Stars Rain Down (11 page)

Nikitin appeared beside him, raring and ready to go. "Makes ya feel like a big man, don't it?"

Nikitin didn't have any aversion to firearms, and never failed to give Jack crap about his. He had a small collection of rifles which he treated like children, and he usually spent his vacation time alone in the wilderness, hunting big-eyed creatures that never saw it coming. Jack never could figure out how Nikitin dealt with the cognitive dissonance.

Jack patted the gun. "I don't want the damned thing. Do you?"

"Naw. Might confuse it for a real gun and try to play hero. Better leave it with someone level headed like yourself. Come on. We should get a move on before it turns dark."

With that, the two climbed up the side of the ravine and back into the dust storm's vicious winds. They kept their heads down and scurried from one pile of debris to the next, creeping up on the village in ten meter bursts. They could make out more details at each stop, and the picture wasn't pretty: broken walls and shattered beams dominated the foreground, against a hillside which had long ago been cut into scalloped terraces, and was now pockmarked with jagged craters.

They stopped at a pile of broken bricks and waited for any sign of movement, but there was too much dust in the air to see anything clearly. For a moment, Jack was tempted to grab Nikitin's binoculars, but he only would've seen dust and more dust beyond it.

They crossed the last stretch of land and immediately pinned themselves to a wall. It was connected to two more which were still standing, while the fourth had fallen inward along with the roof. Every other building in sight was much the same: barely held together, with hand-painted signs hanging from whatever remained upright.

From there, Jack and Nikitin skirted the edges of the village and listened for voices—for any hint of people—but there were none. They silently passed one shattered building after the next, some still smoking from recent attacks, and Jack imagined that Nikitin felt just as hopeless as he did.

Then they caught sight of movement. Both men reacted the same way, instinctively ducking for cover in a darkened doorway. The building's roof was in pieces, and the rubble inside left about as much space as a small closet. It was a wonder both of them fit inside.

They tried to breathe as quietly as they could while they watched the road and awaited the silhouette's approach. It was moving slowly and coming straight down the center of the pavement, and as it drew closer, Jack thought for a second that it was wildlife. Another moment later, he changed his mind completely.

It wasn't large, maybe as big as a teenager, and it walked slowly on all fours while calmly surveying the area. Its body looked oddly shaped for that kind of movement, though, with proportions that were altogether too human. Front and rear legs were the same length but shaped differently, the front pair being more spindly and ending in fully formed hands.

As the creature passed by, Jack could see that it was wearing a mechanical mask not unlike his own, from which two long, pointed ears protruded outward and upward. It also carried some sort of ornate rifle on its back. Although exotically shaped, an embossed branch-and-leaf pattern on the weapon's surface made it look like a Victorian relic.

There was a noise in the distance, like a horn or an animal howling, and the creature stopped in its tracks. It stood up on its hind legs, took a last glance around the area and thankfully missed Jack and his partner in their hiding spot. Then it turned toward the source of the noise and leapt off, returning to all fours and sprinting as a jackrabbit would.

"Follow it?" Nikitin asked quietly.

"Unless you've got a good idea," Jack replied.

They made sure the coast was clear, then crept out together and headed after the creature. They moved from one broken building to the next using rubble piles for cover, and it didn't take them long to reach the far end of the village where another discovery waited.

They crawled on their bellies to the top of a particularly large mound of debris and peeked over the edge, only to find one of the alien cuttlefish sitting motionless on the other side. Nikitin took a quick scan with his binoculars, then handed them to Jack who took his time studying the scene.

There was something going on in the space between the ship and the village, but Jack wasn't sure what. The aliens had collected a pile of human bodies, which was guarded by a handful of the jackrabbit creatures, along with another type of alien that couldn't have been more different.

The new type reminded Jack of nothing so much as a bipedal rhinoceros, although the similarity only went so far. They were massive and walked fully upright on thick, tree-trunk legs, while their equally thick and muscular arms hung far out to the sides. Jack could just barely make out another, smaller set of arms closer to the middle of their torso, which they kept hidden away.

What skin he could see was rough and grey, while the rest was hidden beneath an armor that glittered like the inside of a geode. Those plates extended to their long heads, where it ended in a sharp horn at the tip of their snout.

The rhino creatures had something even weirder on their backs. At first, Jack thought they might be backpacks or machines until he saw one move. It was twitching. He continued to stare and began to make sense of the shape, like a huge water strider clinging to the rhino's back with its long legs. He briefly wondered if the bug might be controlling the rhino, but there was no way to know.

"Whaddyu think?" Nikitin asked in a hushed voice.

"I dunno. Collecting them for food, maybe?" Jack was a little surprised at how detached he sounded. At how detached he felt. He couldn't figure out where all his moral outrage and disgust had run off to.

"Maybe," Nikitin said. "I wouldn't treat food that way, though. No one's loading them onto the ship either."

That was true. The creatures didn't show any real interest in the pile of corpses. It might as well have been a pile of scrap wood on a construction site. This wasn't for show; it was just business.

Then Jack heard plaintive cries that were all too human, which grew louder until two rhinos emerged from the dust dragging a young woman by the arm. She was screaming at the top of her lungs and thrashing against their grip, but it was no use.

After another moment, a third kind of creature appeared behind them, floating in mid-air, swaying back and forth gently like seaweed in high-tide. This thing looked to be made of the same material as the ship, covered from head to toe in sharp bony outcroppings. Everything about it hinted at sea-life, even the single glowing, blue-green eye. It was like some kind of flying prawn/human hybrid with a whiplike tail, and six thin waving arms.

The two rhinos dragged their captive to the body-pile, and Jack pieced together what was going on. Without thinking, he pulled out his gun with one hand and grabbed a flare from his pocket with the other, then cracked the breech and loaded it. His hands began to shake and he was sweating all over.

Leonid Nikitin's hand pushed the gun back down. "We can't save her, Jack."

The woman screamed louder when she caught sight of the bodies, and the sound pierced Jack's ears. There had to be a way to stop this. Frantically, he looked all around, trying to find some weapon, some answer, but there was nothing. They were surrounded on all sides by the hollow corpse of a village, and the sounds of a doomed woman.

For the first time he could remember, he was hungry to kill something. His heart thumped like the pistons of a locomotive, and he wanted to murder them all with his bare hands.

Before Jack could climb to his feet, Nikitin effortlessly pinned him back down. He moved his head close to Jack, and so very near a whisper, he said, "Only two ways this plays out. Either she dies alone, or we all die together. There's no third option, hero. I know you wanna save her. It's what we do, but that just ain't happening this time. There are other folks out there we can still help, though... people who need you, Jack, and I'm gonna make damn sure you survive long enough to find 'em. You understand me?"

Jack struggled under Nikitin's arm, so slobbering mad he couldn't form words, but he couldn't move a centimeter. He might as well have been pinned under a school bus. There was no escape, and so he watched with unblinking eyes.

A rhino lifted the thrashing girl up and dangled her above the ground, and the floating prawn-man made a motion with one of its many arms. It was a command. In response, the rhino palmed her head in its mammoth hand and snapped her neck.

The screaming stopped.

Jack's hot breath filled the oxygen mask and he grunted in anger. Down below, the rhino tossed her limp corpse onto the pile and walked away to join its companions. Just business as usual. A passage opened on the outside of the ship, and all but one of the alien creatures walked in. A lone jackrabbit waited longer than the others, all the time staring at the pile of bodies, then it shook its head, sprinted up the ramp and was gone.

The fin surrounding the cuttlefish started to wave, and the clothes washer sound started. The noise filled the air as the ship lifted into the sky and disappeared.

Nikitin released his grip on Jack the moment the ship was away, and they both lay there in stunned silence. It took ten long minutes for the lone thought in Jack's head to stop repeating, commanding him to kill them all. When he finally returned to his senses, he said one word: "Bastards."

"Been a real bad afternoon, Jack."

"No shit."

Dusk was swiftly turning to night. "But tomorrow's another day."

Another day like this,
Jack thought. He was close to calm again, but his chest was still shaking. "Tomorrow's another day," he parroted. "Let's get the others and bring 'em back here. There's still plenty of shelter. We grab some shut-eye, and hunt for supplies in the morning. Something tells me there aren't any survivors, and the bastards won't be back any time soon."

They waited another minute there atop the rubble pile, collected their thoughts, then climbed back down and headed off toward the stream.

The Copernicus Observatory hurtled around the Earth, completing each lap in just over an hour-and-a-half, and Jansen thought Phileas Fogg would be positively green with envy.

Under normal circumstances, the station's suite of multi-wavelength active and passive scanners would be staring out away from the bright blue globe, penetrating into the depths of the darkness beyond, but this wasn't a remotely normal day.

Instead, Copernicus continued on at its dizzying pace, but the lights were out and the three technicians charged with babysitting it had forgotten all about the stars. Instead, they hung around in silence, together watching the fate of their planet while trying not to think too hard about their own predicament.

The invasion had been carried out with frightening efficiency. Strange discs arrived from out of nowhere, jammed all radio frequencies, and then bashed everything in orbit to pieces.

The only possible explanation for Copernicus' survival was that the station had been powered down during the attack; whether the invaders thought it broken or simply failed to notice it was up for debate. Either way, none of the three men aboard was in any hurry to flip the generators back on.

The next phase of the attack happened while Copernicus was on the other side of the world. The station came back around, streaking over Europe and then toward the Mideast, and as it approached Pakistan, the crew caught sight of twin mushroom clouds reaching high into the sky. Two objects had struck with unimaginable force, one in India and the other in China, leaving vast craters and dust clouds that swelled up and swallowed the entire continent.

After that, nothing could surprise the crew of Copernicus anymore. The invaders torched launch facilities facilities, removing any ability to mount an offensive in space, and then bombarded population centers all over the globe. With their communication cut off, cities everywhere were hit completely unaware, with coastal regions receiving the brunt of the punishment. They all erupted in balls of blue flame that left nothing but charred ruins and the immolated bodies of the dead.

Human civilization was annihilated in three hours, before even one alien bothered to set foot on the ground. Then, with the ashes of empires still smouldering, the seven vessels made planetfall in Africa and South America.

The action was over by the eighth hour, and with the atmosphere recyclers turned off, the air inside of Copernicus was getting stale. All three crewmen were suited up, but refused to don their helmets; with radios down, being sealed up would be too much like being alone... even though none of them had spoken in hours.

Sometime after it was over, Marco Esquivel broke the silence. "So," he said, "are we slowly killing ourselves or what?"

"What the heck?" Hopkins asked in dismay.

"I don't know," Jansen said, ignoring Hopkins as usual. "We can't call for help. Doubt there's anyone left to call if we could."

"What about Midway or Tranquility? Ares? There's gotta be someone alive. I mean, our dumb asses survived... someone else must have." Hopkins was a frantic mess, just like any other day.

Marco put his hands behind his head like he was lying in a hammock on a Fijian beach. "I guess. The invaders came right to Earth, so those guys might still be alive. Radio is screwed, though."

Jansen nodded. "Won't know for sure till we kick the power back on."

"Wait wait wait," Hopkins said quickly, waving his hands about. "We can't turn the power on. That's the only reason they didn't frag us in the first place."

Jansen took a whiff of the air. He didn't need any instruments to know that oxygen was running low. "No power, no oxygen generation. So there's our choice: do we suffocate all slow like, or do we perish in a glorious ball of flame?"

Marco chuckled. "Pretty clear which way you're leaning. Why not? Put me down for the blaze of glory, too."

Hopkins crossed his arms in frustration. "Jackasses. Fine. Do whatever you want. I'll see you both in Hell."