All Fall Down (49 page)

           
“Good work, Jonah.” Daoud walked to a command table; a holo, unstable but usable, flickered above it. “I see MedLab is in an evacuation bunker. And the schools, too.” Kate watched him carefully. His tone of voice was very measured; overly so.

           
“Sophie's work. What are your orders, Administrator?”

           
“General Leland has assumed full military control of the facility. I suggest we ask her,” he looked to Kate. She still held her helmet under her arm. While she considered her response, she put the helmet on a control panel and surveyed the emergency command centre, festooned with imagery and control panels.

           
Finally there would be some control.

           
Daoud's words from the secret lab came back to her, “
When the time comes ... perhaps it's as simple as not standing in the way
.”

           
Stand in the way of what? War?

           
She stood surrounded by insubstantial light. Representations of real events. History in the making above her.

           
In her head one sentence repeated, “Say something. Say something. Say something.”

           
The eyes of everyone in the room fell on her mouth, their ears pricked, waiting to glom, to hear, to understand.

           
Djembe's eyes were full of trust, waiting for instruction, ready to commit to her.

           
The pilot, Kate realised she couldn't remember her name, had never asked, was wide eyed, flicking between Daoud and Kate, the subtleties of the power play apparent even to her and her resignation to the lower levels of command. The pilot's stance betrayed her thoughts, “Someone just tell me what the hell to do so I can get out of here.”

           
Jonah, looking Kate up and down, appraising her.

           
And Daoud himself, eyes flat, face unreadable, dangling the future of humanity in her face, into her open hand. Her chest thumped. A heartbeat since he'd asked.

           
“
Perhaps it's as simple as not standing in the way
.”

           
The light of the auroras still danced in her eyes, emulated in the flickering holos around her. She looked Daoud in the eye.

           
“We will stand and be counted. And we will make a difference here today. Djembe. Jonah,” she kept her eyes on Daoud, “get upstairs to the Central Operations Room's holo suite. Divert all power to full scenario analysis, run as much in parallel as possible.” Finally she looked at each of them in turn, “Maintain power to critical life support only and to surface defences. Link up every holo suite, contact our ship, get Verigua and the ship's Mind and the orbital satellites in. Figure out what's happening up above, full consequence output stream to this bunker. Go.” They turned and left.

           
Growing in confidence, with Daoud a blank slate, she looked over to the pilot, “Find some crew, get the hangar doors fixed if they're not already. Prep as many craft as you can for evacuation and battle damage survival. Then establish a link with the
Hand
, get it back here and Win, too. We've risked enough for one day.”

           
The room was now empty, but for the two of them. Kate and Daoud. He stood against red and blue holos, she against yellow and green.

           
Kate aired the suspicion that had been running in her head since Jonah had spoken, “Sophie's dead, isn't she?”

           
“Most probably, given the readings,” Daoud walked to a command station.

           
“And how do you explain those?”

           
“We are pressed for time. Perhaps we can open a committee later?” Daoud plunged his hands into a holo, started pulling command functions around.

           
“It must be humbling, being pressed for time. I think you could only be in twenty four locations if you had twenty four Colony bio-tags. Which wouldn't make sense.” Kate rested against a control panel, “Of course, if you were a cyborg, and each component carried your biosignature, that would start to explain things.” She looked around the room and saw something in a surface security holo behind Daoud's head, a series of dark shadows outside the Colony, “Especially if you'd been absorbed by your twenty three specimens.” She crossed her arms. “But that would still leave one. A ghost?” Daoud ignored her, carried on manipulating holicons, “A fake signal in the Colony, so she could carry out your orders without arousing suspicion.” Finally Daoud looked up, for a fraction of a second. There was a troubled look in his eye. Had he not been expecting this? “Cybernetic implants. How old was Sophie?”

           
The holos flickered again, “Five hundred years, more or less. It's a pity she's gone. She was very effective.” He didn't sound very sorry.

           
Kate nodded, looked at the floor, rested the heels of her hands on the control panel's lip, “I wonder how old you are.”

           
“Classified.” He continued working, identifying mecha distribution patterns, gun emplacement ammo levels and energy stability, defining satellite observation parameters.

           
“Classified,” she looked around the room, “classified. By whom? You're far too...”

           
They were interrupted. “Kate,” Djembe's voice interrupted them, “we're operational. We should have analysis and consequence data within the minute.”

           
She stared at Daoud, “Thanks Djembe. How close are we to totality?”

           
“Less than three minutes. We should have full holo of it in a moment.”

           
“And Win?”

           
“No word yet. We're having trouble contacting the ship. I will keep trying.”

           
In front of her Daoud was pulling apart the external holo, chunking it, placing views of key scenes in different parts of his visual field.

           
“So. I asked you. Who has classified your age?”

           
He looked through the glow, “You are in a war room. If you value your career, you will be best advised to act like a General.”

           
Furious, she opened her mouth to respond, but the holos distracted her. The inselberg was shaking. Alien ships were on the surface, their occupants disgorged. The giant city-ships hung in the air. To one side, she thought she saw a tiny speck, maybe Win, where the holos broke down, where the flickering obscured detail. And in another holo, the twenty three pods roaming across the surface.

           
“I will deal with you afterwards,” she gave him one last stare, tried to focus all of her anger into it. And then looked away, plunging her hands into the holo displays.

           
Kate set about protecting the Colony. Opposite, Daoud's hands danced in the light.

“Flyby,” is how Win thought of it. The black mass that had killed Huriko Maki sailed over him. It performed a shallow parabola so that it curved around Win's position. It had obviously sensed him, mute with wonder in his suit, a matchstick man in the vast dusty plain, and had made way, despite being five metres above ground. He watched it in the twilight head to the inselberg.

           
“Verigua, what's your conclusion on the inselberg's activity?”

           
Seconds after the thing had glided over him, a smaller, secondary mass followed, barely thirty centimetres in diameter, speeding, an energetic catch-up. A baby following its mother. He watched it go. There had been two brief signals before the storm had rolled in the previous day. Now he understood why.

           
“A good question. I have been pondering it. Given the cracks around its base.”

           
That thing had killed Doctor Huriko Maki. Win tracked it and its chaser. What was the smaller thing?

           
“And the shaking in the ground,” continued Win, already there, drawn to the same conclusion.

           
“And the similar looking planetoids above.”

           
He carried on to the ship, walked, ran, always looking to his left, to the inselberg and the retreating mass and its hanger-on.

           
“And the delegation here to bear witness.”

           
They finished at the same time, “It's trying to be born.”

           
The
Hand
was just ahead. He slipped once, when the pulsating ground liquefied the surface sand.

           
Birth surrounded him. He checked the mass's location. Birth. Huriko Maki had been pregnant, too. There had been almost nothing left of her when she'd encountered the mass. Win knew he shouldn't jump to conclusions, but the association, the hypothesis grew in his head anyway. It wasn't just Fall that was birthing a monster. Pregnant Huriko and the mass had become one.

           
When he reached the great ship in the sky, its outer edge, he stopped. Being under the ship may limit his view, he wanted as much sky view as possible while keeping close to the
In The Palm Of Your Hand
. Straight above, the sky was split, his right shoulder under the city, his left under the sky, caught between firmament and construction, a foot under two realities.

           
“Verigua, I'm going to watch the rest of this from my current position. Can you bring the ship closer to me please?”

           
While the ship covered the final half kilometre, he watched and watched and watched, and recorded a log of his hypothesis, transmitting it live to the
Hand
. “Win, log, date time stamp. The alien visitor we saw in the holo, which apparently killed Doctor Huriko Maki, has returned. We discovered during our investigations that Doctor Maki was pregnant. The visitor now has a secondary unit. I have to assume that it has given birth. Possibly it needed Doctor Maki as food to complete a pregnancy?”

           
At last, a sound world blossomed, exploded, as the inselberg started its final birthing strictures, throwing up cornfields of sand. A light rain fell, patter-patter, seconds only, each hyphen of water a metallic violet in the almost totality, smiting the ground. Win looked up to its source and saw chunks of ice caught in the city-ship's bottom hull detailing, comets trapped for who knew how long, melting.

           
The blue sun filled the disc of the yellow. Great wyrms uncoiled in oily photic loops, immense solar streams glorifying the totality. The two new moons, whatever they were, surely no ordinary planetoids, completed their graceful slide across the double solar disc.

           
A profound silence settled on the planet. Win held his breath.

           
The eclipse dark sky lit up as all of the Fallen bodies reached totality.

           
Golden green rings of luminous light throbbed from the sun-moon alignment, not outward, filling the sky, not brushing the heavens with verdant rainbows, but inward, focused, tube-like, through the atmosphere, towards Fall, whumming through the temporarily hushed air, crackling in shamrock bursts on the inselberg, bathing it, electrifying it, the concentrated gravity of an entire solar system's solar-planetary alignment radiated on one immense structure. Which rent the air with a crack, a sound barrier-splitting slap which made the grounded ships – human and alien - bounce into the air, which slammed into the oppressively solid craft carpeting the sky, rocking even them.