Wilson stopped. “Uh,” he said.
“‘Uh’?” Lowen said. “Are you kidding me, Harry?”
“Here,” Wilson said, and sent instructions from his BrainPal to Lowen’s suit. It sealed up everywhere but the eyes. “That should be fine until we go,” he said.
“When is that?” Lowen asked.
“I was going to do an emergency purge of the deck,” Wilson said. “But now I’ll wait for the pods to go before we do.”
“And then I’ll be blind,” Lowen said.
“Sorry,” Wilson said.
“Just talk to me on the way down, all right?” Lowen said.
“Uh,” Wilson said.
“‘Uh,’ again?” Lowen said.
“No, wait,” Wilson said. “You have your PDA, right?”
“I put it in my underwear, since you insisted I take off my clothes,” Lowen said.
“Put the audio up as loud as you can. Then I should be able to talk to you,” Wilson said.
From above the shuttle deck, the two of them heard panicked yelling and screaming, and the thundering of people running down the ramp to the shuttle deck.
“Oh, my God, Harry,” Lowen said, pointing at the rush. “Look at that.”
Harry turned in time to see a flash, a hole in the hull where the bottom of the ramp used to be, and people both thrown into the air and sucked out of the hole. Lowen screamed and turned, losing her footing and falling hard against the deck, momentarily stunning her. The suction of the hole sent her tumbling silently into space.
Harry frantically sent a command to her suit to cover her eyes and then leaped into space after her.
IX.
Captain Coloma had been keeping tabs on Schmidt and Wilson, the Clarke’s lost sheep, via their PDA and BrainPal, respectively. Wilson had been moving about shuttle gate five but seemed fine; Schmidt was at gate seven, having just missed the shuttle, and was largely motionless until the announcement about the escape pods. Then the ships attacking Earth Station started putting missiles into the shuttle gates, intentionally targeting the decks where the people were funneling into escape pods.
“You sons of bitches,” Coloma said.
She was alone on the Clarke. The escape pods off the ship seemed not to attract attention. At the very least, no missiles were sent in their direction. Not every crew member was happy to go; she’d had to threaten Neva Balla with a charge of insubordination to get her into a pod. Coloma smiled grimly at this memory. Balla was going to make an excellent captain.
The ships targeted and hit the sections Wilson and Schmidt were in. Coloma zoomed in and saw the wreckage and the bodies vomiting out of the holes in the Earth Station hull. Remarkably, Coloma’s tracking data told her both Wilson and Schmidt were alive and moving. “Come on, guys,” Coloma said.
Wilson’s data indicated he had been sucked out of gate five. Coloma grimaced at this but then watched his BrainPal data further. He was alive and just fine, aside from hyperventilating slightly. Coloma wondered how he was managing this trick until she remembered that he was scheduled to do a jump with a U.S. soldier later today. It looked as though he were doing it earlier than he expected. Coloma watched his data for a few seconds more to assure herself that he was good, then turned her attention to Schmidt.
Her data on Schmidt was less exact because his PDA did not track his vital statistics, unlike a BrainPal. All Coloma could tell was that Schmidt was on the move. He had gotten himself down the ramp of gate seven, which the Clarke’s shuttle pilot had damaged, meaning it was filled with vacuum. Despite that, Schmidt had planted himself in an escape pod. Coloma was curious how he’d managed that and regretted that at this point it would be unlikely that she would ever find out.
The escape pod launched, plunging down toward the atmosphere.
The Erie Morningstar launched a missile directly toward it.
Coloma smiled. She went to her display, tracked the missile and vaporized it with the final blast of her antiparticle beam. “No one shoots down my people, you asshole,” she said.
And finally, Coloma and the Clarke had the attention of the interloping ships. The Erie Morningstar launched two missiles in her direction. Coloma waited until they were almost on top of her before deploying countermeasures. The missiles detonated beautifully, away from the Clarke, which was now swinging itself around as Coloma plugged in a course for the Erie Morningstar.
The Erie Morningstar responded with two more missiles; Coloma once more waited until the last minute before countermeasures. This time she was not as lucky. The starboard missile tore into the skin of the Clarke, rupturing forward compartments. If anyone had been there, they would be dead. Coloma grinned fiercely.
In the distance, three ships fired on the Clarke, two missiles each. Coloma looked at her display to gauge how long it would be until impact. She grimaced at the numbers and pushed the Clarke’s engines to full.
The Erie Morningstar was now clearly aware of what the Clarke was up to and was attempting evasive maneuvers. Coloma compensated and recalculated and was pleased with her results. There was no way the Erie Morningstar wasn’t going to get kissed by the Clarke.
The first of the new set of missiles plowed into the Clarke, followed by the second and then the third and fourth in rapid succession. The Clarke went dark. It didn’t matter; the Clarke had inertia on its side.
The Clarke crumpled into the Erie Morningstar as the fifth and sixth missiles struck, shattering both ships.
Coloma smiled. Her Colonial Defense Forces orders were, should she engage a hostile ship that attacked either her or Earth Station, to disable the ship if she could and destroy it only if necessary. They wanted whoever was in the ship, in order to find out who was behind everything the Colonial Union was coming up against.
That ship is definitely disabled, Coloma thought. Is it destroyed? If it is, it had it coming. It went after my people.
Sitting there in the dark, Coloma reached over and patted the Clarke fondly.
“You’re a good ship,” she said. “I’m glad you were mine.”
A seventh missile tore into the bridge.
Wilson couldn’t see Lowen but could track her. His BrainPal vision showed her as a tumbling sprite twenty clicks to the east. Well, fair enough. He was tumbling, too, because of his hasty exit from Earth Station; his BrainPal gave him an artificially stabilized view of things. Wilson was less concerned about her tumbling and more concerned about her utter silence. Even screaming would be better because it would mean she was conscious and alive. But there was nothing from her.
Wilson pushed it from his mind as best he could. There was nothing he could do about it right now. Once they were in the atmosphere, he could maneuver himself over to her and see how she was doing. For now, all he needed to do was get her through the burning part of reentry.
Instead of thinking about Lowen, Wilson had his BrainPal turn its visual attention to Earth Station, which floated darkly above him, save for the occasional flare as the missiles struck another area of the station. Wilson did a status check of the Colonial Union diplomatic ships at Earth Station. The Aberforth, the Zhou and the Schulz were all pulling away from Earth Station at speed, with or without their diplomatic contingents. Their captains were probably aware by now that one way or another, Earth Station was going up like a roman candle.
The Clarke was missing or not responding. That was not good at all. It it wasn’t there, then it wouldn’t matter whether the shuttle got everyone out or not; they would have met their fate on the ship. Wilson tried not to think about that.
He especially tried not to think about Hart.
There was a dazzling light from Earth Station. Wilson focused his attention on it once more.
It was detonating. Not haphazardly, as in the attack; no, this was a planned and focused thing, a series of brilliant flashes designed to reduce an entire spaceship into chunks no larger than one’s own hand. Whatever the attacking ships started, the Colonial Union’s detonation protocols were f
inishing now.
A thought flashed into Wilson’s head: Some of that debris is headed this direction and it’s going much faster than you are.
A second thought flashed into Wilson’s head: Well, fuck.
Wilson’s BrainPal alerted him that Lowen was beginning to drag on the Earth’s atmosphere. A second later, it told him he was beginning to do the same thing. Wilson ordered the release of the nanobots and immediately found himself encased in a matte black sphere. On the other side of that, he knew, would be several thousand degrees of reentry friction that the nanobots were shielding him from, taking some of the heat from the reentry to strengthen the shield as he fell.
This would not be a good time for Dani to wake up, Wilson thought, thinking about the flat darkness surrounding him. Then he remembered that she would be in darkness anyway because she had no BrainPal.
I’m definitely not a fun first date, Wilson thought.
He fell and fell some more and tried not to think of Lowen, or Hart, or the Clarke, or the fact that screaming chunks of Earth Station were almost certainly whizzing past him at ultrasonic speeds and could turn him into kibble if they smacked into him.
This did not leave a whole lot to think about.
There was a sudden fluttering sound and the nanobots tore away. Wilson blinked in the noontime sun. He was amazed to remember that it was still barely after noon, Nairobi time; everything that had happened happened in just about an hour.
Wilson did not think he could take many more hours like this.
Lowen pinged on his consciousness. She was now less than five klicks away and a klick up, still tumbling but less so in the atmosphere. Wilson carefully negotiated his way over to her, stabilized her and, as much as he could, checked her vitals. At the very least, she was still breathing. It was something.
Still, not having her conscious was not going to be a good thing when it came to landing.
Wilson thought about it for a moment, but only for a moment, because the ground was going to become a problem in the very near future. Then he checked how many nanobots he had left, estimated how much weight they were going to hold and then wrapped himself around Lowen, face-to-face. They were going to go in tandem.
That covered, Wilson finally looked around to see where he was. In the close distance the beanstalk still stood, feathering in the wind. Wilson had no idea what that was about, but it meant that he remained somewhere near Nairobi. He looked down, compared the terrain with what he had stored in his BrainPal and realized he could make it to the football field he and Hirsch were originally planning to land at.
Lowen woke up at around three thousand meters and began screaming and thrashing. Wilson spoke directly into her ear. “I’m here,” he said. “Don’t panic.”
“Where are we?” Lowen asked.
“Ten thousand feet above Kenya,” Wilson said.
“Oh, God,” Lowen said.
“I have you,” Wilson said. “We’re in tandem.”
“How did you manage that?” Lowen asked, calming down.
“It seemed a better idea than you falling alone while unconscious,” Wilson said.
“Point,” Lowen said, after a second.
“I’m about five seconds from deploying the chute,” Wilson said. “Are you ready?”
Lowen tightened up around Wilson. “Let’s never do this again,” she said.
“Promise,” he said. “Here we go.” He deployed ’bots from both of their packs so that both of them were tethered into the chute. There was a sharp jerk, and then the two of them were floating.
“We’re close enough to the ground and going slow enough that you could use your eyes if you wanted,” Wilson said, after a few moments. Lowen nodded. Wilson had her cowl open up.
Lowen looked down and then jerked her head back up, eyes closed. “Okay, that was a spectacularly bad idea,” she said.
“We’ll be down in just a minute,” Wilson promised.
“And this parachute for two won’t mess us up?” Lowen asked.
“No,” Wilson said. “It’s smarter than a real parachute.”
“Don’t say this is not a real parachute, please,” Lowen said.
“It’s smarter than other parachutes,” Wilson corrected. “It’s been compensating for wind and other factors since we opened it up.”
“Great,” Lowen said. “Just tell me when we’re down.”
They were down a minute and a half later, the nanobots dissipating into the wind as their feet touched down. Lowen disengaged from Wilson, grabbed her head, turned to the side and threw up.
“Sorry,” Wilson said.
“It’s not you, I swear,” Lowen said, spitting to clear her mouth. “It’s everything.”
“I understand,” Wilson said. “I’m sorry about that, too.”
He looked up in the sky and watched bits of Earth Station fall like glitter.
X.
“I told you it was a bad idea,” Rigney said, to Egan.
“Your continued lack of enthusiasm is noted,” Egan replied. “Not that it does us any good at this point.”
The two of them sat on a bench at Avery Park, a small neighborhood park in an outer borough of Phoenix City, feeding ducks.
“This is nice,” Rigney said, tossing bread to the ducks.
“Yes,” Egan said.
“Peaceful,” Rigney said.
“It is,” Egan said, tossing her own bread at the quacking birds.
“If I had to do this more than once a year, I might stab something,” Rigney said.
“There is that,” Egan said. “But you said you wanted to catch up. I assumed you meant actually catch up, not just talk sports scores. And right now is not the time to be catching up on anything in Phoenix Station itself.”
“I knew that much already,” Rigney said.
“So what do you want to know?” Egan asked.
“I want to know how bad it is,” Rigney said. “From your end, I mean. I know how bad it is on my end.”
“How bad is it on your end?” Egan asked.
“Full-bore panic,” Rigney said. “I could go into details, but you might run screaming. You?”
Egan was quiet for a moment while she tossed more bread at the birds. “Do you remember when you came to my presentation for those midlevel bureaucrats and you heard me tell them that the Colonial Union is thirty years out from total collapse?” she said.
“Yes, I do,” Rigney said.
“Well, we were wrong about that,” Egan said. “It’s closer to twenty.”
“That can’t all be because of what happened at Earth Station,” Rigney said.
“Why couldn’t it?” Egan said. “They think we did it, Abel. They think we lured several hundred of their best diplomatic and political minds into a shooting gallery and then had a fake group of terrorists blow the place apart. They didn’t shoot to destroy the space station outright. They went after the elevator car and they waited until people went for the escape pods to put holes in the shuttle bays. They went for the Earthlings.”
“They also shot at the Clarke and its shuttle,” Rigney pointed out.
“The shuttle got away,” Egan pointed out. “As did the single escape pod to make it off Earth Station. As for the Clarke, how hard is it to make the argument that it was a decoy to throw the scent off their trail, especially since everyone but their captain survived? And especially since fourteen of the ships that attacked Earth Station seem to have disappeared back into the same black hole from which they came. Seems a fine conspiracy.”
“That’s a little much,” Rigney said.
“It would be if we were dealing with rational events,” Egan said. “But look at it from the Earth’s point of view. Now they have no serious egress into space, their political castes are decimated and paranoid, and they’re reminded that at this moment, their fate is not their own. The easiest, best scapegoat they have is us. They will never forget this. They will never forgive it. And no matter what evidence comes to light about it, exonerating u
s, they will simply never believe it.”
“So Earth is off the table,” Rigney said.
“It’s so far off the table the table is underneath the curve of the planet,” Egan said. “We’ve lost the Earth. For real this time. Now the only thing we can hope for is that it stays neutral and unaffiliated. That might mean that seventy years down the road we might have a shot at them again. If they join the Conclave, it’s all over.”
“And what does State think the chances of that are?” Rigney said. “Of them joining the Conclave?”
“At this moment? Better than them coming back to us,” Egan said.
“The consensus at CDF is that the Conclave is behind all of this, you know,” Rigney said. “Everything since Danavar. They have the means to plant spies in the CDF and in the Department of State. They have the resources to pluck our ships out of the sky, turn them back into warships and drop them next to Earth Station. All sixteen of the ships that disappeared showed up there. And there’s something else we haven’t told State yet.”
“What is that?” Egan said.
“The ship Captain Coloma smashed the Clarke into. The Erie Morningstar. It had no crew. It was run by a brain in a box.”
“Like the one in the Urse Damay,” Egan said. “Of course, the Conclave maintains the Urse Damay was taken from them as well. Along with several other ships.”
“Our intelligence hasn’t confirmed those stories,” Rigney said. “They could be running that across the trail to keep us confused.”
“Then there’s the matter of someone out there actively sabotaging our relationships with Earth,” Egan said. “And the fact there’s a growing segment of the colony population who wants to replace the Colonial Union with an entirely new union with the Earth at the center. That certainly seemed to spring up overnight.”
“Another thing the Conclave has resources for,” Rigney pointed out.
“Perhaps,” Egan said. “Or perhaps there’s a third party who is playing us, Earth and the Conclave for fools for purposes we haven’t figured out yet.”