Black Man (5 page)

6:13 AM.

Low strands of cloud in a rinsed-out, predawn sky. Last night’s drizzle still sequined on the black metal carapaces of the rap-rep shuttles, evercrete landing apron damp with it, and spots of rain still in the air.

Joey Driscoll came out of the canteen with a tall canister of self-heating coffee in each hand, arms spread wide as if to balance the weight, eyes heavy lidded with end-of-shift drowse. His mouth unzipped in a cavernous yawn.

The siren hit, upward-winding like the threat of a gigantic dentist’s drill.

“Oh for fuck’s sake…”

For a moment he stood in weary disbelief—then the coffee canisters hit the evercrete and he was running resignedly for the tackle room. Above his head, the sirens made it to their first hitched—in breath and started the cranking whine all over again. Big LCLS panels on the hangar lintels lit with flashing amber.

Off to the left, under the sirens, he heard the deeper-throated grind of the rapid-response shuttles’ turbines kicking in. Maybe a minute and a half tops before they hit pitch. Two more minutes for crew loading and then they’d be lifting, dipping and bopping on the apron like dogs trying to tug loose from a tight leash. Anyone late aboard was going to get their balls cut off.

He made the tackle room door just as Zdena darted out of it, tactical vest still not fully laced on, helmet dangling off the lower edge, XM still long-stocked in her hand from standing in the rack. Widemouthed Slavic grin as she saw him.

“Where’s my fucking coffee, Joe?” She had to shout over the sirens.

“Back there on the concrete. You want it, go lick it up.” He gestured up in exasperation at the noise. “I mean,
fuck
. Forty minutes to shift change, and we get
this
shit.”

“Why they pay us, cowboy.”

She snapped the XM’s stock down to carbine length and secured it there, shoved the weapon into the long stick-grip sheath on her thigh, and focused on pulling the buckles tight on her tac vest. Joe shouldered past her.

“They pay us?

Into the riot of the tackle room at alert. A dozen other bodies, yelling, cursing at their superannuated gear, laughing out the tension like dogs barking. Joe grabbed vest, helmet, T-mask off the untidy piles on the counter, didn’t bother putting any of it on. Experience had taught him to do that in the belly of the rap-rep as it tilted out over the Pacific. He gripped the upright barrel of an XM in its recess on the rack, struggled briefly with it as the release catch failed to give, finally snapped the assault rifle free and headed back for the door.

Forty fucking minutes, man.

Zdena was already sitting on the lowered tailgate of Blue One, helmet fitted loosely, unmasked, grinning at him as he panted up and hauled himself, ass slithering, aboard. She leaned in to yell above the screech of the turbines. “Hey, cowboy. You ready for rock and roll?”

He could never work out if she was hamming up the Natasha accent or not. They hadn’t been working together that long; she’d come in with the new hires at the end of May. He figured—and etiquette said you never
never
asked—she was probably licensed outland labor, at least as legal as he was these days. He doubted she’d hopped the fence the way he had, though. More likely she was across from the Siberian coastal strip or maybe one of those Russian factory rafts farther south, part of that fucking Pacific Rim labor fluidity they were always talking about. Of course, for all he knew, she might even be West Coast born and bred. Out here, mangled English didn’t necessarily signify anything. Wasn’t like back in the Republic, where they blanket-enforced Amanglic, punished the kids in school for speaking anything else.

In the Rim States, English was strictly a trade tongue—you learned it to the extent you needed it, which, depending on the barrio you grew up in, didn’t have to be that much.

“You gotta”—still panting from the sprint, no breath to yell—“stop watching all those old movies, Zed. This is gonna be a fucking punt around the deep-water mark. Scaring the shit out of some idiot plankton farmer who’s forgotten to upgrade his clear tags for the month. Fucking waste of time.”

“I don’t think, Joe.” Zdena nodded out along the line of shuttles. “Is four boats they got powering up. Lot of firepower for plankton farmer.”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll see.”

The dust-off went pretty smoothly, for their ship anyway, last month’s practice drills paying off, it seemed, despite the groans. Eight troops in, standard deployment strength, all webbed into their crash seats along the inner walls of the shuttle’s belly, grinning tension grins. Joe had his tactical vest all hooked up by then, vital signs wired in, though he wondered if anyone bothered to look at that shit anymore now they’d downgraded cockpit command crew from three to two. But at least the automeds would look after him in a firefight, and in the final analysis the vest was somewhere to hang all the spare XM magazines and boarding tools.

Briefing came in over the comset in his ear, drummed from the speakers set in the roof of the shuttle like an echo.

This is a class-two aerial breach incursion, repeat class-
two
incursion, we expect no combat—

He leaned out and nodded triumphantly down the line at Zdena—
Told you fucking so
.

—but maintain combat alertness nonetheless. Mask and gloves to be worn throughout mission, apply anticontaminant gel as for biohazard operations. Please note, there is no reason to assume a biohazard situation, these are precautions only. We have a downed COLIN spacecraft, repeat a downed COLIN

spacecraft inside coastal limits—

Zdena shot him the look right back again.

“Fucking
space
ship?” someone yelped from the row of seats on the other wall.

—medical teams will stand by until Blue Squad completes a sweep. Be prepared to encounter crash casualties. Squad division in deployment teams as follows, team alpha, Driscoll on point, Hernandez and Zhou to follow. Team beta…

He tuned it out, old news. Current rotations put him at the sharp end of deployment for the next three weeks. Now he couldn’t make up his mind if he was pissed at that or glad. This was going to be a fucking
trip
. Outside of TV, and a couple of virtual tours of the COLIN museum in Santa Cruz, he’d never seen a real spaceship, but one thing he did know—they didn’t land those fucking things on Earth.

Not since the nanorack towers went up everywhere, disappearing into the clouds like black-and-steel beanstalks from that stupid fucking story his gran used to tell him when he was a kid. The only spaceships Joe knew about outside of historical footage were the ones that occasionally cropped up at the slow end of the news feeds, docking serenely at the mushroom top flanges of those fairy-tale stalks into the sky, their only impact economic.
Just returned from Habitat 9, the haulage tug
Weaver
’s cargo is expected to make a substantial dent in the precious metals market for this quarter. Measures requested by the Association of African Metal-Producing States to protect Earth-side mining are still before the World Trade Organization, where representatives of the Hab 9 Consortium contend that such restraint of trade is—

So forth. These days, spaceships stayed in space where they belonged, and everything they carried went up or came down on the ’rack elevators.
Perfect quarantine,
he’d heard some late-night talking head call it once,
and extremely energy-efficient into the bargain
. A spaceship coming
down
was the scenario from some cheap disaster flick or even cheaper paranoid alien-invasion experia show off the Jesusland channels. For it to happen for real could only mean that something, somewhere had gone superwrong.

Oh dude—this, I’ve got to fucking see…

He was still applying the biosealant gel to his face when the shuttle banked about and the tailgate cracked open. Cold Pacific air came flushing in with the scream of the turbines and the gray dawn light. He unbuckled and shuffled down the line to the cable hoist. His pulse knocked lightly in his temples.

Something that was too much fun to be fear coursed in his blood. He wrapped the T-mask across his face, pulled the breathing filter down to his chin, pressed the edges of it all into the biosealant. The wind whipped in off the ocean outside, chilling the newly pasted skin of his cheeks where they were still exposed at either side of the mask. There was an illusory sense of safety behind the curve of impact-resistant one-way glass and its warm amber heads-up projected displays, as if his whole body were sitting back here instead of just bits of his face. They got warned about that shit all the time. Some crudely rendered virtual drill sergeant in the bargain-basement Texan software that was all Filigree Steel Security’s training budget ran to. Inexplicably, the badly lip-synched figure had a British accent.

Whole-body awareness, you ’orrible li-uhl man,
the construct was wont to bellow whenever he tripped one of the program’s stoppers.
Are your legs on loan? Is your chest a temporary appendage?

Whole-body awareness is the only fucking thing that will keep your whole body
alive.

Yeah, yeah. Whatever.

He snapped the cable onto his vest, turned back to the belly of the shuttle and the observation camera fixed in the ceiling. He made the OK sign with finger and thumb. Coughed into the induction mike at his throat.

“Point, ready to deploy.”

I hear you, Point. On my mark. Three, two, one… drop.

The cable jolted into motion and he fumbled his XM to readiness in both hands, leaning out so he could peer down at what lay below. At first, it was just the endless roll and whitecap slap of the Pacific, outward in all directions. Then he got a fix on the ship. Not what he’d been expecting: it looked like a huge plastic packing case, awash in the water, barely floating. The hull was mostly a scorched black, but he could make out streaks of white with the remains of nano-etched lettering, some kind of corporate insignia that he supposed must have skinned off in the heat of reentry. He dropped closer, saw what looked like an open hatch set in a section that was still above water.

“Uh, Command. Are we sure this thing isn’t going to sink?”

Affirmative, Point. COLIN specs say she should stay afloat indefinitely.

“Just, I’ve got an open hatch here, and with this wind and the waves I figure she’s got to be shipping some water.”

Repeat, Point. Vessel should float indefinitely. Check the hatch.

His boots hit the hull with a solid clank about a dozen meters off from the hatch and a little downward.

Ocean water swirled around his feet, ankle-deep, then sucked back. He sighed and unclipped from the cable.

“Understood, Command. Off descender.”

Will maintain.

He crouched a little and worked his way up the shallow slope toward the hatch, peered down into it.

Water had sloshed into the opening; he could see it glistening wetly on the rungs of a ladder that led down to a second, inner hatch, which he assumed had to be the end of an air lock. As he watched, a fresh surge washed over the hatch coaming and rinsed down onto the ladder, dripping and splashing to the bottom of the lock. He peered a bit more, then shrugged and clambered down the ladder until he was hanging off the lower rungs just above the inner hatch. The water down there was about three fingers deep, slopping back and forth with the tilt of the vessel in the waves. Just below the surface, the moldings of the hatch looked unnaturally clean, like something seen at the bottom of a rock pool. There was a warning: caution: pressure must equalize before hatch will open.

Joe figured whatever pressure there was inside the hull must be pretty close to Earth standard then, because someone or something had already unsealed the inner hatch. It was hanging open just enough to let the water drain very slowly through the crack. He grunted.

Weren’t for that, fucking air lock’d be a quarter full already from the slop.

He tapped his mike.

“Command? I’ve got a cracked inner hatch here. Don’t know if that’s the systems or, uh, human agency.”

Noted. Proceed with caution.

He grimaced. He’d been hoping for a withdraw call.

Yeah, or failing that, some fucking
backup,
Command. This baby’s come from
space,
right, from Mars most likely. No fucking telling what kind of bugs might be loose in there. That’s what nanorack quarantine’s for, right?

For a moment, he thought about backing up anyway.

But—

You’re equipped,
he could already hear the patient voice explaining to him.
You’re masked and gelled against biothreat, which we don’t in any case anticipate. You have no valid reason to query your orders
.

And Zdena’s voice:
Why they pay us, cowboy
.

And from the others, jeers.

He shook off a tiny shudder, moved down a couple of rungs, and put a boot through the water to press gingerly on the hatch. It gave, fractionally.

“Great.”

Point?

“Nothing,” he said sourly. “Just proceeding with extreme fucking caution.”

He braced one hand flat on the wall of the air lock, stamped harder on the hatch, impatient now and—

—it caved in under his foot.

Hinged heavily down to the side, dumping the water through into a darkened interior with a long, hollow splash. The sudden drop caught him unawares. He lost his grip on the rung above. Fell, grabbed clumsily with one flailing gloved hand, missed, and clouted the side of his head on the ladder as he tumbled. He went right through the opened inner hatch, had time for one garbled yell—

“Fuuuuuuahhhh—”

—and ended up in a heap on what must have been the sidewall of the corridor below.

Shock of impact, his teeth clipped the edge of his tongue. Sharp bang in his shoulder, gouge in the ribs where one end of the XM jabbed him on the way down. He hissed the pain out through gritted teeth.

For the rest, he seemed to have landed on something soft. He lay still for a moment, checking for damage reports from his tangled limbs.