0 comments/ 9836 views/ 2 favorites Skyfall Dawn By: martincain It was always the same dream. “False target generator on, track breaker on, ECW pods set to jam-on-signal, adaptive countermeasures online. Maintain speed and heading. I’m gonna take a look.” Flt. Leader Melvin said, going down his mental checklist for both of the ships in the Skyfall formation he led. His F/A-300 sharply climbed a hundred feet higher and stabilized. There was a cluster of vehicles just over the approaching ridgeline. His threat receiver was going off like mad- search radars had found him. “We’re beaconing.” Lt. Shannon said from Skyfall 7 as he detected her ECM and ECCM pods coming online. Their radiated signatures had just increased by several orders of magnitude. Her weapons bays were filled with wave-riding missiles designed to produce EMP effect. So much to do- too much to keep track of. Melvin thought as he dropped altitude. His sensors had spotted three anti-air vehicles on the surface ahead. Octavia was a cold world with a thin atmosphere, covered with cratered lowlands rimmed by sharp mountains, a Mars-sized sphere bathed in the harsh glare of the binary whites, Procyon A and B. “They got me in no-time flat with a continuous wave Doppler. There’s a mobile THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser) battery camouflaged on the ridge.” Behind that topography he could see smoke pillars from a firefight drifting heavenward. “Skyfall, can you hear me,” A voice called over tactical channel, shouting to be heard over the dull thump of explosions in the background. “This is Dagger. Come in, over.” “This is Skyfall. We have you five-by-five, Dagger, over.” Melvin said and sipped water out of the soft tube pressing against his lips. Call sign Dagger was a special-forces outfit. He banked left and the flight ran parallel to the ridgeline. “We walked into an ambush. We have nine men down and need a way out of this mess. The damned militia have us pinned, over.” “That’s affirmative, Dagger. Upload your GPS coordinates, over." Melvin said and an instant later a new icon appeared on the Info-Link display projected inside his data-visor in glowing white. “Upload complete. Say your ETA, over.” The Dagger major said as a particular loud explosion could be heard in the background followed by someone wailing grievously, then the popping sound of a small-arms weapon firing and someone near the open transmitter freaking out. Oh shit- oh shit- oh shit- oh shit. Melvin programmed a course to give him minimal exposure to the THEL when he crossed the ridgeline. The laser it generated would burn through his F/A-300 with a minimum of resistance, but the laser was radar guided and thus was vulnerable. “We’ll be there in five minutes. Just hang on, over.” Melvin said and keyed the voice link to Lt. Shannon. “Break off and circle around. In fifteen seconds I’m going over the ridge. Wait until I’m over and then go after that defense station. They’ll be focusing on me and you should have a clean shot.” “Roger that.” Shannon said and fired her maneuvering thrusters to break out of formation. Melvin put the drinking tube to his lips and drew, but found that it had already been drained. His mouth suddenly seemed very dry as he turned toward the ridgeline. He put the THEL battery out of his mind as best he could and got his thoughts into ground-attack mode. He had a cluster-bomb dispenser on the centerline hard-point, twelve attack missiles, and 8,000 pellets of HEPAC ammunition. A switch by his thumb set the mission profile from “Cruise” to “Ground Attack.” Servos whined as the F/A-300 changed shape, becoming wider and flatter to generate maximum lift, but with a corresponding loss of top speed. A familiar chime sounded in his helmet just before the data-feed coming into his visor flipped from air-to-air to air-to-ground mode. “This is Dagger. Target designated, over.” “Acknowledged, Dagger. Secure for EMP and keep your heads down. We’re coming in on the deck, over” Melvin said. “On the deck” was altitute near and, for the unwary pilot, often equal to surface level. “I’m rolling hot,” Ajax said and locked the targeting piper on the largest cluster of targets ahead not squawking IFF. A militia armored vehicle had been designated as the impact point. “Seven, are you still with me?” “Missile away,” Seven replied tersely. “Smleck! A THEL just got it but from where? Oh, God!” His wingmate’s voice trailed off in fright. He pressed his thumb down on the payload release when the piper turned green. Chuff-chuff-chuff. Cluster-bombs ejected out from each side of the centerline dispenser. Ajax boosted to climb and banked slightly left, then turned his head to watch the ordinance land, twin rows of orange-black puffs in the garden of destruction. Back on the ridge he saw her bracketed by not one THEL battery, but a group of three, that had her caught in a kill basket of visible Laser. The transmitter clicked open once before her ship broke apart and fell to earth. “Great drop, Skyfall! Give us another one just like that, over.” Dagger called in from planetside. His eyes followed her ship into the ground where another hate-flower blossomed. “Skyfall to base. Seven is down,” He intoned numbly into his helmet transmitter. “I repeat, Skyfall down. I need search and rescue, over.” “Negative Skyfall,” Base reported back. “Your area is too hot. We’ll try and contact ground units in the area, over.” Melvin adjusted his course toward the THEL group. He marked their locations digitally as each vehicle shut down its laser in sequence. A touch called up the weapons display and he selected “attack/missile” from the list of options. “Go to hell!” Melvin roared, not caring if his transmitter was open as he depressed the thumb trigger on the flight-control stick. The F/A-300 shuddered as a missile dropped out of the right payload bay. The rocket motor kicked off a second later and Melvin watched the plume heading for its target. A beam reached out and the missile exploded, creating an angry cloud of shrapnel pierced by a glowing ruby shaft. “You think you’re smart, huh?” He muttered under his breath and set the rest of the missiles to “ripple-fire” on a single target. Lasers lanced into the sky again, concentrating on knocking down the swarm before they overwhelmed the lone THEL being concentrated on. All he had left were CBU’s and the HEPACs protruding from the blisters on each side of the canopy. A THEL succumbed to a tactical missile and exploded, burning in the thin atmosphere, but Melvin was too occupied to notice. Boosting to gain airspeed, he brought the F/A-300 into the secondary line of attack, his path would take him over both remaining batteries. “Skyfall, this is Dagger, please reply. We could use a little more of that good stuff down here, over.” From the commo-tech’s gasping voice and the steady slap of footsteps in the background noise, Melvin guessed that the special forces group was running through the hole that he’d created with Charles Bravo. There was less ground fire then he’d heard before. “Dagger, this is Skyfall. Just keep that designator handy,” Melvin said as the range-finder measuring the distance between him and THEL #2 closed rapidly toward 0.000 meters. “I’ll be with you again shortly, over.” “That’s affirmative, Skyfall,” The commo-tech said without enthusiasm. “Just don’t wait too long, out.” The air-to-ground sight turned green when he was still 1200 meters away. He thumb came down on the trigger and stayed down. Chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff-chuff. He looked back in time to see the LASER emitter on THEL #3 tracking him before 5 CBU’s fell onto the generator vehicle and radar vehicle, destroying both. “Skyfall, this is Dagger, come in,” A different male voice called out to him, one that sounded younger and scared. “Skyfall come in!” “This is Skyfall. Go ahead, Dagger.” “The Major got zapped. They’re all around us, we need support, we need it now, over.” Melvin turned the F/A-300 on it’s stubby wingtip and boosted engine output to 87%, increasing speed, he could see the fire-fight without the aid of the fighter’s sensors. He went low, using the terrain for cover as he made his way closer. The target area was already designated by the friendly ground forces. His eyes flicked to his weapons display: 300 CBU’s and 8,000 rounds for the HEPAC. The Octavian militiamen were going to pay. “Skyfall, where are you?” Ajax blinked and for the briefest moment wondered where he was, then he saw other dark, human forms around him and remembered that somehow he’d found his way back to Hell. How long he slept he did not know, but there were the sounds of commotion; the grunts of people getting to their feet and the scrape of boots sliding on loose rocks. One eye was swollen completely shut, partially blinding him, then his senses took over and the memories of what happened came back to him. "Sully?" Ajax called out timidly. His vision still had not fully adjusted but he could see shadowy forms moving about. Voices gibbered quietly around him in what sounded like every language spoken by man, but none seem to be talking to him, it wasn’t the first time. "Sully?" "I'm here, meat," Sully's familiar voice came from above him. "It's about feking time you woke up." "What's going on?" "Feeding time at the zoo, you slept through two a few already. "We got ration bars in two flavors: hard or dry." "I'll take mine hard, please." Ajax said as he sat up, gathering his thoughts and legs beneath him, getting his mind back into the prison routine. "Wouldn't we all," Sully said with a raspy cackle. "I'm afraid that we're out of the hard, all we got is the dry." Ajax groaned and put his hand against the coarse wall for balance as he got to his feet. His face throbbed and dust had caked in his throat as he slept. "I need some water." "You'll get some with your ration." Sully said and snagged him by the front of the shirt, leading him to the end of the queue, which advanced at an even pace. At the conjunction of several main-line tunnels was a dispenser island illuminated by overhead lights set to a dim level. It had three faces, each a long pane of thick plexi with a hopper set waist high. As each convict stepped up and leaned forward against the plexi, a barcode scanner underneath the window swept their pattern and a ration pack dropped into the hopper. Ke-shunk. Sully stepped forward to collect his ration. Ajax stood next in line. Then the howling starts again. Prisoners milled around the dispenser as the howling got closer. Once they identified which tunnel the noise echoed from, everyone cleared away from it, even the trustee. From that same tunnel came the sound of bone scraping on rock, bone being smacked on bone, and always the howling. Lupus laughed as he and his gang moved out of the darkness of the tunnel into the light. He was a giant. Ajax estimated that the top of his head was six inches lower than the top of the tunnel and his shoulders wide enough that, walking down the center-line of a tunnel, there would be for only a child to squeeze by him. The hair that grew from his head and face was tangled and filthy. He looked down on the other convicts clustered in the mouths of the other tunnels and smiled. His face was filled with black cavities; filth was lodged in the pores in his skin, there was an empty socket where an eye should have been. His feral mouth was a gap-filled mess, his teeth had been ground down to points but there were not many left. "I spy piggies with my one good eye." Lupus said, his words twisted by a torn lip. He gave out a baritone chuckle and swaggered toward the dispenser. His henchmen were just as ugly, but not quite as big, and all of them started laughing when their leader did. Lupus and his boys carried weapons, long bones sharpened to a point against coarse stone. "Get ready to rush them if they make a move." Sully whispered as the laughter died away. "We're gonna rush them?" Ajax said. He was beyond incredulous. "If we have to," Sully said and balled his narrow fingers into fists. "Remember, we got them outnumbered." Lupus turned in a slow circle, looking for the places where others were hiding. He clenched a bundle of ragged strips of the same synthetic material everyone wore. Removing a strip from the bundle, Lupus laid one side flat against the scanner. Beep! Ke-shunk! The dispenser chimed and a large plastic envelope fell into the hopper. Lupus handed off the ration pack to one of his boys and removed another strip. Ajax balled his fists in anger when he realized what the strips are… barcodes torn away from prisoner's coveralls. Beep! Ke-shunk! Another chime sounded and another ration dropped in, another meal the rightful owner would never see. Lupus carried enough stolen barcodes to get each of his crew double-rations. The third barcode laid against the scanner triggered an angry honk. "So they finally figured out that this piggy is dead," Lupus laughed and offhandedly tossed the useless strip to the ground. Ajax chilled and felt goose-pimples raise on his skin. The DeepCore was still being quarried for raw materials, living people now instead of ore. "Which one of you piggies will take his stead?" "Take your rations and go." The trustee said. He was smaller than Lupus, but not by much. "Watch yourselves, little piggies, Lupus has a taste for little piggy meat," Lupus said as he scanned another purloined barcode and was rewarded with another ration-pack. He removed the ration from the hopper and shook the few remaining strips in his fist. "And like these piggies found out, Lupus always gets what he needs." Beep! Ke-shunk! As Lupus scanned the last of his foul strips, the overhead lamps snapped on. They were painfully bright, almost blinding. Ajax cried out like most others do and brought his hands to his face, blotting out the glaring intensity. Tears dribbled out from beneath his eyelids as his body attempted to minimize the trauma of the sudden shock. Light-balls still exploded in his brain. "Quickly! Everyone up against the wall!" He heard the trustee bellow out, an order he could hear the people around him obeying. "Line up! Line up!" One arm over his eyes, Ajax staggered forward until his outstretched hand touched bare rock, then he turned and leaned back. Where Sully was he had no idea and where Lupus had gone he did not care, but he felt other prisoners jammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on each side. Though still blinded by the harsh light, the noise of guards entering from a tunnel to his left filled the chamber, more than one guard. Some of the convicts yelped as they were prodded into position with shock-rods. "Attention scum!" A burly voice called out. "The convict known as Kinkaid, Melvin, will sound off presently!" The last word was delivered with hard emphasis. Ajax waffled as he tried to figure why they wanted him. "I will not repeat myself!" The leader said as Ajax picked up his head and filled his lungs with fetid air. "Here!" He yelled out. Within moments he was forcibly pinned to the wall by a pair of strong hands. He felt the rounded point of something hard like a light-pen traverse his breast and heard something chime electronically. "This is him, Kinkaid." One of the two guards restraining him said. "Right." The other replied. The two were different than the ones who delivered him to the DeepCore. "What's going on?" Ajax said uneasily. He was sure that things were about to get worse. "There's been an administrative error in your favor convict," The leader said. "The computer logs of your arrest were corrupted during transmission. Without evidence we can’t hold you. We're here to take you back." "Back to general population?" Ajax said. The guards guffawed and pulled him out of the line of prisoners, then cuffed his hands behind his back. "Bring him," The leader ordered. "The stench down here makes me want to put in for hazard pay." The guards pulled his arms and he stumbled forward- then fell to his knees. "Wait," Ajax said as he caught his breath. "You're forgetting someone." "We only got orders for you." One of them growled as they lifted him to his feet. Ajax resisted when they pulled forward again. "Those aren't the rules," Ajax said, protesting a breach of what he had come to understand, he had remembered his deal. "If you miss your lift date, you get left until the next man, right?" "You try my patience." "Sully was the last one to miss his lift," He said. "The rules say he should go up with me." The guards stopped pulling on him to consider his request. "The convict known as Sully will sound off!" The sergeant barked. The guards were bound by the rules they made as well as those in the volumes-thick Terran Charter. "Here!" Sully shouted from his place against the wall. He yipped as his barcode was swept and the reader chimed. "Bring him then!" The leader ordered. Several convicts wished Sully luck in quiet voices, others murmured that it should be them going up instead of him. "Adios, you filthy melvins!" Sully cackled as they led him down the corridor toward the lifts. “Where are you taking me.” Ajax said once they were well away from the others in the group. The nearest guards face split into a cruel grin but he gave no reply. They were going up, which gave Ajax some small measure of relief. Sully and his guards got off at the minimum-security level. Ajax, the captain of the guard, and the rest rode the lift to the top. Once the doors opened, one gave Ajax a shrug and sent him stumbling out. When he caught his balance, he realized that he was at the center of a circle of large men, all in SOLMAX uniforms. The administrator that had processed him into the facility was with them. “Melvin Kinkaid, I have happy news and sad news,” The administrator said with a frown. “The sensor logs taken of your ship and the contraband in your hold have somehow been, misplaced. You’re to be released immediately.” Ajax felt his heart leap, as if the chains it had been wrapped in had suddenly fallen off, a smile began to form at the corners of his mouth. “But,” The administrator continued as Brawny led the circle closing around the ex-convict at its center. “You’re not leaving here without a reminder of your visit, and absolute certainty of what will happen if you ever set foot in this facility again, that’s the bad news.” Ajax cried out as a shock-baton was rammed into the flesh over his kidneys, his hands tightening into fists and his hair standing on end. He sank to his knees as shadows closed over him. A boot slammed into his ribs, then others from opposite sides. He put his hands up to protect his face and counted the seconds until his torment ended, a count that went on for some time. *** He was prone on a multi-function medical slab, one of several in the infirmary, all supporting the infirm or injured. A medical technician wearing a headset data-monocle treated his injuries: setting several cracked ribs with a Calcium bond treatment and swabbing his abrasions with a purple antiseptic that stung as it was applied. “I don’t know who you pissed off, Melvin Kinkaid,” The med-tech said and shook his head at Ajax’s sorry condition. “But I suggest you apologize or find a way to get off this rock.” “Any suggestions?” Ajax said and winced in pain. The tech lifted an auto-injector and plunged the tip into his deltoid. He felt his body relax as the pain disappeared. “I used to know a Kinkaid,” The tech said as he capped the antiseptic spray and replaced it on a shelf at his elbow. “I was a Marine medic once. This admiral who was in charge of the fleet at the time, his name was Kinkaid. Any relation?” “Never heard of him.” Ajax said as he closed his eyes and laid his head back on the pallet. The sedative analgesic was beginning to take full effect. Skyfall Dawn “That’s good. He was a real son-of-a-bitch.” In less than two hours Ajax watched the Pallas asteroid recede through the viewport of a shuttle. In five he was on a small, in-system transport moving coreward. Before a 48-hour watch rotation had been completed, Earth was in sight. *** SOL-3/Earth The Palmettos planted along the shoulder of East Elgin Boulevard finally stopped moving outside her window seat. Jena took a deep breath of salty Florida air as she stepped out of the shuttle-bus she’d taken from the spaceport, the new southern hub built on land reclaimed from the Tampa Bay. There was one last thing to do before she left Earth perhaps forever. Virtually indistinguishable from the urban clutter of Niceville to the north, the mid-rise housing complexes of the ELGIN USAF base needed painting, as she remembered they always had, one of the many deactivated military bases nationwide where families of deceased service-members were issued apartment billets. Everything, even meals and sanitation, was done by contract and the quality fluctuated, given the nature of government work, but all the services guaranteed to be provided were done so unfailingly. The base commissary was restocked with food and sundries once a week, the air conditioning worked during the oppressive heat of summer, and the roads were repaved every twenty years. The statue where the main gate once stood was of a winged figure with an arm uplifted; symbolizing that which those who constructed the “Curtis Lemay” DFC sought to capture for the people housed there… a helping hand, a guardian angel. Children playing nearby stopped their antics to gawk at her as she adjusted her white formal uniform. She opened her regulation handbag and removed a clamshell compact and her small auto-tinting wand, brushing up the color on her eyes, lips, and checks with several practiced strokes. Once she was satisfied that the image reflected in the compact mirror was close to ideal, she returned the items to her handbag and oriented herself toward home, or what was once home. Her steps clicked smartly on the sidewalk as she passed the base educational facilities. Elgin High School looked much worse for the wear than what she’d remembered, perhaps only because it was empty or perhaps because she was appraising it with an adult eye. She paused to reflect on the fates of those classmates she used to call friends but after several moments realized that she had forgotten them, worse, that there’d been noone that she’d considered as such. Four blocks away from the schools was Bombadier Street, a wide boulevard that ran the length of the base. Her eyes followed the ground as she turned down Bombadier, seeing not service boots on her feet, but child-sized, patent leather pumps. She followed a route she knew by heart, home-to-school, school-to-home- 500 steps from door to door. “Four hundred ninety-seven, four hundred ninety-eight, four hundred ninety-nine, five hundred” Jena counted aloud and stopped when she came to a familiar crack in the sidewalk. The words “Start/Finish” had been written above in red chalk when she was eight years old- lifetimes ago. When she looked up the walkway, the rowhouse that she’d long considered her prison greeted her eyes, without the melancholy it held when she’d left it after graduation. Rose sprouted from the window-boxes of house number 216, and behind the blooms she could see the orderly interior of a sitting room. She stepped aside to let a tracked robot pass with a dog leashed to its chassis and then started for the door. There was movement inside as she walked up and rang the bell. Her sister Jessie opened the door. “Oh, it’s you,” Jessie said and adjusted her baby, Nicole, on her hip, sounding none too happy to find her sister smiling on the stoop. “Mom’s been waiting for you.” “So this is my niece,” Jena said as she stepped through the open door and waved at the drooling cherub. “Julie’s a wonderful name and she’s a beautiful.” “She’s MY daughter,” Jessie said and gave Jena a cold glare. “And get a good look, because by the time you get back from your little adventure she’ll be grown up, and won’t even remember you, if you come back.” Jena felt tears form in her eyes from the venom in her older sister’s voice. She doffed her service cap and said, “You don’t have to be so mean.” Jessie stepped closer as her voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re killing Mom. Do you know that?” Jena stepped past her into the living room and did a brief scan. All the furniture there was still where it rested in her memory. “I don’t understand.” Jena said. Fury tinged with sadness filled her sister’s eyes when she met them again. “We lost Dad because of the goddamned Neo-Colonial War,” Jessie hissed. “Now here you go following right in his footsteps. Fine. Go off and get yourself killed.” “Jena?” The spry voice of Mary Mitchell called out from the dining room. “Is that you? Come in here.” “Julie needs baby food,” Jessie said, her hard eyes remained locked on Jena’s, slowly shifting them to their matriarch. “Do you need anything, Mom?” Mary Mitchell sat at the table with spreads of glossy photograph prints and a large plastic storage box in front of her. She looked at Jessie and said, “Thank you, dear, just the list we discussed.” She smiled when she saw Jena. “You look wonderful,” Mary said and eased out of her seat into a standing position. “I’m happy you made it. I almost thought you were going to leave without saying goodbye.” Jena wiped at her eyes and said, “You know I wouldn’t do that. One of the things you always taught us was to check in before we went anywhere.” “True enough,” Mary said as she opened her frail arms for an embrace. Jena had been at school and unable to attend her 60th birthday. “But for God’s sake, I hope you learned more than that.” “I learned that you have to follow your dreams,” Jena said and broke the embrace. “And what the price of that sometimes is.” “Look at this.” Mary said as she picked a glossy out of the pile and held it up to the light. The plug in the data-jack installed through her left Mastoid bone pulled memories and printed them out as video captures. The picture was of young Jena in a white dress seated at a piano. As she took the picture, Jena heard music begin to play inside her head, Fur Elise, from a piano recital she’d forgotten about. Her mother smiled at the wistful look in her eyes and said, “You played like an angel- every note- was perfect. Your father would’ve been so proud. I see a lot of him in you. You have his eyes.” She offered up a photo of a rugged looking man in a vacuum suit holding a pressure helmet under one arm. “I guess I have more than just his nose,” Jena said and offered the pictures back. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to be here for you. I feel like… like this is something I just have to do.” Mary pressed the glossy of her father back into her hands and said, “It’s a difficult decision to make. It takes courage. Most people would be happy enough staying right here on Earth but not you, you heard the stars calling.” “Then why does Jessie hate me?” “She doesn’t hate you, darling, she’s just afraid for you. She’s afraid that you’re leaving her here to take care of me. Most of all she’s afraid of being left alone if something should happen to you. Both of you were very close when you were little, best friends as well as sisters.” Jena fingered the print of her in her recital dress. After a moment the printer on the buffet behind her spit out a new picture; Jena and Jessie sister sitting on the front stoop outside the house, arm in arm, at ages 7 and 8. “I just don’t want her to think I’m abandoning the family.” Jena said and wiped away a sniffle at the memory. “I… I just feel like this is something I have to do.” “Then do it,” Mary Mitchell said and grabbed her by the arms, giving her a gentle shake. “Don’t worry about me or your sister. The only person who knows what’s right for you IS you. Go, have your great adventure, just try to get us a V-mail once in a while. If you decide to stay there and start a new life, none of us will blame you.” “I love you, Mom.” “I love you too, sweetheart,” Mary Mitchell said and pressed a small memory card into Jena’s hands. “Don’t forget this.” “What is it?” Jena said and turned the card over in her hands. “It’s your lineage,” Her mother said with a wrinkled smile. “The last five hundred years of your family history, just in case you decide to stay out there… just so you won’t forget where you came from. It’s important you know.” “I’ll never forget you, I promise.” Jena said and slid the plastic wafer containing her heritage into her pocket. Just then the door buzzed. Jessie Mitchell strode out of the kitchen, where she’d been working at their Worldnet terminal, and moved to open it. A tracked robot waited at bottom of the steps with a box of baby food tubes and other supplies in its cargo basket. Jessie gathered the load in her arms and returned to the kitchen, Jena behind her. Once the box was on the counter they fell into a natural routine; Jena would unload goods from the box, Jessie would put them away. “I don’t want to leave with anger between us,” Jena said once the box was empty. “I might never see you again and I don’t want this to be the last thing I remember about you.” Jessie leaned against the kitchen counter, as if weary, her face miserable. She stared out the window into the backyard where both had played a thousand games together. “We were a team,” Her sister said and went back to storing plastic containers full of instant meals in the small pantry. “We always told each other that no matter what happened, we’d always be there for each other, do you remember?” Jena nodded. They’d made many such childhood vows. “Do you remember how Jimmy Morris told everyone that he was dating both of us at the same time, and when we both confronted him, we made him run home in tears?” “That was grade school,” Jena said at the memory of how embarrassed the boy, then the school bully, had been. “But back then nobody messed with the Mitchell girls.” “That’s right,” Jessie said and sniffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “We were there to support each other, I guess that’s the way I always thought it was going to be.” “I’m sorry,” Jena said and put her hand to her elder sister’s shoulder. “I can’t ask you to understand why I have to leave, but I do, my dream was to go the stars. This was the only way.” “I know,” Jessie said quietly and put her hand over Jena’s. “I knew the day you enlisted. I don’t hate you Jena, I really don’t, it’s just that with everything that’s happened to me so far, Mom’s age, Steven leaving me with the baby, has been very hard. You’ve been a rock, but you’re going away.” Guilt lowered Jena’s eyes to the tiles on the kitchen floor. “You’ve always been stronger than me, inside and out, I have to know that you’ll be all right.” “Maybe this will be a good thing,” Jessie said and gave a heavy sigh. “Taking care of Julie and Mom will put me in a position I’ve never been in before in terms of the family. We’ll both have to be leaders, in our own ways.” “Whatever happens,” Jena said and stopped as the alarm on her Krono went off. She silenced it with a frown. The time allotted for her to say goodbye had expired. Her ship was waiting. She wrapped Jessie in an embrace that lasted for several quiet minutes. “Whatever happens, I want you to go outside some night and look up. I’ll be out there.” Her lingering memory of home was of Mary, Jessie, and baby Julie standing at the door, watching her as she turned down the sidewalk toward the transport loading area. The clouds that had been gathering over the area finally burst. Jena ran the remaining distance to the passenger shelter, but not before her uniform had been soaked through, enough that noone would be able to tell that she’d been crying. *** Jamaica Bay Metropolitan Spaceport The air shimmered with swampy heat as Ajax framed himself in the exit door of transport shuttle. “Gibson was right.” He said to the night and stopped at the top of the stairs to take in unfamiliar surroundings. The place had gotten bigger while he’d been away. I95 corridor was an artery that spread urban development like a living thing. The sprawl could be seen from space as a gash of light on the dark Earth at night. “Keep moving, please.” The pleasant voice of the cabin attendant said from over his shoulder. Ajax kept moving. Jamaica Bay terminal teemed like a massive hive, filled with travelers passing through for business or pleasure. Transients took air-conditioned shelter during hotter months. Ajax took a breath as he was slapped by a familiar rotting stink of the stacked urban cores, but there was a stiff wind picking up from the south that carried the smell of rain. After NEO ALH-24 came down in the Pacific, it had gotten progressively colder. The asteroid was three kilometers wide and had come out of nowhere to hit like a titan, blasting a divot 20 kilometers wide into the Australian outback just north of Cape Leveque on the Timor Sea, forming Crater Bay. Disaster shows ran clips of the chaos leading up to the strike: the panicked mobs with the hand-painted signs reading “We don’t want you,” then the looting, the mass killings. The after-effects were worse: the Indonesian Petronas Towers collapsing into the massive tidal wave caused by impact, a wall of water taller than the largest skyscrapers rushing for the coast of Madagascar at the speed of sound, the devastation along the east African coast. Though still recovering from the effects of the strike, Earth could’ve taken one bigger. “Please keep moving, sir.” One of the ground controllers called. Ajax kept moving. He could see anti-collision lights blinking from the tops of the arcologies and super-towers in Manhattan. The slab-sided giants were packed with people, cities unto themselves. New York had stopped growing outward and started growing upward. The super-towers were just as tall but the arcologies were micro-ecologies. They produced their own food and power, managed their own wastes, their own security and the largest ones could be seen from space. Seven thousand feet was the limit set by building codes but with satellite dishes and microwave antennas sprouting from their tops, the four arcologies within the metropolitan area were that and more. SHEL batteries protected the buildings from air and spacecraft collisions. On the outside, in the long shadows they cast, dwelt an underworld that thrived on supplying what could not be procured on the inside. The skies burst as he neared the entrance to the terminal. Hefting his bag and rushing for the gate, he squeezed past a toothless old man, who swore at him in raspy German and shook his fist but waited in angry silence while Ajax cleared customs. The inside of the terminal was more like a museum, or cathedral to the progress of civil space transport. Instead of a choir, the terminal echoed with the ceaseless droning of overhead courtesy pages, delivered in such an inoffensive, feminine tone that they were likely computer generated. Art depicting various spacecraft in flight decorated the walls, gifts from the major transport lines that used JBMS as a hub. Above the customs desk, an 8' by 12' oil captured a burly Caravelle 200 in SOLCorp livery coupled to a ring on Liberty Station. Beside the passenger lounge, a smaller work explored the sleek tranquility of an Avianca trans-orbital shuttle on the ground, covered in snow. The travel desks ringed the center of the terminal floor. Above them, exotic constructs of fragile lifting-bodies were suspended beneath settings in stained glass, great moments preserved by a protective atrium of plexi-glass; Liberty Station being completed, the VISIGARD 1 landing the first colonists on Mars. Ajax studied a watercolor of the space-liner Royal Andromeda hanging beside the entrance to the men's toilets. Once a liquid waste dump had been satisfactorilly completed, he hefted his patched travel-bag onto his shoulder and located the exit. The terminal was serviced by the spaceport access on four levels. At ground level, the terminus of a dedicated grav-lev line that followed the expressway to a tunnel that ended beneath Union Station, level two moved auto-buses, level three carried lines of auto-cabs, level four designated for personal vehicles. Ajax hopped an automated-stairway to level three. He made for the exit, maneuvering through a sea of travelers arriving and departing. Honda robots pushed carts of luggage through the terminal to and from the lounges where passengers waited. Ajax steered around one of the humanoid robots as he cleared the entrance. In an orderly fashion, an auto-cab pulled into a gap in the cab stand that had just been vacated and popped its hatch, discharging a fifty-something couple wearing matching Hawaiian shirts, who brushed by him as they hurried for a departure pad. Ajax threw his bag into the now vacant vehicle and ducked inside. It was one of the automated types guided by orbiting satellites to its destination instead of a human who might kibitz about where he was going and how lousy the Yankees were that season. Noone wanted to drive cabs anymore. Cabbies had been extinct on Earth for 100 years. The interior of the taxi was not as resilient to damage as the exterior. The padding in the seat had been ripped out, and it seemed that every passenger the vehicle had ever transported took the time to leave a missive carved with a knifepoint or scrawled with ink on the cabin wall. He was figuring which “For a good time...” net address seemed the most legitimate when the flat, mechanical voice of the computer running the cab came through the speakers. “Input destination now.” The onboard computer hummed in a monotone, electronic vibratto. The audio generation software in the auto-cab had likely already been obsolete when installed. “The corner of Hunt and Holland. Scenic route… take the Queensboro Bridge and go by Yankee Stadium.” The GPS display mounted beneath the scarred plexi-glass shield warmed and a map of the city appeared. The path the cab would follow appeared in red. Ajax could barely see through the scratches on the surface but it looked more or less like the route he wanted. “Insert IdentiCredit card into reader to accept fare. Insert IdentiCredit card into reader to accept fare.” He slid his card into the box and waited as it read his account information. Once it had transferred the correct sum, the card popped out, the passenger door closed, and the cab started to move. It merged into heavy spaceport traffic as the access filtered into the westbound Van Wyck Expressway and headed into the city. The computer-directed traffic was lighter on Queens Boulevard, where the cab got off the Van Wyck and went north. It was a straight shot across the old Queensboro Bridge. NYPD checkpoints sealed off what he considered his old neighborhood. In places, natural light was blocked off by spans of the M3 elevated motorway, built between high-rises and supported by the tops of smaller structures. The automobile traffic at the top cruised along in computer regulated intervals two-hundred feet above the surface roads. At ground level, it looked rough. There were more burned out wrecks along the side of the road than driving down it. Enforcers, police robots assembled by Mitsubishi, were used in the dark-zones beneath the motorways, slums where it was too dangerous for their human counterparts to go. The corner of Hunt and Holland could not easily be identified, but after nearly an hour on the road, the cab stopped and the door unbolted. Drizzle still fell from the cracks in the motorways above but the air smelled washed and clean. From there it was an easy walk. Skyfall Dawn An old sign hung haphazardly above the door of the place, supported by a few thick strands of rusting wire. It spelled out “Chief's” in large neon letters that had originally been red, and cast long shadows on the surrounding tenements. The rain and lightning of the passing storm added gothic to the pink light of old neon. “De Maestro return to Babylon.” A voice colored with Caribbean voodoo called as a shadow detached from the darkness of an alley and stepped into the mist-diffused light, a ghost from the past with thick dreadlocks that fell to the man’s waist. "Ah been waitin 'ere a mos long time, Bruddah ‘jax, standin 'ere takin mah fill o' dis debil rain. I should hab known de stormbird come on de wings o' de storm." “Brother Dizzy!” The memories of good times shared with the tall adept and the rest of the Alpha Perfects flashed back from the dark pits where they had almost been forgotten. Ajax howled with elation and embraced Dizzy like family. The Alpha Perfects considered themselves to be just that. When Ajax had left, the only things that mattered were the bacchanalian combinations of boozing, stimming, and chasing Terra Angels on Friday and Saturday nights. “What are you still doing here?” Ajax said as he released Dizzy from his welcome. “Same o, same all, mon,” Dizzy said. His dreadlocks danced as he shrugged. “Seekin de path tah Moun' Zion.” “Word.” “I got d’word for ya,” Dizzy snorted as he reached into a large pocket and withdrew something wrapped in plastic. It was the size of his thumb. "Dah las’ word. Ya ben up tah see dah wondahs, mon. Too right ya tell poor Dizzy how ees done." "Get a job that takes you there." Ajax said as he accepted the package from Dizzy and examined it. The pungent aroma of Ganja met his nostrils. Dizzy undoubtedly had quantities of other illegal “products:” DreamStim, Meth, and NightLace someplace on his person. "What's this?" “Ees de las o' mah crop, mon. Ah ben savin eet for a rainy day." Dizzy said, put his head back and let the rain hit his face. "De Elders mus’ be smilin for ya come back an eet rain like we ned tah rais’n Ark.” He roared out laughter at the torrent. The taste of Dizzy’s harvest was a welcome home gift to a brother, missing for years, who had finally returned to the family, the prodigal cousin if not the son. “De bruddahs ‘ave gaddah'd tah give ya a mos' propah welcome home. Ya know de where an de when.” “I’ll be there, Dizzy. I have to see the Chief first, but I’ll be there.” Ajax said as he clapped Dizzy on his shoulder and turned away. "Den we start widout you, Bruddah ‘jax, take eet to dah next lebel when ya come." Dizzy called at his back. "Don be long, de Terra Angels almos be fahgettin ya name." Guarding the front door of Chief’s was a large Enforcer decorated with the METRO police logo down each side. It shifted on its treads and swiveled its bulbous head to give Ajax a scan as he walked by, comparing his profile to those of the wanted felons it kept in memory. Pock-marks on its armored frame were evidence of where some fragger had made the mistake of shooting at it instead of just giving up. Enforcers were bullet-proof and weather-proof, a good thing; two hundred years of concentrated industrial warming had altered the climate. Sea level rise had displaced millions from coastal areas worldwide. New Yorkers had built a wall around their islands to eventually keep the water out. Nothing could be done about the people the flooded the streets instead, except by moving as many as possible off-planet. “Keep moving.” Words came out of the Enforcer’s voice modulator as it returned to its slow left to right scanning. Ajax kept moving. Immediately inside the double doors was a formidable looking man with a face marred by a long white scar, who scowled at him from behind the bullet-proof shield of a weapons scanner, the bouncer. He knew the bouncer's name was Angus and that Angus only had one hand. The other had been lost to a booby-trapped Octavian Militia helmet he had fancied as a souvenir. "Oye, birk." Angus said in greeting. He could still hold a gun and squeeze the trigger with the Second-Hand prosthesis he had been fitted with upon discharge. Though he was not carrying one, Ajax sensed a weapon within easy reach. “So what you got an Enforcer outside for? This is still the Chief’s, right?” At the question, Angus shrugged his hairy shoulders. “Dunno, birk," He said. "The robots just show up, stay till their batteries run low, then get move on back to where ever they come from.” “How can you tell?” Ajax said and squeezed past the detector, which failed to register any devices on his person. "When their batteries run out, I mean?" "They start beeping, how else?" Angus said, his hard expression unchanging. The man was supposed to have a mean temper and horror stories circulated around frontier merchant havens by free-traders who’d experienced his wrath first-hand. The inside of the bar was a step up from that of the DeepCore. The only illumination in the place came from the light over the booze rack and from neon signs on the wall advertising labels like "Luna Bock" and "Astro Ale." The Chief was sitting at the bar, sharing a drink with a patron and telling a joke that Ajax heard more times than he knew. “Professor Heisenberg is on his way home from the lab and he gets pulled over by a skimmer cop,” The Chief said and struggled to keep from giggling at his own joke. “The cop comes up to the window and asks him if he knows how fast he was going…” “…And Heisenberg says, no, but I know where I am.” Ajax said along with the Chief as he delivered the punchline. The patron laughed as the Chief whipped his head around to see who had upstaged him. When he saw who it was his face split into a grin. “Ajax? How the hell are ya?” Master Chief (Retired) Seamus McMillan rumbled, waving Ajax into chair now vacant beside him. “How’d you like Solmax?” Right to business then. “It was miserable, Chief. It was so bad it makes me want to hang up my flight-suit," Ajax said as he took off his wet jacket and hung it on the back of the stool. "I suppose I have you to thank for getting me out of there.” The Chief pish-poshed the thought away as he pulled a cigar from a wooden humidor, clipped it, and lit the blunt tip with an antique Zippo. The anchor-in-orbit symbol of the old Space Command adorned the relic’s burnished silver shell on one side. Ajax smiled as somewhere in his head someone said the words, “He got it.” “I got to look after my people, but getting you out I had nothing to do with,” The Chief said and offered a cigar to Ajax, who politely declined. “The shipment they took from you never made it into evidence. Oh yeah, some guy named Dizzy was in here looking for you." "He just wanted to say welcome home.” “I never trusted that Brotherhood you used to hang out with, but what the hell, you just got out of the Max. Do whatever you want to.” The Chief said and sent a lungful of blue smoke wafting toward the air scrubbers laboring in the ceiling. Over the years, body-banks citywide had provided him with two transplanted lungs and a new liver, all vat grown or harvested from recent cadavers. “I appreciate that, Chief, but I need your advice. I got a problem I was hoping you could help me with.” “So I’ve heard. They tell me that you had to sell the Utburd to pay your fine,” The Chief said and gave an indifferent shrug. “That’s really tough. If you’re looking to take on a few more runs, I might be able to help arrange something.” "That's not all of it, Chief. Solmax scared me. I'd rather die than go back there." Ajax said, unable to look his longtime friend and mentor in the eye. “So what am I supposed to do about it? Geez, I don't see you for ten years while you're off raising hell on the frontier and you come back needing a favor?” The Chief said and waved his cigar in theatric disbelief. “Someone tell me where the justice is?” "I want out, Chief, I don’t want to do anymore runs. You should’ve seen the boat that took me in,” Ajax said. The Devonshire had been huge compared to the Utburd 3. “Next time they might decide not to give me a warning before they blast me. Next time I might not get so lucky." "Let's see if I understand this correctly," The Chief said and looked very confused. "You don't want to do anymore ‘special’ runs for us but you want to run something mainstream instead?" "Yeah, that's pretty much it." The Chief smiled, spun on his stool and barked an order at the bartender, "Julio! Line 'em up. Open a bottle of the good stuff!" He clapped Ajax on the shoulder as the bartender set up several shot-glasses and filled them with green liquid, Centaurian Brandy, a fancy name for the sweet, green distillate produced on the stations in the Alpha Centauri system. The Chief raised one in toast. "You know I was never one to tell you what you should do with your life, but it's about god-damned time you came to your senses." Ajax picked up a shot and tapped it against the Chief's. The good-stuff was open. It would have been an insult to refuse. The liquor made his mouth numb wherever it touched. It was several minutes before the effect wore off and he could speak again. “Can you help me?” “I’ll see what I can do,” The Chief said and slammed his empty shot-glass down on the bar. “But you just took the first step toward a new life. Have another drink.” What Ajax thought would be a quick visit turned into one several hours long. One toast turned into four, then eight. The Chief poured more shots from the nearly empty bottle and offered yet another toast, this one for the Space Command, the next one was for the Fleet. His old eyes glinted with mischief at the irony. The bottle had come from one of the past loads Ajax had brought in. “Just so you know, you can stay upstairs until you get back on your feet, I insist, Constance insists. She wants you over for dinner tomorrow night.” There was a place above the bar where the Chief stayed on rare nights, now that he was past sixty, though his wife Constance would still put him out if he came home drunk. Before Ajax could decline, the Chief rose from his stool and staggered off to retrieve the room keys, stored in a cigar box behind the Shok-Stik baton he kept beneath the bar. He gave them a toss. Ajax fell off his stool trying to make the catch. I have to go find Dizzy. Ajax reminded himself as rose shakily to his feet. The Chief would spend the night in a hotel. He bellowed out a farewell and instructions as Ajax staggered to the door. “Stop by tomorrow!” As far as urban gangs went, the Alpha Perfects had real influence in the Teterboro area mostly, with occasional fighting for control of regions a few blocks north or south. The loose circle of large hab-complexes that formed their territory was well circulated by pedestrian and vehicle traffic, a counter-point to the walled-enclaves that well-heeled humanity was in full-retreat behind. As the business and communication towers grew skyward, the once-low rent spaces were “enjoying the development management of sympathetic entities,” arbiter-jargon for local redevelopment funds donated by rich philanthropists at the heads of large corporations, but there were places where that influence had not yet reached. Noone came into Teterboro without paying “tax.” The gangers still knew how to throw a party and their allied Terra Angels were still heart-stoppers of the most natural sort, not a variant among them. Dizzy introduced him to a firebrand named Felicity, an angel initiate. Everything after that was a blur of hard beats and bodies moving in rhythm, old-friends and new faces that took some getting used to. Felicity had seen him home and stayed for breakfast, but too much Brandy otherwise ruined a night to remember. Ajax awoke when she slipped out from beneath the covers and padded towards the shower-room in just panties. A single pair of wings had been inked between her shoulders. Advocates and adepts, ranking members of the Terra Angels, had more drawn down the center of their backs. The storm, if not the celebration, from the previous night, still raged. Although the room was well-lit by large windows, the omni-present cloud-cover reduced the ambient light to a morbid gray. Thunder chased the wind through the artificial canyons formed by mid-town star-scrapers and arcologies, gathering speed, sucking at the plexi-glass windows as they swept by. "I found this under the door, brother Ajax." Felicity said and handed him a folded sheet of paper before crawling back under the covers. “What’s Skyfall?” “What do you mean?” Ajax said as he unfolded the letter, surprised that she would ask. Felicity yawned and closed her eyes, laying her head on her hands. “You talk in your sleep.” “Meeting: 11:00 am: downstairs.” He read the Chief's characteristic scratch quietly aloud. A look at the clock next to the bed caused Ajax's heart to jump. The following panicked spasm shook the bed and woke Felicity again. 11:05? Fek! He mentally cursed as he sprang out of the bed. Felicity snickered as his legs tangled in the sheet, tripping him up as he rushed to pull clean clothes out of his travel bag. "Is something wrong, Ajax?" "I got business, girl, He said hurriedly as he pulled on his trousers. "I'm late, my clothes look like they’ve been shot with a double-barreled wrinkle gun, and where the fek are my boots!" "They're in the shower room." Ajax collected his boots and pulled them on as he hurried down the stairs. The Enforcer METRO 8 had been replaced by METRO 12. The clock above the bar hit 11:10 as he walked through the door, dripping wet from the seconds he was exposed to the downpour. The best he hoped for was the torrential rain to disguise his sloth. The Chief was nowhere to be seen but a man in a suit was leaning against the bar, drinking coffee and trading remarks with the bartender in rapid-fire Spanish. He turned and smiled as Ajax approached, extending a manicured hand. “Melvin Kinkaid?” He said affably. “Thank you for taking time to meet with me. Artemis Cutter.” “Nice to meet you although I have to admit, I prefer other names.” “I don’t blame you.” Cutter said and offered a firm handshake. He reminds me of the spec-ops types I ran into on Octavia. Ajax realized as he mentally snapped his fingers. It was the way Cutter carried himself; aloof, subtly arrogant, and kind of funny. The eyes said it all. If this man had to raise his voice then the smleck was about to hit the blower. “Then again,” Ajax said, wanting coffee, but the bartender had left them alone to talk. “It’s not often that a man in my situation is presented with an opportunity like this. Call me whatever you like.” “Right to business then. Good, I hate small talk.” Cutter said though Ajax felt that statement, at best, was only partially true. I represent the TIL Corporation . I’m sure you’re aware of who we are. We’re not just a manufacturer. We also provide survey resources to select clients," Cutter said as he set his coffee mug down still half-full. "In short, we send survey ships out to the frontier looking for extrasolar bodies. If we find any, TIL gets concessions toward exploitation rights once our clients lay claim. It’s very lucrative." "So what does this have to do with me?" "It’s got everything to do with you," Cutter said with a snort at the impatience in Ajax’s voice. "I’ve known Seamus for years and he says that you’re a good pilot, which is enough for me, but that's not all. Your experience as a free-merchant, shall we say, and your extensive knowledge of the frontier are particularly valuable to us.” "Go on." Ajax said, half-angry, half-embarrassed by Cutter’s reference to his shady past, but was is part of the business. Cutter had undoubtedly done his checking. Ajax got the bartenders attention with a wave and pointed a finger at the coffee cup on the bar. “We're looking for someone tested, a quick thinker, someone who's not afraid to use the resources placed at his disposal,” Cutter said. Ajax leaned closer as his voice dropped to a whisper. “I know you had fourteen victories during Procyon, Ajax, an ace more than twice over. I know that you put the fear of God into those Octavian savages. What did they call you? Utburd?" He pronounced it gutterally, deep in his throat, the way Octavians did. "That's the past. I don't put anything into anybody anymore." Ajax said. A panel in the bar-top opened and his coffee-cup, filled with soy-based Lava-Java caffeine solution, came up through it on a serving block. The coffee-flavoring additive was touted to taste like the real thing, but he’d never had it. "Humility from a rocket-jock. Interesting," Cutter said and shook his head. "You can't escape your past, Ajax. We need people who have learned their lessons the hard way. If we wanted just a good pilot I wouldn't be here, I'd be up at the Merchant Marine Academy. I need a good pilot and then some." "Then what do you want with me?” Ajax said and stirred in sugar. “If you know about me, then you know how my last career ended." "Accidents happen," Cutter replied as he opened his briefcase and lifted out a holo-interface Sony. "We're willing to take our chances. If you’re interested, I’ve already got a contract drawn up, the same contract all of our courier pilots get, except with a few bonuses I think you would find very generous.” He pushed the datapad across the bar into Ajax's hands. “You could start tomorrow with Mister Durham. Think about it. To be needed, to be part of a team again. No more living day to day, worried about where the next cargo will come from, or that customs frigate waiting for you at the jump point. Think about it, but please don't take long. The window for this opportunity is very short.” Cutter finished his pitch and reached for his mug of Lava-Java, a smug devil expecting a foregone answer, but Ajax had no soul to sell, only time. Back into action again. Ajax thought as he scrolled through the contract and studied the parts not written in legal jargon. They do take such good care of their people. A smile slowly broke over his face as he read down the list of benefits. “I don’t know why you want me,” Ajax said as he laid the Sony down on the bar. “But I’m in, I’m definitely in.” “Welcome to our team,” Cutter said as he stood and took his overcoat off the back of the chair. He removed a wireless communicator from the pocket, punched in a number, and put the matchbox-sized device to his ear. “I’m ready.” In less than a minute a black skimmer-car was idling outside the main entrance. Several large men got out of the back and took up positions around the car. They left the car door open, and through the rain Ajax could see a brunette reclined on the backseat, blowing smoke drawn from a long stem-burner, looking impatiently out towards the bar. "You made the right choice," Cutter said as he slipped his arms into the sleeves of the coat and returned the datapad to the briefcase. "We're very glad to have you on-board, all we expect from you is your best, of course." *** The rain stopped in time for Ajax to go out for a haircut and a new suit. Little Beijing was the closest retail district and his Citizen ID let him ride the old subway there for free. The Metro Commuter, a monorail train suspended above the streets by flying-buttress supports built onto the sides of the midtown high-rises, was still in planning when he had shipped out for the Procyon system. Long since operational, it was faster, cleaner, and quieter than the electric cars in the tunnels beneath the streets, but there were no Commuter platforms within walking distance of where he needed to go. The company prided itself on what it called “giving back.” He held a printout he’d generated from the TIL netsite as the subway hummed through the tunnel, the other hand on the nearest support pole, leaning in response to the subway as it slowed to enter a curve. He flipped the page once the car straightened.