Earthfall (29 page)

Bathed in the cold glow of the instrument panel, he found he didn’t want to contemplate such things. Instead, he urged the SCEV onward, putting his trust in its computer systems to get them back to where they needed to go, to propel the hulking machine on the course they had mapped on their outbound leg.

The cockpit door slid open behind him, and he glanced back as Rachel slipped inside. She handed him a cup, and it was warm to the touch. He regarded it in the glow of the instruments as she settled into the copilot’s seat and strapped herself in. She held a cup of her own.

“It’s coffee,” she told him.

He nodded and reached across the center console so he could squeeze her hand. “You’re the bestest, hon.” He was happy to have the caffeine. Shifts were longer now that Mulligan was out of commission. Everyone was already dog-tired from the voyage, not to mention the stress of dealing with Law and his people. Now that he had some time and distance separating him from the events in San Jose, Andrews marveled that several hundred people there had managed to survive. From the deformities he had witnessed, he knew Law hadn’t been idly boasting when he said the survivors were fertile. Even though Law was obviously a psychotic madman, he had done an incredible job of keeping his people alive over the years, scavenging whatever they needed from the corpse of the shattered metropolis. It was truly a commendable feat.

Of course, that also included eating other survivors,
he reminded himself. Viewed in that light, Law’s accomplishment seemed a little less warm and fuzzy.

“How’s Mulligan?” he asked, sipping from his cup. The coffee was hot and bitter, so strong it was almost overpowering—just how he liked it.

“Still out, but it looks like he’s in a normal sleep, now. Kelly’s keeping an eye on him.” She paused and shook her head. “Well, whenever Leona isn’t, anyway.”

“Come again?”

Rachel looked at him and rolled her eyes. “Babe, you really need to pay more attention. Lee’s got the hots for Mulligan.”

“Eklund?” Andrews chuckled at the thought. “No way!”

Rachel shrugged and sipped from her own cup. “I can’t imagine why, but it sure looks like it.”

Andrews didn’t know what to make of that—the two most disconnected people in Harmony Base had somehow managed to find one another after practically living on top of each other for years. Well, at least Leona saw something in Mulligan. It remained to be seen if it was a two-way street, especially since Mulligan was twice Eklund’s age.

That ought to be something to see.

“Anyway, what are you going to tell Benchley about San Jose?” Rachel asked.

“Everything we know. Those … people back there might not be what we were hoping for, but it’s a start. And Law mentioned something about survivalists from the north, so that’s something else we’ll need to look into—”

A tone sounded suddenly, and the rig began to slow down. Andrews looked at the engineering display as he disconnected the autopilot and took control of the vehicle. He didn’t like what he saw—a gear chip warning in the number two differential. The computers had automatically disconnected the faulted system, essentially placing the system in neutral to preserve the complicated array of meshing gears.

“That doesn’t look good,” Rachel said, looking at the same display.

“No, it’s not,” Andrews said. “We’ll need to shut down and check it out. Without it, we’ve lost the center set of wheels. They’ll still roll, but they won’t provide any power, and that’s going to screw us up big time.”

“We could get stuck,” Rachel said.

Andrews nodded, slowing the rig until it came to a halt. “Yeah. And getting stuck out here would be a permanent duty station.”

***

While they didn’t have Spencer’s skills to draw from, both Laird and Andrews had enough technical smarts to figure out what had to be done, assisted by the SCEV’s electronic system manuals. Rachel was able to pitch in as well; while her forte was not vehicular transmissions, she knew enough about them to be able to assist the two men as they pulled up the floor in the SCEV’s center compartment to gain access to the differential. When they opened the case, they found that one gear had been partially stripped. Fishing around through the fluid in the case, they were able to find a few fragments, but were unable to recover all of them.

“It’s definitely FUBAR, Mike,” Rachel said finally. “I think we can still keep going, but we’ve got to be careful. Like you said, we get stuck now, it’ll be permanent.”

Laird regarded the failed gear. “I guess there’s no chance of fixing this, huh?”

“Not out here,” Rachel said. “We don’t have any spares aboard, and I’m not familiar enough with these systems to jury-rig something. If I blow it, we might wind up worse off than we are now.”

“You know, I don’t think that would take a lot of doing,” Laird said. He handed the gear to Andrews, who turned it over in his hand. It was still slick with lubricant, but the metal around the stripped teeth was sharp enough to cut skin. He sighed and wrapped a paper towel around the warm circle of alloy and placed it in a drawer by the engineering station.

“All right, let’s button it up and get moving,” he said.

“How much will this slow us up?” Kelly asked.

Andrews sighed. “Well, we’re not going to be able to cruise as fast as we might, and we have to be damned careful about where we put the wheels. Getting stuck out here, especially in the mountains, would be a total bag of day old dicks. We’ll have to be on our toes for the entire trip, and that means we’ll have to take it slow.”

“Mike, Harmony doesn’t have a lot of time left.” Leona looked at him with a grim expression that had nothing to do with the painful injury to her leg. Even under the numbing effects of the oxycodone Kelly had given her, she was still alert enough to understand the risks of arriving late.

“I know that, Lee,” he said.

“You guys are all tired,” she said, looking around the compartment. “Mulligan’s still out, but I can pitch in and help out.”

“Not while you’re half in the bag from the pain meds,” Laird said as he bent over the opening in the compartment deck. He matched up the seals they had disturbed opening the differential’s casing and prepared to seal it up again. His hands were filthy with glistening, gray lubricant.

“I’ll stop taking them,” Leona said.

“Probably not an awesome idea,” Andrews said, looking over Laird at Kelly.

Kelly shrugged. “It’s not like she’s going to be doing calisthenics, Captain. She’ll be in some measure of discomfort, but as long as she takes it easy and doesn’t tear open the sutures I put in her, she’ll be fine.”

“I can deal with it, Mike,” Leona said.

“How long ago did you take your last dose?” Andrews asked.

Leona looked down. “Just before we came to a stop,” she said, which meant a little over an hour ago.

He looked at Kelly. “How long until it gets processed by her system?”

“Six hours, to be safe. It does tend to make her a bit loopy, but that’s an expected side effect for some patients. We can substitute it with acetaminophen, which won’t be as effective at managing the pain, but there shouldn’t be any side effects that could impair her performance.”

“A little bit of the lightfighter candy all right by you, Lee?”

Leona nodded.

“All right. Go hit one of the racks, and we’ll see about bringing you up front in about six hours,” Andrews said.

“Hooah,” Leona responded, and she slowly limped to the rig’s third compartment. Andrews caught a glimpse of Mulligan lying in one of the lowermost bunks, wrapped up in a blanket. Half of his face was covered by an angry mass of black and purple bruises.

He picked up a torque wrench and bent over the differential casing as Laird fitted it back together.

T
he woman’s face is still mostly smooth. The only signs of her true age are an array of laugh lines that crinkle whenever she smiles, which she does quite a bit, finding something humorous in almost every situation. Her hair is a tawny blond, its rich color diminished somewhat by the encroaching grays, the ones she’s just not vain enough to try to hide behind the quick fixes of bottled hair products. The woman—and more importantly, the man who adores her—knows that youth and vitality are more about what’s on the inside than what’s on the outside. The interior is what’s important, and only a precious few intimates get to see that. The exterior? Hell, everyone else on the planet can see that, free of charge.

The girls look like both of them, a mix of her fair skin and honey-colored hair, but with his eyes and nose. He thinks the nose looks much better on them than on him. It confers an impression of quiet, regal strength that makes him wonder how they’ll fare in the coming years when boys begin to circle around them. Would they take the males on head-to-head as he would, or would they instead use the mother’s good nature and occasional guile? He finds he almost can’t wait to find out, but he knows these things will happen sooner than he’ll want. It’s not going to be easy watching them winnow away the list of suitors until they find the right ones. And when that happens, they won’t be his little girls any longer.

He pulls open the screen door on the small house they leased on the plains of Kansas, where the land is flat and seems to go on forever, broken only occasionally by trees or telephone poles that stand a silent vigil in the heat of the midday sun. From somewhere in the humid, sticky distance, a crow caws, and he feels a momentary portent of dread flutter across his heart. But why? The day is perfect, the weather calm, and his family waits for him only a few steps away in the small kitchen. He enters the room, and the girls shriek with delight as they leap toward him with no hesitation, even though he’s been gone for so many years of their lives that he sometimes feels he barely knows them. His wife’s smile is broad and welcoming, and her dark eyes twinkle as she turns from the kitchen counter, forgetting about the lunch she had been about to serve.

“Well, it’s about time, stranger!” she says, laughing, her voice bright and clear.

Behind him, the crow caws again.

The day explodes into bright white light that washes out all the color, turning everything into a hodgepodge of blacks, grays, whites. His daughters shriek, cowering before the brilliant, overpowering flare that scorches their retinas, decimating their vision in an instant. His wife staggers backward, the smile finally wiped from her face as her own eyes are immolated. She crashes against the counter, reaching out with both hands to steady herself.

From behind, a rumble draws near. He likens it to the roar of a subway train closing in on a station, pushing a gust of hot air through the tunnel as it advances. He senses death closing on him, something he’s felt before, but this time it approaches with such surety that he knows there is no warding it off. No tricks to play to sidestep it, no weapon to defeat it, no training to help him prepare. He knows what’s coming, and he knows his might is as insignificant against it as a drop of water holding back the desert.

The shockwave rolls over him,
through
him, and slams into the house with such force that the structure buckles immediately. The wave of superheated compressed air brings something else with it—burning, potent radiation that causes the house and those inside it to explode in flame. The girls’ screams rise to a tortured keening that is impossibly loud in his ears, then his wife shrieks as well as her clothes disintegrate and her skin reddens and chars before the blistering onslaught. The shockwave does its work, tearing the house away from him before he can take another step, ripping his family away from him as the prairie catches alight—

Mulligan snapped to full consciousness, the ragged scream caught in his throat. The transition from the white-hot world of his nightmare to the semi-darkness of the SCEV’s sleeping compartment jarred him, kept him mentally off-balance as he rocked from side to side in the slightly scooped bunk. He turned his head and found his neck was stiff, the tendons and muscles protesting the sudden action. His entire body was sore, essentially one giant ache. He saw a figure sleeping in the bunk across from him, and he recognized it as Jim Laird, his snores barely audible over the whining drone of the SCEV’s turbine engines and the creaks and rattles of the rig as it bumped across the landscape. Mulligan slowly swung his legs over the side of the bunk and sat up, his movements sluggish. He sensed more than saw other figures in the compartment’s tepid light—Choi, sleeping in the bunk above Laird, and Kelly Jordello, snoozing away in the bunk above his. Kelly murmured something in her sleep and rolled over, but other than that, none of them gave any indication that they had heard the strangled cry that he had tamped down on an instant before it became a full-throated scream.

Mulligan buried his face in hands and softly wept.

***

Leona looked up from her work at the Command Intelligence Station when the aft shield door opened and a disheveled Mulligan stepped into the second compartment. He looked like hell—bruised and battered, eyes bloodshot. He blinked against the compartment’s bright light as he closed the door and moved toward the kitchenette, holding onto the padded rails mounted to the compartment’s overhead. Leona smiled at him wryly, but if he saw it, Mulligan ignored her.