Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Grim."

  "Grim as in they've missed a few showers? Or grim as in they're about to start eating each other?"

  "Then you've seen the latest reports."

  Rada drew back from the table. "They're eating each other?"

  "There have been reports," Stuart repeated. "I find them believable, even credible."

  "What can we do to help?"

  Kansas shrugged. "We shouldn't do a damn thing."

  "Have you gone mad? There's still billions of people down here."

  "You mean billions of traitors. When the Lurkers came for their homes, the people of Earth didn't choose to fight back. They chose to surrender."

  "They didn't hold a vote! Cannel and the Unified Defense League made the decision for them!"

  "But they voted for Cannel. They chose to be led by gutless rats that would surrender to the aliens instead of fighting for their lives. Even after they knew he meant to surrender, they didn't revolt against him. They just let it happen. Because they're soft. Well, it's time for all the soft ones to die and leave the System in the hands of those who were willing and able to defend it."

  "What's your plan, then? Drop nerve gas across the planet, then bring in brave Locker pirates to resettle it?"

  Kansas put on a skeptical look. "That's kinda barbaric, don't you think? When I say we should do nothing, I mean we do nothing. Let things play out on Earth as they will. The ones who survive will be the ones who can survive. Those are the people I want sharing the System with me."

  "This is completely crazy. You're talking about mass murder."

  "I'm not the one that bombed them to hell. I was the one fighting for them to not get bombed. As I recall it, Earth's leaders sent their own fleet against me to stop us from turning back the Lurkers."

  "You're right. Earth was betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect it. But if you walk away from Earth now, you'll be finishing the Lurkers' work for them."

  She and Kansas stared at each other. The blue of Kansas' eyes was as cold as the ice of Nereid.

  "The scope of the devastation may not be clear to you," Stuart said. "The Lurkers' assault was thorough. There is very little infrastructure of any scale remaining. Much of what survived the Lurkers' strikes was damaged or destroyed in the international conflicts that followed. That was the Lurkers' strategy and it worked extremely well. Three billion were lost in the initial bombardment, which targeted the cities, and its immediate aftermath. We estimate losses have now risen as high as five billion."

  Rada's tongue felt too thick to speak. The numbers were beyond comprehension. "You're saying two billion were killed in the international wars?"

  Stuart shook his head. "Most of the casualties that followed were from starvation, lack of water, and disease. As it stands, Earth can't reverse these problems on their own."

  "So start the evacuation. Get them to Mars. The Belt. Every station that can house them."

  Kansas' eyes flashed. "If you try to fly a single one of them to the Locker, or any station under my control, I'll blow your ships out of the sky."

  "Are you completely crazy, Kansas? Most of these people had nothing to do with their governments' decisions. They're innocent."

  "They're infected. Not with disease. With weakness. They're not like my people and they never will be. Bring them to the Locker and you might save their lives, but you'll destroy the Locker."

  "You're still not understanding." Stuart's voice remained utterly patient. "There remain at least five billion people on Earth. How many cargo ships can you muster to relocate them?"

  Rada shook her head. "We converted almost everything that could fly into warships. It wouldn't surprise me if there were less than four hundred cargo vessels left in the entire System."

  "And how many people could fit onto those four hundred ships?"

  "You'd be lucky to squeeze in a thousand per ship. So four hundred thousand total," she said. Stuart was opening his mouth to say more, but Rada was already ahead of him. "It would take at least two weeks from now for them to arrive, load up, and deliver their passengers to another station. If they fly right back and do it again, that's less than a million people relocated in the first month. How many people would die on Earth in the meantime?"

  "Another billion. Potentially more."

  "You see?" Kansas said. "Relocating them is pointless. If you try it, you won't save the planet, but you just might ruin my station."

  "Relocation isn't the only option," Rada said. "We can treat the problems here instead. Bring the survivors all the supplies we can, prioritizing food and the supplies necessary to get their power back up and running."

  Stuart nodded. "I have already been in contact with various stations about providing resources and cargo transports. However, my name means nothing to them and they will not commit what little they have without the authority of the admirals who broke the Lurkers."

  "I'll put my name behind any request you make," Rada said. "Kansas?"

  Kansas slid her jaw forward. "These are the same people who've been fighting for two hundred years to control and destroy my way of life. Well, my way of life just saved our species. That means these people would have driven us extinct."

  "So what's your plan? Drive them extinct instead?"

  "That would be the smart play. History would blame me for it, of course. They would cast me as the monster. Like I'm to blame for Earth being so helpless. Like I made its people so afraid of facing the truth. There are bad people and even worse aliens. If you don't have the will to defend yourself, then your leaders will treat you like cattle. When times are good, they'll be happy to milk you. But when times get tough, they'll sell you out to save their own skin."

  "So there are bad people out there, huh? You mean like murderous pirates that have been preying on Earth's colonies and shipping lanes for generations?"

  Kansas grinned, showing lots of teeth. "That's the real question at play, isn't it? If Earth hadn't been hunting us, trying ceaselessly to domesticate us and turn us into one more stall in their shopping mall empire, would we have gone soft?" She turned to the screen and gazed down on the battle-scarred world. "I think we would have. So I'll give them their chance to recover. By the time they do, my people will be the empire. And maybe it will be us who needs to be reminded how to fight."

  Seemingly unconcerned by the implications of anything he'd just heard, Stuart switched the conversation to the details necessary to bring in as much aid as possible. Mat-Nalin mentioned that many of the supplies the Belt had gathered for their own evacuation could be shuttled to Earth instead. Winters rattled off a dozen corporate sites that could be turned over to the manufacture of power supplies. Even Kansas offered the condensed food she'd cached for the Locker in preparation for a longer conflict.

  When the enormity of it reached her, Rada's throat closed so tightly she was unable to speak for several seconds.

  They had won the war. But she would be long dead before humanity had undone the damage wreaked upon it.

  ~

  They flew in from the sea, dark blue water sparkling under a persistent sun. Below them in the bay, exactly where it had fallen, the disk of the Dovon mothership jutted from the waves, the alien metal eroding so slowly it might be another ten thousand years before the last piece of it finally crumbled away into the ocean.

  The city of Founder's Bay lay in tatters. Whole blocks had been smashed into debris-clogged craters, some of which had been filled by the output of broken water and sewage lines. The skyscrapers of sympathy glass that had once stood like icons stolen from a higher plane of reality had been dashed down like broken china. Entire neighborhoods had burned and the hills ringing the metropolis were scorched with black stripes. The smoke that rose now, however, was from cook fires. Along with this evidence of life, scavengers crept behind houses here and there searching for valuables and food, but the city, once among the largest in the world, was all but abandoned.

  Across from MacAdams, Webber stared out from the
flier's window, expressionless. He must have felt MacAdams' gaze on him, but he didn't look up. Mina reached for MacAdams' hand. He gave it a squeeze.

  The pilot tried to take them down on a stretch of clear road just a few blocks up from the St. Martin's Street address, but was forced back up by small arms fire from a boarded-up house. They had to settle for an LZ in a park a half mile away.

  The craft touched down. MacAdams was first out the hatch. There had been looting, killings, and even one attempt by a local gangster to reinstitute the true empire of Raina the Great, and MacAdams wore a combat suit disguised as street clothes and carried a rifle disguised to look like a much less threatening rifle. Mina came next. Webber was last out the hatch. His eyes were darting every which way, drawn to every rustle of leaves or garbage.

  "Remember that there's a good chance she ain't here," MacAdams said. "The whole city looks deserted."

  "The whole city isn't sick with an illness that needs constant treatment," Webber said. "She wouldn't leave her house."

  "Everything's gone to hell down here. People haven't had much choice about when to stay and when to go."

  "Let's just get to the house," Mina said. "Before whoever's watching us decides to take a shot at us."

  MacAdams nodded and headed out of the park and into the street. The sun wouldn't quit and it was halfway warm even though they were well into winter. Along with its historical significance, the temperate climate was a large part of why the city was widely considered a paradise.

  But it would be a long time until that was true again. At that moment in time, the city looked like, and was, the aftermath of a war zone. Buildings blasted into garbage. Dead people everywhere. The bodies had had weeks to rot in the pleasant, temperate sun. No traffic of any kind. If anybody was there other than the scavengers, they were in hiding.

  Webber grunted. "Looks just like one of the Panhandler movies."

  "It does," MacAdams said. "But not nearly enough bodies. Most of the people here got away to somewhere else."

  Webber nodded, not looking consoled in the slightest. The refugee logs were far from complete, but the people who weren't on them had either hidden themselves away in the wilds or died. And Dinah was not the type to make a go of it alone in the mountains.

  MacAdams stuck to storefronts for the first few blocks—when the stores hadn't been blown apart, at least—but had to move to the street when the neighborhood switched to single-family homes and the sidewalks became snarled with knocked-down trees. In front of a Blue Classic-style house, a brown dog looked up from the possum it was eating and watched them go past.

  Webber stopped and nodded to a pale green house across the street. "That's it."

  MacAdams surveyed the houses around it. Everything looked empty. Most of them had smashed windows or open front doors. "You want to cover us from out here?"

  "No. I'm going inside."

  "I'll stay," Mina said, understanding. She slipped across the street, got behind a hedge of thorny purple bougainvillea, and braced her rifle.

  Webber headed for the house. The yard was brown. The front door was closed but unlocked. The interior was dark, much darker than the sunny street, and smelled like dust and something rotten. MacAdams feared the worst, but the rot turned out to be an open refrigerator. Since the loss of its power, it had transitioned into a thriving mold farm.

  The floors were fake wood. Grit crunched underfoot. There were already a few cobwebs. There were no bodies. All the medicine and toiletries were missing from the bathroom, but that could easily have been looters. After a look in the back yard—MacAdams didn't see any graves—they returned to the front.

  "I'm sorry," MacAdams said. "We'll keep looking."

  Webber sat on the stoop. "No one's lived here in weeks. Probably not since the invasion."

  "Which means she might have left early."

  "Do you actually think we'll find her? And I don't want to hear any platitudes or easy words. I want to know what you really think."

  MacAdams held the strap of his rifle. "You want the truth?"

  "That's what I just said, isn't it?"

  "People say they want the truth all the time when what they mean is they want to be told what they want to hear."

  "Well, I want the truth."

  "She probably didn't make it. Most people here didn't, and she's less mobile than most."

  "Yeah."

  MacAdams turned back to the house. "But we know she didn't die here. That means she got somewhere. Maybe even somewhere where she's still alive. So we'll keep looking for her until we find her or you say stop."

  "It's not right," Webber said. "I spent my life trying to make hers better. In fact, I spent two lives, counting the one I faked the end of. With some help from Toman, her life had finally gotten pretty good. Good enough that I didn't have to worry about her anymore. Then what happens? A fucking alien invasion comes along and takes everything away from her. What kind of sense does that make?"

  "Not a hell of a lot."

  "We might not have lost to the Lurkers, but I don't think you can say that we beat them. How much did this cost them? A few hundred ships? A few thousand soldiers and crew? We're never going to fly out to their worlds and bomb them. Meanwhile, there's five billion of us dead. And a couple billion more who will never see their families again."

  It was true and there was no arguing otherwise and there was no consolation, so MacAdams said nothing. The sun was warm and it was so quiet you could hear the boom of the surf even though the ocean was a mile to the west. If humans had never built a city here to be ruined, it would have been gorgeous.

  A woman stepped out from across the street. MacAdams shielded his eyes to the sun, about to tell Mina that Dinah wasn't here and all they could do was leave a note and get back to the flier, but the woman crossing the street was a lot too thin and pale to be Mina. Her hair was too light, too.

  The woman cocked her head. "Mr. MacAdams?"

  Webber got to his feet so fast he nearly fell over. The woman put her hand to her mouth. "Pippin?"

  Webber ran to her. Thin and rickety as she was, Dinah ran to him, too. They embraced in the middle of the leaf-strewn street in a dead city in a universe that hurt you every day until the day it decided to kill you. But for now, they were still standing, brother and sister. It was all they had left in the world, and it was enough.

  ~

  They held Toman's funeral at the Hive. The artificial side of the station had been shot up pretty thoroughly during the war with FinnTech and Valiant and there hadn't been the time or resources to make any but the most critical and patchwork repairs, leaving it looking ragged and unstable.

  But the miniature three-mile-wide mini-Earth that made up the other half of the station had come through everything in one piece. So it was there that they gathered, at the shore of the lake where Toman had liked to fish, with the high towers of the castle overlooking them from the hill.

  All of the Lords of the True Realm were there, looking somber and much more clean-cut than usual. So were Webber and Dinah and MacAdams and Mina, along with Winters and Stuart. Rada wasn't sure they'd come, but Kansas had shown up with Ced, and Mat-Nalin was there too, along with a motley yet respectably-dressed contingent of Belters and Dashers.

  There were also a great deal of representatives from various corporations, only a few of whom Rada recognized from the wars, be it with FinnTech or the Lurkers. They seemed to recognize her, though, introducing themselves or nodding from afar. She got the impression that several of them would have made her high-end job offers if not for the fact they were presently at the funeral of her employer.

  All in all, several hundred people had traveled there from across the System. Nearly two thousand more had come from the other side of the habitat. Each one of them went dead silent as a man in a gray robe ascended the dais at the bank of the little lake.

  He laced his fingers together and lowered his gaze. "We assemble to pay honor to the life of Toman Ramsey Benez. This is an
easy task, for Toman, though still so young, accomplished so much that is worthy of our praise. He founded his company before most of his peers had entered university. He acquired the Hive, and converted it into a center of extraterrestrial scholasticism. Yet when the time came, this man of science and inquiry proved willing and able to pick up the sword: first against the conquest of the System by his fellow humans, and then against its invasion by alien beings."

  The priest went on in this manner for several minutes. Rada listened with one ear while she went over her own words. She had had no idea there would be so many people at the event and very much hated the idea of getting up in front of them to speak, but her feelings didn't matter. It was her duty to honor Toman, and she would do so.

  The priest wrapped up. A woman spoke, Toman's sister. Rada hadn't even known that he had a sister.

  Then it was her turn. She left her seat and crossed the grass to the dais. The artificial sunlight bouncing from the lake dazzled her and when she turned to the crowd they were nothing but a blur.

  "I did not meet Toman under the most personally flattering circumstances," she said. "In fact, I'm lucky I can remember those circumstances at all. But I'm even luckier that, even though I was a total mess, he still wanted me on his team. One of his best talents was his eye for talent." She smiled slightly. "Is it vain to say that? Well, he was great at it. More than that, he didn't care where you came from, what kind of pedigree you had, how important your friends and peers were. If you could do what he needed you to do, he would let you climb as high as your ability could take you."

  She could see clearly now that her eyes had adjusted to the light, but she still paid no mind to the 2500-odd people watching her. "He rescued me. A few years later, he rescued everyone. Somehow, he took a fragmented System of corporations, pirates, frontiersmen, and free agents, and he united us into a single people. The craziest part is that he did all this without really being a soldier himself. He would have been the first to admit that. He was a leader, yes, but he wasn't a born fighter."

  Rada's throat and eyes were starting to burn and she knew she didn't have much longer. "No, it wasn't in Toman's nature to be a warrior. But by the end, when it mattered most, he became one."