All Fall Down (55 page)

           
“General Leland, your Colony is under attack. Daoud has gone. You have failed in your mission. We will talk when this is finished. I am now taking command.”

           
“Yes, Admiral.” Kate slumped into an anti-grav chair.

           
“We are a few minutes away. We will set up a defensive blockade and...”

           
The holo cut out.

           
Kate stood, alarmed. “Djembe, where's the comms?”

           
“Gone. The
Eagles Dare
has been destroyed.”

           
“What?”

           
“On its return to base, it was hit by something. I can only assume a missile or weapon from the aliens.”

           
“How many people on board?”

           
“A hundred.”

           
“I've failed,” she slumped again. “Failed.”

           
All she had wanted to do was avert a war. It had seemed obvious. Daoud had shown her an innocent city being attacked. She had refused to believe it, tried to stand in his way. And now they were under attack. An unprovoked attack, like in the holo of the mountainous granite city, its shining threads of city life clinging to scarred rock faces, and then smattering in crystal shards as deadly flowers bloomed their explosions.

           
She realised then that her field promotion must have had some deliberate forethought behind it: a General was sent to war. The Cadre must have suspected something along these lines. The military fleet was here hours earlier than it should have been.

           
Kate switched to a camera view of the hangar bay. The final evacuees were leaving for the bunkers. She saw the
Hand
's pilot standing alone, looking up. Flipping the view, Kate saw the hangar bay doors closing, eating away at the intense daylight, and forming a continuous silhouette with what looked like the profile of the
In The Palm Of Your Hand
.

           
The bay doors closed. Kate was back in the dark.

           
She thought over the exchanges with Daoud. He had been opposite her, in here, the war room, the emergency bunker, his hands a blur in the holos, while she panicked, while she procrastinated. She hadn't even checked what he was doing. Immediately, she pushed her hands back into the holos and traced his activity, now fully focused on the investigation.

           
“Unbelievable,” she stepped back from the holo. “Oh no, oh no.” Brazenly, hidden in plain sight, he had been sending people to the wrong bunkers so they arrived over-crowded, so stairwells were blocked, lifts were used inefficiently. He had amplified the panic in the Colony. And something else. She shifted through holicons, audited their evolution, traced back, back, back. Somewhere Djembe was trying to talk to her, she put him on hold for a few minutes. She went through infolayer after layer.

           
A jamming signal. Comms had been blocked by Daoud himself.

           
And a tractor beam projected from the Colony, stopping ships from leaving.

           
“I should have seen it.”

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

           
And he'd walked out of here. She'd sent him out. She hadn't stood in his way, she'd let him get away with creating this panic, and allowed him to leave the bunker, leave the Colony. By now the mecha and defensive ships' pilots would be back in the Colony, telling people what they'd seen. Panic. Attack. Aliens.

           
She was a midwife to humanity's loss of innocence and the re-birth of its war-loving nature.

           
She set her jaw, stood up and took a deep breath. She was a General. She owed it to Win, to the colonists, to everyone, to make this right, to turn this around. To bring these great cultures, human and alien, together outside of conflict and death and destruction.

           
Taking the comms holicons he had been working on, she deconstructed them. Within minutes the Colony's comms were active again. There were enough satellites left to form a communications link. She quickly identified a break in the comms relay in space, and boosted the signal to overcome it. Now Fall was re-connected to comms all the way to the wormhole.

           
“Djembe, sorry to ignore you. Report.”

           
“Mr. Kingsland has left the suite. His family were in the
Eagles Dare
. I've found traces of the pods on the surface. Security holos show they were attacked in orbit. Most were killed. The remaining few surrounded a pilot, and protected him through planetfall. He's on the surface.”

           
“Is he alive?”

           
“Yes, but unconscious. It's the pilot we met, Kiran ha'Doek. And something else.”

           
“Something else. There's always something else.”

           
“Another alien has joined them. I've scanned it and its identical to the original visitor. It's... merged with the pod material around Kiran. He's in a sort of organic suit.”

           
“Send someone out, get him back here. With the organic.”

           
She pulled up a holo from the satellite feed. The fleet was attacking the great ships, which were deploying defensive manoeuvres: not attacking, just deflecting the attacks they were receiving. Beyond them, the planetoids were moving away with their baby. She watched them moving slowly into deeper space, and then the holo warped, and they were gone. The great jade ships started moving away. They moved on a trajectory back to the wormhole, ploughing through the blockade created by the military ships. Kate watched with dismay, shouting at the holo, “Get out of the way you idiots.” But Admiral Kim stuck to her blockade tactics, firing constantly on the alien ships. Half of the human ships were destroyed against the alien's shields. The alien ships accelerated and sped away through the dust clouds.

           
Kate sat and cried. War had started. Kim would be tracking the ships, had maybe even shot tracers on their hulls. What had happened here, regardless of how it had started, would be avenged. She knew it. It was the human way.

           
Leaving the emergency command bunker, she made her way to the hangar, asking Djembe to join her there.

           
They arrived in time to see the SS Maris One brought in, and Win's mangled body, which was placed under a sheet. She had him taken to MedWing, to the morgue.

           
Kiran ha'Doek was brought in by a MedTeam, wrapped in the organic mass.

           
Her wrist pad chimed and Admiral Kim's head appeared again, “General Leland, prepare for surface landing and to receive our casualties. Out.”

           
Djembe looked at her, “This has all gone terribly wrong. It wasn't supposed to end like this.”

           
“No,” she shook her head, blinked away tears, “this has all gone to plan. Daoud's plan. He wanted to start a war.” She kicked a piece of equipment across the floor. “Look at this mess. Win dead. This, this ship. Daoud said it's last transmission was from today.”

           
“What?”

           
“The SS Maris One. The first ship to leave the Sol system nine hundred years ago. Lost. It's last transmission through the Sol wormhole was from today. And now it's here.”

           
“What does it mean?”

           
“What does it mean?” She looked at him wild eyed, “What does any of this mean?”

           
She walked over to where Kiran was stretched out on a gurney, the organic mass writhing around him. She reached out to touch it. It shrank back, at first, and then formed a growth, reached out to her. “He survived planetfall in this.”

           
Djembe joined her, “Perhaps Daoud was not so stupid. This could be a useful technology.”

           
“He designed it as a weapon. It's a technology of war.” Kate shook her head. “It's all gone to his plan.”

           
The
Hand
's pilot approached her. “General. The Colony's AI has a report.”

           
Next to her a black panther leaped from the
Hand
. “I am sorry, General. I was making good progress. They are essentially peaceful. I was going to some pains to explain why the Colony craft opened fire, when the military ships arrived.” The panther prowled over to Kiran, “I am glad this one survived. And you will be glad to know I am cured. The anxiety loops are gone.” It looked at Kiran's organic technology, “This technology of Daoud's has. How should I say? Matured, in a rather interesting fashion.”

           
“Where is the Administrator, Ma'am?” The pilot looked around the hangar, as if Daoud might be there, commanding personnel to receive the incoming casualties.

           
Kate looked at the panther, over at the
Hand
's pilot and finally into Djembe's eyes, “Daoud escaped the system during the confusion. He's to be considered a terrorist. I will find him. And I will end his war.”

           
Kate looked up at the hangar bay doors, which trembled as the first military ships landed above, “This story isn't over.”

- end -

Acknowledgements

All books are products of a relationship between the author and anyone who will listen. I am indebted to many for encouraging me to write this and for giving substantial feedback.

Art

I thank Rob Ellis (@MoviesSimple) for designing the wonderful cover art from a long and rambling brief. Goodness knows how he translated my waffle into such a great image.

Proof reading

Thanks to everyone who read small parts of this text and gave comments, especially in the early days. Particular thanks to those who read the entire book, in various drafts, and gave feedback: Dave House (@rev_engineer, a wonderful musician) who also made an early offer to produce cover art for which I am truly grateful; Michael Done and Lisa Herron Done; Sarah Barrick; and author John Harris Dunning (graphic novel fans are recommended to read his Salem Brownstone: All Along the Watchtowers). I continue to be grateful to author Tara Basi for his insight into planetfall and my other writing.

Further material

Writing blog:
www.astrotomato.com

Photography:
www.flickr.com/astrotomato

Twitter: @astrotomato

planetfall book 2: Children of Fall available 2015. The concluding part by 2018.