Lacuna: The Ashes of Humanity (3 page)

"It didn't
look
like a cat! Is it okay?"

He changed lanes, driving on the wrong side of the road to avoid a broken-down vehicle. "Don't think about it. We're nearly there."

"Why don't we just go home?" Olivia's voice was pleading now. "Dad, we can just go home."

Christian knew better. The ship's arrival meant that this was no ordinary dust storm.

"Wait," said Olivia, "look over there!"

He couldn't see which way she was pointing. "Where?"

"Left! Left!"

Christian twisted in his seat to see, risking taking his eyes off the road for an instant. A bright beam of light, white hot and so bright it revealed the horizon, shone through the smoke and dust. It held steady for a moment and then winked out.

"What's that, Dad?"

He stared, unable to answer, his eyes locked on the spot where the bright light had appeared. Then the car slammed into the back of another vehicle.

Christian's instincts told him to get out, exchange contact information with the occupants of the car he'd just rear-ended, then call his insurance company. But the bright flash of light was something else, something almost every Human knew. The Toralii worldshatter devices.
They
were here. The demons.

That was why the
Beijing
was in the atmosphere. Why this massive dust storm had sprung up out of nowhere. He put the car into reverse, spun the wheel and then went around. The car's bumper bar dragged on the road and the electric engine made a pained groan as he accelerated. For a moment, he thought it would give out, but soon the car was back at speed.

"Collision detected," came the unnaturally calm female voice from the car's stereo system. "Please remain calm, emergency services have been alerted."

He ignored it, as he did the other lights on the dashboard. Overheat warning. Autodrive inoperable. Seatbelt undone.

"Are those people okay?" asked Olivia, her voice filled with panic.

"They're fine, honey. They're fine. Keep an eye out for more cars."

Christian drove off an exit ramp towards Reliant Stadium. He could hear sirens, and other cars, all converging on this one point. He was not alone in his thinking. The traffic picked up as he drew close; he parked the car near the entranceway, abandoning it without a second thought.

The dust picked up, as did the temperature. It was as though someone had opened an oven; a hot air rolling in from the west, dry and full of sand, blowing at the back of his head. He kept his sleeve over his mouth as he half carried, half-dragged Olivia towards the entrance to the huge stadium.

Right as he did the colossal ship, one he knew as the TFR
Beijing
, slammed down into the ground barely three hundred feet in front of him, still glowing hot from its passage through the atmosphere.

The wind and the heat were momentarily in his face. The blast blew him onto his back. Olivia shrieked, a sound almost drowned out by the falling debris and groan of settling metal.

"Olivia! Olivia!"

"I'm here, Dad!" She was still standing, offering him her tiny arms.

He took her hand but barely used it, instead pushing off with his other arm. He stared, wide eyed, at the wall of metal higher than the stadium walls.

The
Beijing
had come down parallel to the oval, the bow of the ship completely crushing the concourse lounge. The middle of the ship must have been in the central playing field; that must be why they had landed there, to have such an opening.

"Come on," he said to Olivia. He knew this stadium well; the Coca-Cola entrance would lead them to the central area, if it wasn't destroyed. He made for the fire stairs, but already all around him, cars pulled up and disgorged people. It was going to get crowded fast.

The fire stairs door was locked from the other side. He cursed loudly; this had cost him time. He tried forcing it open with his shoulder, then a few well-placed kicks to the handle, but it held fast. Nearby a crowd of people were swarming through the gates, the automated ticket system complaining endlessly, but nobody paid it any heed.

"Hold my hand; hold it really tight. We have to go through there."

Olivia looked distinctly unhappy at that prospect, but she gripped his hand tightly. "I got you, Dad."

Christian merged with the crowd, pulling Olivia along behind him, moving with the throng. Everyone was talking at once, calling the names of friends and family or trying to call them on cell phones that no longer worked. People cried out names, warnings, shouts of encouragement.

The lights of the
Beijing
lit up the stadium brighter than any game lights. The airlocks opened, and armed soldiers in spacesuits funnelled the crowd aboard, barely able to control the panic.

"Children first!" shouted one of the space-suited people, a female voice with an Asian accent, amplified by some unseen source. Nobody paid any attention to her, so she raised her rifle in the air and discharged several shots. The rounds, explosive and powerful, smashed into the shattered remains of the ceiling and exploded. "Children first!"

"Child over here!" shouted Christian, but he realised that Olivia was gone.

"Olivia!"

The screaming and shouting all around him drowned out all hope of response. He began pushing his way through the crowd away from the ship, fighting against the tide, shoving people out of the way. "Olivia! Olivia! Olivia!"

Suddenly the crowd was against him. He became more than someone trying to reach the ship as they were; he was an obstacle, something blocking their way. He shoved, and they shoved back; someone slammed their open hand into his face and his nose exploded into a flower of blood. He fell onto his back, and the crowd washed over him, trampling him under dozens of shoes and booted feet. A heavy boot crushed the fingers on his right hand, a wave of pain that ran up the length of the limb, each finger crushed and mangled.

Hands grabbed him and pulled him up. A couple of strong men, one with long hair and the other wearing gang colours, hoisted him off the ground.

"Come on, buddy!" shouted the longhaired man, "We gotta get to the ship! It's heating up out here!"

"I can't!" Christian shouted, spitting out a mouthful of blood. "I have to find my daughter!"

"There's no time for that!"

More gunfire from the front drew his attention. The soldiers all had their weapons down and levelled, pointed at the advancing tide. "We're approaching capacity!" shouted the female soldier again, and this time Christian was close enough to pick out the Chinese flag on her breast and the pips on her shoulders that signified she was an officer. "We can take fifty more, children only!"

More people poured through the doors to the airlock. She fired again, this time lower, the round striking the western stands. "Back!"

The two men half carried Christian forward. He was too battered, bruised to do anything but fight to keep on his feet, frantically looking in all directions for his daughter.

"Dad!"

A voice, faint and far away that only a father would have heard. One of the space-suited soldiers carried Olivia toward the airlock. She had her arms out to her father, pleading as loud as her small voice could carry.

"No, wait!" She struggled in the soldier's arms. "Save my dad, too!"

"We need to seal this airlock! We're over capacity!"

Christian was near the front now, carried aloft by two helpful strangers, when the soldiers turned their guns on the crowd.

Explosive rounds tore through the flesh all around him, bursting with deafening force as they made contact, blowing people into hunks of meat. Gore splattered his face, so thick he could barely see, and then the bang-whizz of a round passed close by, followed by the wet thud of an impact.

Dozens of little bees stung all over the left side of his body. The grey-haired man dropped him, shrieking in pain.

His father had been a veteran in the second Iraq war. He was discharged when, during one of their patrols, an A-10 Warthog had strafed their position in error. Years later on Thanksgiving, when his father had too much to drink and the turkey was for some reason not to his satisfaction, he had told him what shrapnel felt like. Like little bees attacking all at once, and then all your blood went everywhere. Your whole body felt like it was on fire, as though the venom of those bees was lava making its way through your veins and burning you from the inside, and you would lie screaming in the dirt until someone filled you so full of morphine you didn't remember anything until you woke up in Rammstein military hospital.

Although his father's story painted a vivid mental image, Christian always viewed the description with detached curiosity. Now it was his turn to scream in the dirt. Christian fell forward on his face, rounds flying over his head. The deafening roar of semi-automatic fire stole his hearing, leaving only a pronounced ringing in both ears. The guy with long hair lay beside him, half his torso missing.

The tide turned. People started running away from the ship, silently screaming to the sound of white noise in his ears.

He sat up. It was a strange thing to do while everyone was cowering, dead or dying, beside him, but he did.

The soldier pointed her gun at him but then raised it. She and the soldier beside her, carrying a silently screaming, kicking Olivia, stepped through the blood-splattered airlock and sealed it.

Christian tried to stand, but his balance was gone. He fell back into the bodies, hands and knees slick with rapidly pooling blood. The ground began to tremble as the ship gained energy, slowly lifting off before him, a mute whale floating towards rapidly darkening skies.

The air was so hot it was unbearable. The ringing in his ears began to fade, replaced by the howl of the wind, the screams of the dying, the shouts of the remaining people as they milled around, trying to formulate some plan. The
Beijing
climbed and climbed until the red dust cloud enveloped it. Christian watched that spot, eyes fixed upon it, as Olivia was lifted up and away.

Then a lance of alien fire speared down on Reliant Stadium, turning it and all the people within to ash.

Operations

TFR
Beijing

"We are away, Captain. Minimal damage to the substructure from the landing."

"How many did we save?" asked Liao, her voice tight. The ship groaned as it fought through the raging dust storm that was the air above the southern United States. She felt like a robot; the people they'd saved were nothing, just people. Numbers. Lumps of flesh plucked off a dying world.

"Impossible to know, Captain," said Jiang. "Marine Lieutenant Cheung reports that they stopped counting at around 8,000, but there's many more."

Liao nodded tersely. "So evacuation capacity, or near enough. That'll have to do."

Jiang wouldn't look at her. Liao could barely look at anyone. "Report on casualties from the surface?"

"It doesn't matter," said Lieutenant Ling from the radar station, saying what they were all thinking. "If they're not dead now, they soon will be."

Liao closed her eyes. It was true; it
didn't
matter. Anyone left on the surface now was as good as dead, so it didn't matter that they had shot civilians. They needed to close the airlock doors, they needed to recover their marines safely, and they needed not to exceed the maximum jump tonnage of the ship. If the ship's mass exceeded 200,000 tonnes the jump drive, already stressed to its limits and damaged, would not be able to function.

Her conscience would have to wait.

"Captain!" Jiang's voice shook Liao from her contemplation. "The Toralii are firing near us!"

"Evasive manoeuvres." What else could she do? The ship lurched, and she grabbed her console to keep her feet steady.

"Already on it, Captain. Raising the bow to minimise damage."

The monitors connected to external camera flooded white. A faint shudder ran through the ship from stem to stern.

"Near miss, Captain. They weren't firing at us, though, simply completing their ground bombardment."

"Then let's get the fuck out of their way."

Jiang tapped her console. "Captain, Broadswords are docking."

"Good." Liao nodded in approval. "Get them aboard as soon as you can."

Hsin, their communications officer, spoke up. "Captain, the Broadsword
Farsight
reports that its reactionless drive is suffering a malfunction. They have to abort their docking and return to land on the surface."

She felt as though her stomach should have tied in a knot. This should have been a big issue; she should have felt guilt. Anger. Helplessness.

She felt nothing. "We can't go back for them," Liao said. "Tell them that. Push their engines; on my authority, jettison ammunition and fuel stores. Hell, throw the seats overboard. Just get them onboard the
Beijing
."

"Impossible, Captain. They can't break atmosphere."

"We can't go back for them," Liao repeated.

"They know, Captain. They plan on ditching in the ocean. Major Berkoff wishes us Godspeed."

Liao turned back to her console, gripping it with the tips of her fingers. "God's taken the day off, Lieutenant. Send the following: Communication received. Good hunting." She released the console and drummed her fingers on the plastic. "Mr. Hsin, patch me through to the
Archangel
."