Space Junque (5 page)

"I have a confession to make." He kissed her forehead. "In the
 
Junque
 
on the way up, I
 
did
 
want to go for your precious parts."

"I knew it."

They took a shower together. "Twice in one day," she said. "My life is suddenly the picture of luxury."

"Oh, you mean the shower? I thought that smug look was on my account."

"Well, it
 
has
 
been a while since I've been with a man."

"Um, not that long."

"Oh, that didn't count." She blushed at the reference. "That was chaos sex."

"And this was more on purpose?" How sweet. He looked hopeful.

"Right." She kissed him and stepped out of the shower.

She headed for the closet but changed her mind and put on the same outfit. Silly, but she wouldn't want Mike to notice that she had changed clothes.

Then she saw her other flight pants out the corner of her eye, the ones she wore on the ride up. She uttered a little cry and snatched them off the floor. Trembling, she unzipped the pockets until she found it.

"Char?" Jake was at the bathroom door, his stubble almost gone and her razor in his hand.

"My necklace." How could she have forgotten? It was like forgetting Sky. She wrapped the black satin cord around her neck and kissed the silver half heart. "My sister wore the other half."

"Sisters are good." He popped into the bathroom and back out again with a clean face. "I love all my sisters. Almost all."

The Emperor had a hundred concubines. An exaggeration, but Jake surely had more sisters than he knew about. Char had only the one, living or not.

Watching him dress, she remembered something from the Blue Marble. "Jake, tell me about the raptors."

"It's true." He pulled on his boots. "I've seen eagles and peregrines myself. Rani saw ospreys, and I've heard about vultures."

"How is it . . ."

"Possible? How is any of this possible? It's all part of the big contamination, I guess. Every species is vulnerable to mutation. Humans completely hairless. Birds becoming giant monsters."

Bing-bong.
 
An alert chime rang with a message on the room's compad. It wasn't Mike.
 
Special Bulletin. Please access Channel One
.

Jake continued. "When I dropped Rani at the V, a guy in the bar swore he watched someone teleport. I mean, that's one of the ludicrous ones, but some rumors are going to be based in fact."

"How big was the raptor you saw?"

"They fly in pairs. The bald eagles were the largest. I'd say their wing span was close to thirty feet, tip to tip."

"How is this kept secret?"

"No reporter will touch that story. They'd lose access to everything else. But it's not so secret. There's plenty of chatter on the grid."

"Whack chatter."

"Exactly how the Emperor wants you to think of them." He certainly had no love for the Emperor.

"What about on Vacation Station? The observation deck."

"It seems their telescopes have been broken for some time."

Shibad
. Raptors had mutated, truly. Even so, the stories had to be embellished. Birds feeding humans to their chicks, intestines ripped from people's bellies while they were still alive.

Bing-bong.
 
The chime rang again, and this time the message on the compad flashed continuously:
 
Special Bulletin. Please access Channel One
.

The monitor in the sitting room covered three quarters of one wall. The picture came up split into four sections, each showing a mushroom cloud and the name of a city: Montreal, Houston, Redmond, Mexico City.

They both stared at the screen. It took Char a few moments to realize the disaster unfolding was a live feed and not some computer-simulated war game.

"But all the nuclear weapons are gone." This couldn't be happening. With the Treaty of Pyongyang, the world's nuclear stockpile had been destroyed. That was before Char was born.

"Someone didn't get the memo," Jake finally said, his voice barely recognizable. He pulled out his com. "Damn them to the last circle of hell."

Beneath the mushroom clouds, the crawl continually updated:
 
Defenders of Gaia deny nuclear strike. Estimated 10 million dead. EU on alert. Pacific Zone quarantine delayed due to North American strike.

On a repeating loop, a pleasant artificial female voice droned. "For your safety, please remain in your quarters." They were far above the range of any effects of a nuclear strike on earth -- the unacknowledged reason so many Imperial offices had relocated off planet -- but all over the station people had to be watching. And panicking.

"Do you have a com signal?" Jake muted the monitor. "I can't get through to Rani."

Char fooled with her com. "I'm down." It was powered up, but she couldn't send or receive. A new headline crawled over the monitor:
 
Emperor and family unharmed in Machu Picchu.

Jake snorted. "Ten million dead, but the important thing is the asshole who created this mess is just fine."

The crawl changed:
 
All ISS arrivals canceled until further notice. Departures advised to confirm at assigned docking station.

"I've got to go, Meadowlark."

"Rani?" She was his crewmate. Maybe more than that.

"The V is going to be invaded by ships getting off planet. The Imperial will be fine; its data links are too hard to come by." He kissed her -- with unexpected intensity. "If things get too weird, stick with Mike. He's a survivor. And he cares about you."

And he was gone. The feeling struck her that she'd had about the Pacific Zone, that same sense of finality. Jake wasn't coming back.

The monitor went blank and a different artificial voice said, "Incoming message, priority one." Mike's avatar appeared in the lower portion of the monitor. Char touched it and Mike's face filled the screen. "Mike, what's happening?”

"So far it's only four cities, all on the one continent. The DOGs are denying everything, but they're behind it." He was calm and precise, as if he were performing on stage. The strong leader. "The Emperor is coming up. Just as a precaution."

That was big. The Imperial press secretary was always making noise about not being terrorized by the terrorists. That the media just wanted to scare people to drive up ratings, and the Emperor had no plans to go into orbit for his safety.

"Jake's gone to Vacation Station to get Rani," Char said.

"Good. Listen, Char, I've sent directions to your com. I need your help with something before the Emperor gets here. Please come. Right now."

Please. A word not usually found in Mike's vocabulary.

In the corridors the friendly green lights blinked like little pixies beckoning her on. After several passages and two elevators, the voice said, "You have arrived at your destination." It was a small docking bay with one aircraft, a hybrid runabout, part personal jet and part old-fashioned racer. Mike waved to her from the pilot's seat.

She climbed in. There was room behind them for four more, but Mike sealed the bubble canopy before she had secured her harness. "Aren't your bodyguards coming?" The racer lifted off without noise or force, and they floated toward the opening bay door.

"There's no security risk. We're going to check a glitch at the hydroponics annex. It's completely automated and empty. The agronomist has gone down to the planet."

Once the runabout was free of the station, Char felt like a mosquito compared to the massive station. It was huge, really, an actual city in space. Ships hovered about its perimeter, from passenger shuttles to cargo transports. More kept coming.

They were dayside now, but from where she sat she couldn't see the earth. Four nuclear bombs wasn't the end of the world, right? A hundred and fifty years ago, the Americans dropped two nuclear bombs in the eastern hemisphere. The world recovered.

The world was already getting through this. The Emperor would relocate. Mike would take care of glitches in the hydroponics annex. Fertility entrepreneurs would avoid the northern hemisphere.

But god.
 
Ten million people.
 
There were thirty million annihilated by the TU in LA/San Diego. A new standard established. Another degradation of civilization. Now we would count mass murder by the tens of millions.

Jake was right about people getting off planet. Once word got out that the Emperor was coming up, orbit was going to be crammed.

"I've never seen a ship like this," she said.

"It's a prototype. I call it the Mikemobile, but the designers call it an orbit runner. One of Tesla's real successes." Mike pulled up a menu on the console and pointed at the word
 
hydroponics.
 
"Push that."

Char pushed
 
hydroponics.
 
They rotated and backed away from the station.

"It runs on a charge off the solar net, the same power source for the hydroponics annex. This thing will go till it falls apart." The com voice said
 
course acquired,
 
and the Mikemobile eased backward from the station.

"You're piloting your first ship." Mike ran his hands through his hair and blew out a deep breath. "Ah, Char. Being governor of the Imperial Space Station wasn't as glamorous as it sounds. I'm glad you came."

Governor, cripes. That explained the
 
Your Excellency
 
stuff. And the bodyguards. No wonder the best table in the Blue Marble had been conveniently available. But what did he mean,
 
wasn't
? Was he going to lose his position?

"Shíb dài!" Mike's curse stopped her from asking the question. A mid-sized shuttle swerved just past them into the space they'd cleared. "That ship should lose its data link."

The pilot could have kept twice the distance from the orbit runner, and Mike would still have taken offense. Even swearing, Mike wanted everything proper. No
 
shib, shibad, shibadeh
 
for him. You could count on him that way, but you could also count on him never bending, always insisting on the rules. Probably one reason Sky had dragged her feet.

The shuttle moved toward the docking bay where they'd exited the station. The bay door had already closed, but a portal beside it slid open and a ball shot out toward the incoming ship. The ball opened and expanded into a net that spread over the shuttle's hull, covering the observation windows and its sunflower logo.

The shuttle lit up with electrical arcs emanating from the net. Like vicious lightning, the arcs darted about the ship's exterior. The pilot's windows blew out, and the vacuum of space sucked a stream of objects out of the ship. Including people.

A body slammed against the bubble canopy in front of Char. The middle-aged woman's eyes were open, staring through a cascade of curls with the same surprised expression Tyler had had. She was still alive -- no. The body shifted. The back of its head was missing. It slid over the canopy and floated away.

"What the hell was that?" Char said through sobs and chattering teeth. Shibadeh, the world
 
was
 
coming to an end.

"The guys in logistics call it an electric blanket." Mike's voice was flat, emotionless. He rubbed the back of her neck, but it only made her feel worse.

"No, I meant why?" Her eyes stung. "There were people on that ship."

"They might have been DOGs," Mike said. "That shuttle was ordered not to dock. Approaching the station was a hostile act."

The supposedly hostile shuttle went dark, its sunflower logo illuminated by natural light. It drifted, dead in space.

The hydroponics annex was a rectangular monolith the size of a football field in synchronized orbit about ten minutes out from the Imperial station. The Mikemobile linked to the annex, acquired docking data, and glided into a bay large enough for a supertransport.

Coming out of the airlock into the control room, Char was bombarded by the smell of green growing things. Still shaken, she closed her eyes and filled her lungs with the sweet air, grateful for the small measure of comfort it gave. Now the faces of two dead people haunted her, Tyler and the woman from the sunflower shuttle.