Stars Rain Down (Biotech Legacy) Read online

  “I’ll be the first to admit we’re facing an uphill battle, sir, but we must fight. It isn’t just the planet we’re talking about. Our analysis of the Copernicus Transmission indicates a sizable number of survivors. Perhaps as many as two billion.”

  “Two billion?” the administrator said, and he mulled over the decimal places.

  “It’s not easy to condemn two billion people to death, is it?”

  “It’s never easy to condemn anyone to death, but difficult choices must be made sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry, but if we can help them… if there’s even a chance, then it’s our duty to try. Ask your people, Mr. Saladin. Let them decide for themselves.”

  Marcus knew that he was pushing too hard, but every minute wasted amounted to more deaths that could have been prevented. They needed to get to work, the sooner the better.

  The administrator had his hands on the table with his fingers laced together, and he was staring at them while he chewed on his thoughts. “It’s true. Something must be done, and if I extend your request to my people, you would have many volunteers. They’re a courageous and selfless lot. However, I’ll not give them the option until I’m convinced this is more than a suicide mission. The invaders destroyed our civilization in the blink of an eye, Doctor. What could a few thousand colonists do in the face of such overwhelming power?”

  “Simply put, sir, the situation has changed. The invaders caught us with our pants down. They appeared without warning, scrambled communications before anyone could get the word out, and slaughtered billions who never saw it coming. This time, we’ll have surprise and superior technology on our side.”

  The administrator still wasn’t convinced. Marcus went on. “As long as Copernicus is operational, we’ll have an abundance of intel about enemy troop concentrations and defenses. With a little planning, we can launch surgical strikes that will cripple their infrastructure with minimum risk to our own forces.”

  “And what sort of weapons will we use? Eireki weapons?”

  Marcus smiled. The administrator was a very shrewd man. “Actually, that’s one of the obstacles still ahead of us. Legacy is… how best to put this… forgetful, and my people, brilliant as they may be, are stargazers and mathematicians. Not weapons designers. We’ll need to develop our own weaponry, and your chief engineer is the key to that.”

  “Me?” Amira Saladin asked.

  Marcus gave her a reassuring nod. “If you’re willing, Miss Saladin. I’ve seen your work, and I wager a single colonist outfitted with your MASPEC armor would be worth a hundred standard infantry. Just imagine what else you could build with our technology.”

  From the look in her eyes, she began to imagine right then and there, and that look alone confirmed Marcus’ suspicions. She was just the kind of person they needed to make this work. The kind of person Legacy needed.

  “How long would you need to make your plan a reality, Doctor Donovan?”

  “One year. An Earth year, that is.”

  The Administrator closed his eyes for a second and pursed his lips. When he opened them again, he spoke. “Against my better judgment, you may have your year, Doctor.” They shook hands across the table. “But I’ll be keeping watch on your progress. I reserve the right to pull my people out should you fail to meet my expectations.”

  “Understood, sir. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  One year. It was longer than Marcus could stand, and less than they needed by half, but it would have to do.

  Chapter 24:

  Remedial

  The midsummer sun was brutal. Jack Hernandez lay on his stomach, looking down the sights of a matte-black assault rifle while sweat ran off him in rivulets. He was wet from head to toe, the sweat making his weapon slippery as a fish. Fifty meters beyond the tip of his barrel sat a target in the shape of a man. A man who was mocking him. He might have imagined that last part.

  Everybody else had qualified on their first day at the range, including Leonid Nikitin who hit every target with ease. He claimed he could blind a suicidal king at three hundred meters, and it was probably true. Shooting was second nature to that man, but Jack wasn’t so lucky. He was now on his third straight day of shooting, and the brass had assigned him a personal tutor as a last resort.

  “Go ahead and take your time,” his little brother Charlie said. “There’s no rush today. Line it up so the post is right in the middle of the notch, then put it on your target.”

  Jack thought it was lined up, but he wasn’t sure. After all, he’d thought it was lined up every other time he pulled the trigger, but that blasted target was still in one piece.

  “Is it lined up, Jack?”

  “I think so.”

  “I need you to know it is, bro.”

  “Fine. It’s lined up.”

  Charlie sat down in the dirt next to him. “Relax. I know you’re frustrated, but I’m trying to help. Just put the post on the target, alright?”

  “Okay,” Jack said. He shifted the rifle left and right, watching the space on either side of the post shrink, then he centered it again. The top of it was level with the top of the notch, and it was sitting dead in the middle of his target. “It’s lined up.”

  “It helps to focus on the post, so the target is blurry behind it. Got it?”

  “Done.”

  “Now take three slow breaths. At the end of your third exhale, go ahead and squeeze the trigger.”

  Jack filled his lungs and let the air slowly escape, then again, and one more time. At the bottom of the last exhalation, he pulled the trigger and the weapon barked. The butt-stock bit into his shoulder.

  Charlie raised a pair of binoculars to his face and sighed.

  “I didn’t hit it, did I?”

  “Nope,” Charlie said. “Tell me what you did wrong.”

  “I don’t fucking know, Charlie. I did everything you said. Maybe the sights are off.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Weapon was adjusted before it left the armory, and I test fired it myself. It’s fine. Now tell me what you did wrong.”

  “Why don’t you tell me,” Jack growled through gritted teeth.

  “Alright. Two things. First, you closed your eyes right before you fired. Don’t do that. You can’t hit what you can’t see. Second, you pulled the trigger. I told you to squeeze it.”

  “And what’s the difference?

  Charlie chuckled, and Jack didn’t know what was so damned funny. “When you’re dancing with a pretty girl and you’ve got her hand, you pull her to you. Once you’ve got her close, you give her a squeeze.”

  Jack closed his eyes for a second and Jess was there at the end of his arm. She was laughing and smiling, and he pulled her to him, but before she was in his arms, he opened his eyes and was back in eastern Israel under the hot summer sun.

  Charlie dropped down on his belly next to him and put his arms out like he was holding a rifle of his own. With his right hand, he extended his index finger and curled it several times. “You’re pulling the trigger, and it yanks the weapon around and blows your aim all to hell. Don’t pull it.” Then he opened his hand up and tightened the whole thing, like he was testing fruit. “Squeeze it. Gently. Now try it again.”

  Jack reseated the rifle against his shoulder and lined up the sights. He took three easy breaths and at the bottom of the last one, he squeezed the trigger. The weapon barked, and the butt-stock again bit into his shoulder.

  Charlie was watching the target this time, and he said, “Better. Not perfect, but you’re getting there.”

  “I hit it?”

  “Real close, bro.”

  “Damn.”

  Charlie rolled onto his back and locked his hands behind his head. “Tell me about your weapon.”

  Jack licked the sweat off his upper lip, and his mouth was filled with salt. “It’s an AN-23. Russian designed, gas-operated, rotating bolt, 5.45 millimeter assault rifle. Fire modes include semi-automatic, fully automatic, and two-round burst. The burst mode utiliz
es a… uhhh, blowback shifted pulse technology, ejecting both rounds before the recoil kicks in, and allowing you to hit the same spot twice with a single trigger pull. Or trigger squeeze.”

  “Okay,” Charlie said. “You read the manual. But tell me about your weapon.”

  “What?”

  “Tell me how it feels. How it smells. How it looks.”

  “It’s a damn gun, Charlie. It’s an automatic death machine. What do you want me to say?”

  “I want you to tell me about this specific gun, not how you feel about guns in general. What was the first thing they taught you when you were issued your weapon?”

  “They showed us how to take it apart, clean it, and put it back together.”

  “And why do you think that was?”

  “So we know how to maintain them in the field?”

  “That’s part of it, Jack. But they also wanted you to start forming a relationship with it. Start caring about it.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, it’s not. You have to depend on it. Not like you depend on a friend, either. You have to trust it to do its job the way you trust your hand or your knee. It has to be part of you. But you won’t let that happen. You’re too busy hating it, and you can’t expect something you hate to save your life. Doesn’t work like that, Jack.”

  Jack grunted and wiped the sweat from his forehead. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why he was a deluge while Charlie was dry as a bone. That fact was really starting to piss him off.

  “Let me tell you something,” Charlie said. “It’s not the weapon that kills people. The weapon is just an extension of someone’s will. It’s a tool, no more good or evil than a shovel or a pen. Go right ahead and hate people who do evil things. They’ve earned it. But you have to learn to accept that weapon in your hands or you’ll never learn to use it.”

  “Fine,” Jack said. “Are you done preaching yet, Reverend?”

  “Just about. Do me a favor and take a good look at your rifle, and really get to know it. I know you’ve seen a lot of people killed by guns, but you have to let those ghosts go. Let them rest for a little while, and actually look at the tool right there in front of you.”

  Jack cleared his head and did as he was told. He shook the rifle softly in his hands, and it was silent as a cloud. There was nothing moving or out of place. There was nothing to spare. He felt the roughened texture under his fingers which, contrary to his earlier thought, wasn’t slippery at all. Not even soaked with sweat. He moved his head a little closer, took a whiff and picked up scents of raw metal, hot oil and the acrid tang of spent guncotton.

  “It’s three or four kilos. Center of gravity’s around the base of the barrel, and the plastic parts feel gritty, like the tape we used to put on our skateboards when we were kids. It smells… well, it smells like a freshly fired gun.”

  “That’s good. Now line up your shot and fire.”

  Jack put the post on the center of his target and gently squeezed the trigger. In response, the weapon barked and there was a fast, nearly invisible flash at the tip of the barrel. It bucked into his shoulder but he was ready for it. Fifty yards away, a puff of smoke was wafting up from the center of the target. He tried not to let Charlie see him smile.

  “Real good, Jack. Now do it again.”

  And he continued to fire throughout the rest of the day.

  Chapter 25:

  Womb

  “Come back to Legacy with us,” Donovan had said, as casually as he might ask someone back to his quarters for dinner. The oddity of it struck Sal like a mallet. She’d resigned herself to Mars, and space travel belonged to her adolescence. It was all in the past.

  Launches on Mars were still dangerous and unpredictable business, events that all the children rushed to watch on the southern observation deck, with their mouths agape and eyes full of wonder. The tone in Donovan’s voice said that those days were over. The world had changed overnight, and space travel was about to become as dangerous and rare as a trip to the bathroom.

  He hardly needed to ask, of course. What choice did she have? It was so obvious that she was finished packing before she realized she’d decided to go.

  When Kazuo found out that Sal was going, he invited himself along for the ride. She wasn’t sure if he felt left out, protective, or some combination of the two, but Donovan’s precise reply was, “The more the merrier.”

  They suited up before nightfall and marched out to the skiff while the sun was setting behind the burnt horizon. When they reached the vessel, its circular portal opened and the ramp lowered for them. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was, but the ship seemed eager to meet them, and pleased once they were aboard.

  The world had become a strange place, and was getting stranger by the minute.

  Sal and Kazuo immediately started searching for seats to strap themselves into. Meanwhile, with a wave of Donovan’s hand, flat metallic panels around the ship became transparent and revealed the darkening Martian landscape shrinking into the distance. The ship was already up and away.

  Sal felt a soft jostle but nothing else. “We’re not actually flying, are we?”

  “Like hell we’re not,” Donovan said.

  Dr. Rao, who struck her as nervous, chimed in. “The ship uses artificial gravity to counteract inertia. You can hardly feel anything at all.”

  “Amazing,” she said. “Is it using artificial gravity for propulsion too?”

  “Oh no. It takes a rather extravagant amount of energy to project external gravity wells. Only larger ships like Legacy can afford such systems. We’re still not completely sure what the skiff uses for propulsion, but I have theories.”

  “Rao always has a theory about something. You’ll get used to it,” Faulkland said gruffly.

  “But how can you not know?” Sal asked. “You built this thing in two weeks and you don’t even know what drives it. How is that possible?”

  Donovan answered this time. “The short answer is that we didn’t build it. Legacy did, and I use the word ‘built’ loosely. She grew the skiff the way we grow hair or fingernails. It and the tugs, which you’ll see shortly, should be considered components of the mothership. They’re not sentient like she is, and they’d hardly function without her.”

  Sentient ships and machines that were grown rather than built. Sal decided she would need some time to wrap her head around those ideas. The world was changing maybe just a little too fast.

  It was around then Kazuo tapped her shoulder and pointed into the distance. Sal was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she missed the shift from dusty sky to star filled space, and they were already rapidly approaching a massive green object in the distance. Like the skiff, it was far more organic than technological, but hinted at both in its own ways. It had two conjoined hulls, like some sort of space catamaran, and Sal very quickly put together that this thing was her planet killer. It was Donovan’s warship.

  The skiff came around Legacy, and Sal stared in awe at the vast ship glimmering in the light of the sun. As exotic as it was, there were still structures that reminded her of ships on Earth. She made out what appeared to be a bridge tower atop the larger hull, and the whole surface bristled with articulated towers that she figured were weapons, sensors or both.

  The skiff came to Legacy’s bow, and Sal got a good look at the front of the two hulls. They were similar in shape, but obviously different in function. The main hull gaped open, with the shadows of some dark machinery lurking within, while the smaller hull’s mouth was covered in a complex pattern of overlapping panels which converged at the center. It had to be a hatch of some kind. Her suspicions were confirmed as the very center of it slid open just wide enough for the skiff to come inside.

  Once through the opening, they were in a different world altogether. The cavity was filled with blue-green light, revealing structures all along the interior surface. The walls near the mouth were covered in a tangle of thick tubes, and behind them lay an uncountable legion of o
ctagonal pads, all facing in toward the center of the chamber. They were all identical in every detail but size, each holding its own set of adjustable clamps, hoses and cables. Long, rectangular buildings split the pads into groups, and were themselves covered in small terraces and balconies.

  Other structures jutted out from the walls on thin stalks, like a forest of cradle-topped trees. These grew progressively larger toward the aft, with the largest dwarfing even the vessel that carried Ares Colony to Mars.

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  “This is the secondary hull,” Donovan said. “It’s broken into separate compartments, each with its own purpose and unique equipment. This one would normally house and launch completed craft. It’s a hangar.”

  “Man oh man,” Kazuo said. “Factory, carrier, battleship. Is there anything your ship doesn’t do?”

  Faulkland said, “Only one thing so far… land.”

  “Actually, there’s plenty she doesn’t do,” Donovan corrected after a moment. “She can’t construct capital ships like herself, nor can she fabricate hollow-drives… her energy source. That’s going to be a serious problem soon enough. She has some trouble with internal repairs, and she’s absolutely rubbish at math. Can you believe that? Still baffles me. I mean, she can count quickly, but that’s about the end of it. Anything more complicated than that, she either does by intuition, or labels it ‘Eireki-stuff’ and leaves it for us.”

  Sal didn’t quite follow. “What do you mean by intuition?”

  Donovan took a moment to think. “Let’s say I throw you a ball and you catch it. Did you numerically calculate a parabolic arc, or did you just feel where it was going?”

  Sal nodded. “Understood.”

  “She can operate well enough doing a lot of things that way. She can figure out intercept vectors and orbits without a problem. Unfortunately, there’s a whole host of other systems we can’t use until we figure out the maths behind them.”