by Baen Books
Nico bent over Madhuja’s shoulder to peek at the console. Nothing there, the screen was asleep. She looked back at Madhuja, whose face was not just ashy but icy white, whose face-plate was no longer laced with fine spider-web cracks but blown out completely.
#
The comm array on the Viper was still functional, short-range and long-range alike. Nico radioed the Outpost for assistance to recover the Viper wreck and to repair her own comm array. Madhuja’s body she cleared away herself, and her Digger cut a deep wide grave in the asteroid face. Far from the mineral deposits Nico was here to mine: even in death Madhuja would never be surrounded by riches.
She left the plateless helmet on the floor next to her bed. She thought she should remember, that someone should. The Pod was still quiet and dark, but sometimes the helmet whispered its guilt when Nico tried to sleep. She still didn’t move it, and after a few nights it kept quiet after lights-out.
It was three days after the crash and two days before the garrison arrived from the Outpost that Nico remembered Madhuja’s time in storage.
She found what she was looking for in the box of freeze-dried potatoes and peas, and beamed it over to Zio right away. It wasn’t video, like she’d expected, just raw text. Not in English, nor any alphabet Nico recognized, or knew how to pronounce. But Zio translated it for her automatically: Dear Ammi, if you’re reading this I’m already dead . . .
At the end, two strings of numbers. A bank account and routing number? The message didn’t say. Nico wondered how much ill-gotten Indy wealth lay hidden behind those digits. She wondered how many years of college it would pay for, whether it could manage the down payment for a better house, one out in the suburbs where the air was still clean. Cleaner.
She wondered how old Madhuja’s sister was now.
Not fair, she thought, not fair. Not fair to plug away on this asteroid, and the next one, and the next one while an answer like this fell through her hands. So much money. Thirty pieces of silver, or thereabouts. Good job, Nico, you deserve it for committing manslaughter.
But there was nothing fair about burial in an asteroid field, either. Only a piece of Viper wreckage to mark the place. Nothing just about suffocating fast instead of dying slow. Indy fuck-bucket, Nico thought. Damn Leech. Thief, burglar, swindler, crook.
“Zio,” she said aloud, before she could change her mind. She turned her back on the console. “I’ve got a packet for Earth. Priority one, okay?”
Bringer of Fire
by David Carrico
Vikram Bannerji sat at table number twelve in The Turf Tavern, one of his favorite hangouts in Oxford, England, nursing a glass of whisky. He had been considering a decision he needed to make for close to forty-eight hours, and he wasn’t any closer to making it now than he had been when he started.
He knew what he wanted to do. No, actually, make that he knew what he needed to do. He knew what the right thing was for his family in Mumbai, for India, for his friends here in Oxford, for England, for the world. He knew what his role in it should be. But it meant turning his life into channels he had never considered for his future. More importantly, it meant turning his life into channels his father had never considered for his future, which was another packet of chips altogether.
The tabletop thunked as a glass landed on it. Vikram felt the vibration as someone else plopped in a chair across the table from him.
"What's up, Vik? You look like your favorite polo pony died."
That was Neil McLeod, a brash young red-haired Scotsman, studying English language and literature at Merton College. His Highland brogue, although tempered by years in British public schools, was still there, and had more than once tripped Vikram up in conversations, especially when the two of them had lifted more than a few mugs of ale, beer, or Neil's favorite potable, Guinness.
Of course, Neil would make the same complaint about Vikram's accent. Truth to tell, there was still a hint of the melodious Indian lilt to Vikram's tenor, although his diction and pronunciation was pure upper-class English. He sounded more Oxonian than most of his classmates, especially the American Rhodes Scholars.
"Not funny," Vikram muttered. "Rhakshasi is fine. Better than I am, actually."
"I was kidding, mate," Neil said. "You take better care of that horse than you do your girlfriend." He took a pull at his glass, and licked a bit of foam from his upper lip. "How long have you been here?"
"What time is it now?" Vikram looked at his watch. "Three hours."
"Well, then, I have a stern chase ahead of me. How many have you had?"
Vikram laid a finger on the rim of his glass. "Third."
"And you're still coherent? A miracle, that." Neil picked up Vikram's glass and sniffed of it. "Whoa. The good stuff. Glenlivet?
"Glenfiddich. Fifty year."
Neil whistled. "What's the occasion?"
"I'm thinking."
That drew a snort in reply, and the Scot took a long pull at his pint.
Vikram reclaimed his glass and finished the last finger of liquid in it. He waved at a waiter who was floating by.
The Turf was known for its traditions about the ambience of the establishment, which dated back for hundreds of years. One of the traditions was live staff, despite the modern technology available elsewhere. And the staff members were proud of being chosen to work there. Competition for positions when they opened up was quite stiff.
The waiter took up Vikram's glass with some care. "Same again?"
"Yes."
The waiter disappeared around the corner to the bar. He reappeared a minute or so later with another tulip-shaped whisky glass loaded with exactly the right amount of Scotch and water. "Cathy says this is the last of the fifty-year bottle. The distributor's been slow in his deliveries lately, so you'll have to settle for fifteen-year for the rest of the night."
"I'll cope," Vikram assured the waiter.
"Anything to eat, mate?"
"No."
"If you don't eat something soon, Cathy's going to shut off your booze," the waiter warned. "Too much drink, even this stuff, on an empty stomach is not a good thing, she says." Cathy was the bar manager and was quite capable of following through on that threat.
Vikram quirked his mouth. "Bring me the fish and chips in about a half hour, then. Without—"
"—the mushy peas," the waiter said with a grin. "I remember."
"Thanks, Stephan."
The waiter nodded and strode off.
Vikram lifted the glass and though he'd already had three servings of the Scotch, he still held it under his nose and breathed in the vapors. Even in his current state, he still appreciated the aroma of one of the world's finest whiskies. Lowering the glass a bit, he took a small sip and rolled it around his mouth, savoring it once again—fine whisky, with just the right slight amount of water to smooth the taste and bring it to its peak of flavor.
"So what?" Neil asked, with a certain amount of impatience in his voice.
"What?"
"Exactly—what are you thinking about?"
"Ah," Vikram said. "I need to make a decision."
"Bollocks," Neil said matter-of-factly.
"What?"
"You heard me," the Scot said, "I said bollocks. My pronunciation was clear and distinct, I believe. You've never taken more than fifteen minutes to make a decision on something in all the time I've known you."
Vikram shrugged. "This is complicated."
"Try me."
Vikram shrugged again. "I'll be leaving school in a few days."
"What? In the middle of the term? Why, in God's name? You're going to have a D.Phil. in economics in . . . " He stopped to count, “ . . . nine weeks, with honors, yet, and you're going to walk away from it all? Now? Have you lost your bloody mind?"
"No," Vikram replied as he swirled the Scotch around in his glass and took another smell of it. "Sadly, I have not. Although I'm certain my family will think so."
"Forget your family," Neil said with intensity, "I think you'r
e bloody insane. All your friends and all your professors will think you're bloody insane. Your family can get in line behind us. And we'll all be bloody right, because if you do this, you are bloody insane."
Neil's com pad pinged at him, and he snatched it up, swearing after he read a displayed message. "Bloody hell!"
"What?" Vikram asked.
"Old McGillicuddy says he's found a flaw in my thesis draft, and he wants to talk to me about it right now. Something about Tolkien's concepts of the Ents not being derived from his liking of trees after all."
"Oh." Professor Ian McGillicuddy, B.A., M.A., M.Phil., M.A. (Sorbonne), D.Phil., F.R.S.L., O.B.E., was Merton College's resident expert on the life and works of one J. R. R. Tolkien, Merton's most favorite son, and was therefore Neil's faculty advisor on his thesis about the origin of the Ents. For all that the Irish professor's one-time blazing bush of red hair was now mostly silvered, his quickness of wit was legendary, and his passion for defending the work and legacy of his distinguished predecessor knew few bounds. "Told you—you should have written on Sir Walter Scott."
"Sharrup," Neil said as he stood and gathered his com pad and bag. "We're not done with this. You haven't half explained what's going on in that narrow little head of yours. You just stay here and keep drinking the good stuff until I get back."
With that, the Scot wheeled and strode forcefully toward the exit, saying something to his com pad as he did so.
Vikram stared into the depths of his glass, running his finger around the rim. His mind drifted back fifteen years.
He barely remembered the world before the coming of the Jao two decades before. At twenty-four, his solid memories of age four had little content about the affairs of the world. He'd been a lot more focused on games and food at that age. So objectively, while he knew there was a time where his country, his world, had not been subject to the overlordship of the Jao conquerors, subjectively they had always been a part of the matrix of his world.
From what he could tell, though, from contemporary accounts and from his father and grandfather, by the time the initial shock of the invasion had dissipated and the world really came to grips with what was happening, most of it had already been overrun. India had put up a more spirited resistance than most, but for all their population and their economic base, their military had not been powerful enough to do more than gather a token resistance strong enough to attract the attention of a senior commander of the fur-clad invaders. A week and two days later, every aircraft in the Indian Air Force was destroyed, every ship in the Navy was sunk, every nuclear weapon in their arsenal had either been used to no avail or had been captured by the invaders, and there were no ground-combat-capable formations left. At that point, the government fell, and the rump of it surrendered before new elections could be held.
Of all the countries of the world, only three had been able to mount any kind of serious resistance to the invaders: Russia, China, and the United States. No one else had both the depth of territory and the depth of resources necessary to even temporarily put a halt to the advance of the aliens. And even they had lost—after some particularly fierce battles. By the first anniversary of the invasion, there was still unrest in pockets of the world, especially North America, but the Jao were in undisputed control world-wide, and weren't shy about demonstrating that control if challenged.
So by the time Vikram was old enough to really start tracking the world around him, the Jao were already in place. India, like most of the world, wasn't especially happy about the state of things, but they also had long experience in dealing with autocratic rulers, and actually recovered from the effects of the invasion fairly quickly. Their internal markets were robust enough that they were able to keep a semblance of an economy up and running even in the worst years. More so than most of the other countries, actually.
But the Jao almost destroyed that when Vikram was nine. Earth's people still hadn't totally accepted that when the Jao said “no,” they were deadly serious—emphasis on "deadly." A climbing team decided to ignore a direct order from Governor Oppuk, the Jao who had been left to manage Earth after the conquest, and make an ascent on Mount Everest. The governor had waited until they were making their final assault on the final leg of the north slope climb before ordering a bolide launch.
The Jao could have made their point with a military assault craft and picked the climbers off with weapons fire. Or they could have dropped a small bolide that would have basically taken the top few meters off the mountain and produced a seismic wave that would have knocked the climbers off the slopes to their doom. But instead, Governor Oppuk, in the first evidences of the excesses for which he would subsequently become infamous, had apparently ordered a massive bolide drop. As best as humans were later able to determine, the bolide involved had been a stony asteroid almost three hundred meters in diameter.
The resulting event had made the Siberian Tunguska event look like a fizzled firecracker. Over eight hundred meters of Everest's peak were vaporized, moving the mountain down to sixteenth on the list of the world's tallest mountains. The impact had created both an atmospheric shock wave and a massive seismic wave as well that registered strongly on seismographs all over the world.
Needless to say, the climbers were vaporized right along with millions of cubic meters of rock. It had occurred in November, and the prevailing wind was blowing from northeast to southwest. The dust cloud and debris tracked across much of northern India before it encountered the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. Traces of the dust were measured in southern Africa, and even scientific stations in Antarctica and southern Argentina measured bits of it.
Vikram had remembered his father Murali arguing with his grandfather Anil about it. Bannerji was an old Brahmin caste name, and even though the caste system was mostly defunct by this generation, there was still a certain repute and respect in the name. And while Vikram and his brothers and sisters were all modern Indians who paid lip service to the Hindu faith, their father and even more their grandfather had been believers.
"The dust cloud and the debris will undoubtedly cause a few deaths in the north," Murali had said from the comfort of their home in Mumbai. Vikram had been lurking outside a barely opened door, eavesdropping. "It may raise some toxicity levels in some of the water supplies, which will probably kill a few more people and some livestock. But in the grand scheme of things, we will have gotten off lightly. Not like poor Nepal. Half their country is in ruins from the seismic shocks."
"Are you willfully blind or do you truly not see?" Anil had snapped. "The blood of the climbers was part of that cloud. It has polluted everything it touched, including all the temples in its path. We will be decades cleansing the land—maybe generations."
Murali had grunted in reply. Vikram had heard nothing else of the conversation, as the two men had left the house shortly after that. But it had an impact, for in addition to making quiet donations to the various temples in the dust cloud path, the entire family had taken Governor Oppuk in severe dislike after that point in time. And in that, they were no different from the rest of India or the eastern Muslim states like Pakistan and Afghanistan, all of which had been touched by the dust cloud.
Vikram's personal antipathy for the Jao had certainly dated from that day. He never had a good word to say about the Jao, and particularly Governor Oppuk, after that. His father and grandfather had been of similar mind, for the family and their business conglomeration had quietly worked around many of the Jao directives, and their assembly lines had produced a number of items that were stealthily shipped world-wide under the very noses of the Jao—items that would undoubtedly have earned them a bolide of their own on the family home if the invaders ever caught on.
To put it mildly, Vikram despised the Jao. He carried that hatred through his school years, on into undergraduate work at University of Delhi, followed by graduate studies at Indian Institute of Technology, and now Oxford. Nothing had been presented to him to cause him to change his opinion of the overlords.
>
Until about a month ago, that is, when the Ekhat that everyone had assumed were either mythical or overblown Jao bogie men showed up and broke through the ranks of the defending ships to drop a ball of solar plasma on southern China. And now, all Vikram's assumptions were turned upside down.
The table thumped again, and Vikram looked up to see his sister Sati sitting in Neil's chair.
"What's this about you leaving school?" she demanded. "Are you insane?"
"Neil shopped me, I take it," Vikram said with a sardonic half-smile.
"Of course he did! And it's a good thing he did if you're really thinking about this. Do you know what Father will do to you if you do that? If he even thinks you'll do it?"
Vikram laughed. "Why do you think I'm still sitting here considering it? I'm working up the courage to face him." He lifted his glass in a mock salute, and took a sip.
"So what are you going to do?" Sati's brow furrowed, and her dark eyes bored into Vikram's. She had always been his favorite sister, not least because they had thought so much alike. They weren't twins, but were close in age, and had been natural allies against their younger siblings.
"I'm going to align with the Jao."
"What?" Her startled reaction attracted attention from passers-by, and she leaned forward and lowered her voice. "Now I know you're crazy. Just what in hell are you going to do . . . go join the jinau or something?"
Vikram avoided that question and pulled his com pad out.
"Sati, I think we have a fundamental misunderstanding of the Jao." He tapped on his com pad. "Oppuk is—was—evil, yes. And it was our misfortune that he was left over Earth for so long. But it seems like the Jao have finally realized that. That image of his execution by the jinau soldier wasn't faked, anyway. And this new leader, this Aille—he seems different."