ll be a while.”
Kilaney was the last to board the Raptor. “Don’t be too long, you two. Well,” he said, “I can’t wait to see the expression on Blake’s face now that I look younger than him.”
Micah and Petra sat side by side in the cockpit, her hand in his. Far away a relentless landslide of rock and dust slid through space toward Esperia. But all the way across its leading edge it was being shaved into a bright swathe of light as a small ship moved almost too fast for the eye to follow, erasing the moonfall’s wave-front, leaving glittering sparks in its place.
Petra’s head was on Micah’s shoulder. “Thank you, Uncle,” she said. “Thank you for saving me so I could see this, so I can finally meet my father.”
Micah said nothing, squeezed his arm around her a little tighter.
She pulled way, looked at him hard. “Uncle, despite what I said earlier, don’t beat yourself up about letting Louise escape.”
He frowned. “Easier said, Petra, and you know it. Antonia –”
“Would thank you, and you know that. Kat, too.” she said, quieter. “But you have to get Antonia back, and the others. You know that don’t you?”
Micah nodded, and she settled back into his shoulder.
He thought about it. Strategically, letting Louise escape with the prisoners was a disastrous decision. Kilaney and Blake should bawl him out for it, though they probably wouldn’t. But together, they’d held Esperia safe. That was the main thing for now.
Silently he swore to get the captives back or die trying, even if he had to damned well do it alone. It would mean going to the Alician homeworld. And why not, he thought. We’ve always been on the defensive, first on Earth, then Eden and now Esperia. Time to take the battle to them.
Pierre’s ship suddenly zipped to intercept a massive boulder the size of a mountain travelling faster than the rest. The Ice Pick vaporised it neatly then resumed at the wave front. “Impressive,” Micah said, “nice save.”
Petra squeezed Micah’s palm, with a gleam in her eyes Micah hadn’t seen for years.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Cracked Sky
The ground crunched underneath Micah’s boots as he made the steep climb up Silent Hill, his breath frosting in the chill air. In the pre-dawn light he was unable to see if anyone else had arrived at what had become a dawn ritual. The sound of a Nightjar, one of the few species of bird rescued from Earth, made him look up, catching sight of the three Kalarash ships close together a kilometre above Esperantia and Shimsha. Pausing, he took in their sleek, elongated crossbow shapes. The three silhouettes resembled the beginnings of an Escher mosaic.
But the Kalarash had arrived too late. Sandy, Antonia, the others… taken to be used like lab-rats; Gabriel, Virginia and Chahat-Me dead. He halted his ascent, squatted down, and dug his fingers into the earth, his breathing laboured. Logically, it wasn’t his fault. And yet… He’d let Louise slip away again. She’d never rest until mankind was gone. Micah knew what he had to do. But he would have to hide it from the others, including Kalaran if he got to meet him. Subduing dark thoughts, he stood up and continued his way.
He stared up again to the ships. It was too early to see the colours of their hulls, but he could just make out that one was blue-green – Kalaran’s – the other violet-red, housing Jen, Rashid and Dimitri, and the third red-green, Hellera’s ship. His eyes slipped back to the stony terrain in front of him; he’d see Jen soon enough at the War Council meeting, hopefully to get some explanations.
On the hill’s summit, as he’d expected, a dozen people stood between waist-high alabaster tombstones, and he again felt the heaviness he’d been unable to shake off despite it being eight days since the mass funeral. For him and the others, this daily vigil was important not only to honour the dead, but because the deceased were somehow a link with the living captives kidnapped by Louise, already on their way back to Savange.
Without being conscious of it, Micah went straight towards the plots of Gabriel and Virginia. Small rocks laced with quartz delineated each rectangular grave, but a few days earlier Petra had removed the stones separating those two, so that they merged into one. Everyone understood. Ramires was already there, Petra kneeling on the damp earth, Blake over at Marcus’ grave. A few other Genners and Steaders whispered around the buried ashes of loved ones.
Micah placed a hand on Petra’s shoulder, and without looking up she laid her fingers on top of his. As one, all those present lifted their gaze as dawn arrived and the sky shifted from dark lapis to aquamarine. Micah drew in a long breath, still not used to what he saw. The sky was cracked, criss-crossed with hundreds of gossamer white lines, as if it had been shattered. He knew they only witnessed a fraction of the extent of the Shrell filaments that stretched all the way to the periphery of Esperia’s solar system. Initially invisible, they had been transformed – energized – by the Kalarash ships as soon as they had arrived three days earlier. He didn’t know why. It was one of the items on his list as soon as Jen returned.
But he and Ramires had the same priority on their agenda – they wanted a ship to go to Savange, to recover the captives, and preferably eliminate Louise and the rest of the Alicians. Chances of success were remote at best. But since the battle for Esperia had ended, there had been a change in the Steader and Genner populace – there was now far more mutual respect and collaboration. Every day and through the night Genners and their parents gathered in the Monofaith, and… just talked to each other. He’d seen several trios of parents and a Genner child where the young boy or girl was patiently explaining something complex, breaking it down till they grasped it. Petra had been instrumental in this social rapprochement, working with both the Genner and Steader sides, arguing that each had something to offer, that Genners needed emotional intelligence and empathy, too, if they weren’t to end up like the Alicians.
One unanticipated outcome from recent events had been a public outpouring of grief, and repeated demands that the sixty captives be rescued. So Micah had heard, when the Alicians had come to take them, many stalwart and well-known citizens had come forward, volunteering themselves rather than letting other more frail or fearful men and women be taken. Micah suspected that had been the case with Antonia and Sandy. The Alicians would have accepted such propositions, yielding stronger stock for their genetic extractions. His thoughts shifted to those two women and their predicament, wondering what exactly had become of them. According to the two Alicians Kilaney had caught, they would be kept alive, though the conditions of their imprisonment were unclear.
Micah realised he was grinding the soil with his boot; Petra saw it too, and squeezed his hand, reminding him that this was a burial ground. He stored his anger for another time and place. Blake came over, standing close to him and Ramires. “It’s time,” he said. Petra got up and led the way back down to Espera
ntia, and the War Council. Micah trudged down the escarpment, his mood gloomy. He had no doubt the Council would support the venture, even if it was purely a political judgement reflecting the emotion of the moment. But the ones they really had to convince were the Kalarash. Only they could grant them their wish by furnishing them a warship for the voyage, but he couldn’t think of one reason why Kalaran or Hellera should oblige. But he would find one.
The Council Chamber, one of the few structures untouched by the Alician raid, was bustling for this time of the morning, hundreds milling about the plaza outside, the smell of fresh flatbreads and clove-spiced Cafarino softening the chill morning air. As the four walked towards the entrance, the chatter around them subsided.
Kat stood in the arched doorway. Micah had barely seen her since her return in the Raptor with the Mannekhi female, Aramisk; Kat spent most of her time since then with Pierre and Petra, and Micah let them be. She kissed her daughter on both cheeks, and then, for the first time ever, gave Micah a hug. She’d not spoken a word to him since she’d heard the news about Antonia, but now she whispered into his ear.
“Get her back, Micah, get a ship from them, no matter what it takes.”
She released him. Micah held her gaze a while. Petra had already relayed what Kat had said about Louise’s behaviour during these past two years, her actions and decisions increasingly unpredictable, her moods full of darkness, and that she was working for Qorall. Louise was more dangerous than ever.
As they were about to go inside, there was a flash behind them. Where they had walked moments before were three figures: the reptilian Ranger Ukrull, the flow-metal Pierre, silver except for his normal, brown eyes, and Jen. He was struck again by the fact that she hadn’t aged due to relativity effects: mousy-blonde hair skirting a shy face with its ski-jump nose and wary, sideways-looking bottle-green eyes. She wore a tan jumpsuit that didn’t flatter her figure, and evidently didn’t care, which meant she was also more self-assured than when he’d known her before. He reminded himself that she’d been with Kalaran for that year, and almost certainly knew far more than anyone else present, save possibly Ukrull, as to what the hell was going on.