As she watched that cloud of peppery rock rise from the ground and rip through the gauzy ships — overwhelming them one by one, at last erupting into clear space — Madeleine whooped and howled.
The debris cloud continued to expand, now beginning to tail after Mercury in its slow orbit around the Sun. It caught the brilliant light, like rain in sunshine. Maybe Mercury is going to have rings, she thought, rings that will shine like roadways in the sky. Nice memorial. The major features of the surface beneath had survived, of course; no backyard rocket was going to obliterate Caloris Planitia. But every square meter of the surface had been raked over.
She contacted the Coalition.
Every human on Mercury had survived — even those who hadn’t taken Nemoto’s advice about deep shelter. Already they were emerging, blinking, under a dusty, starry sky.
Every human but Nemoto, of course.
At least we have breathing space: time to rebuild, maybe breed a little, spread out, before the next bunch of ET assholes come chomping their way through the Solar System. Good for you, Nemoto. You did the best you could. Good job.
As for me — story’s over here, Madeleine. Time to face the universe again.
And so Madeleine fled before the hail of rubble from Mercury — still expanding, a dark and looming cloud that glittered with fragments of Cracker craft. Fled in search of Gaijin, and Reid Malenfant.
PART FIVE
The Children’s Crusade
A.D. 8800, and Later
Near the neutron star there were multiple lobes of light. They looked like solar flares to Malenfant: giant, unending storms rising from the neutron star’s surface. Farther out still, the founts of gas lost their structure, becoming dim, diffuse. They merged into a wider cloud of debris that seemed to be fleeing from the neutron star, a vigorous solar wind. And beyond that there were only the Galaxy core stars — watchful, silent, still, peering down as if in disapproval at this noisy, spitting monster.
This was a pulsar. You could detect those radio beams from Earth.
Malenfant had grown up with the story of the first detection of a pulsar. Pre-Gaijin astronomers had detected an unusual radio signaclass="underline" a regular, ticking pulse, accurate to within a millionth of a second. Staring at such traces, the scientists had at first toyed with the idea it might be the signature of intelligence, calling from the stars.
In fact, when envoys from the stars began to make their presence known, it was not as a gentle tick of radio noise but as a wave of destructive exploitation that scattered mankind and all but overwhelmed the entire Solar System — and the same thing had occurred many times before.
We put up a hell of a fight, though, he thought. We even won some victories, in our tiny, scattershot way. But in the end it was going to count for nothing.
It was ironic, he thought grimly. Those old pre-Gaijin stargazers had thought that first pulsar was a signal from little green men.
In fact it was a killer of little green men.
Chapter 32
Savannah
She woke to the movement of air: the rustle of wind in trees, perhaps the hiss of grass, a gentle breeze on her face, the scent of dew, of wood smoke. Eyes closed, she was lying on her back. She could feel something tickling at her neck, the slippery texture of leaves under the palms of her hand. Somewhere crickets were calling.
She opened her eyes. She was looking up at the branches of a tree, silhouetted against a blue-black sky.
And the sky was full of stars. A great river of light flowed from horizon to horizon. It was littered with pink-white glowing clouds, crowded, beautiful.
She remembered.
Io. She had been on Io.
Her Gaijin guides had taken her to a grave: Reid Malenfant’s grave, they said, dug by strong Neandertal hands. She had, briefly, despaired; she had been too late in her self-appointed mission; he had died alone after all, a long way from home.
The Gaijin hadn’t seemed to understand.
Then had come a blue flash, a moment of pain—
And now, this. Where the hell was she? She sat up, suddenly afraid.
She saw a flickering fire, a figure squatting beside it. A man. He was holding something on a stick, she saw, perhaps a fish. He stood straight now, and came walking easily toward her.
She felt herself tense up farther.
His head was silhouetted against the crowded stars; he was bald, his skin smooth as leather. It was Reid Malenfant.
She whimpered, cowered back. “You are dead.”
He crouched before her, reached out and held her hand. He felt warm, real, calm. “Take it easy, Madeleine.”
“They put you in a hole in the ground, on Io. Jesus Christ—”
“Don’t ask questions,” he said evenly. “Not yet. Concentrate on the here and now. How do you feel? Are you sick, hot, cold?”
She thought about that. “I’m okay, I guess.” She wiggled her fingers and toes, turned her head this way and that. Everything intact and mobile; nothing aching; not so much as a cricked neck. Her trembling subsided, soothed by a relentless blizzard of detail, of normality. The here and now, yes.
It was Reid Malenfant. He was wearing a pale blue coverall, white slip-on shoes. When she glanced down, she found she was wearing the same bland outfit.
He was studying her. “You were out cold. I thought I’d better leave you be. We don’t seem to have any medic equipment here.”
The smell of the fish reached her. “I’m hungry,” she said, surprised. “You’ve been fishing?”
“Why not? I mined my old space suit. Not for the first time. A thread, a hook made from a zipper. I felt like Tom Sawyer.”
…Never mind the fish. This guy is dead. “Malenfant, they buried you. Your burns…” But she was starting to remember more. The Neandertals had opened the grave. It was empty.
“Just look at me now.” Emulating her, he clenched his fists, twisted his head. “I haven’t felt so good since the Bad Hair Day twins had a hold of me.”
“Who?”
“Long story. Look, you want some fish or not?” And he loped back to the fire, picked up another twig skewered through a second fish, and held it over his fire of brushwood.
She got to her feet and followed him.
The sky provided a soft light, as bright as a quarter-Moon, perhaps. Even away from that galactic stripe the stars were crowded. There was a pattern of bright stars near the zenith that looked like a box, or maybe a kite; there was another easy pattern farther over, six stars arranged in a rough, squashed ellipse. She recognized no constellations, though.
The grassy plain rolled to the distance, dotted with sparse trees, the vegetation black and silver in the starlight. But where Malenfant’s fire cast a stronger light she could see the grass was an authentic green.
Gravity about Earth normal, she noted absently.
She thought she saw movement, a shadow flitting past a stand of trees. She waited for a moment, holding still. There was no sound, not so much as a crackle of undergrowth under a footstep.
She hunkered down beside Malenfant, accepted half a fish, and bit into it. It was succulent but tasteless. “I never much liked fish,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Where’s the stream?”
He nodded, beyond the fire. “Thataway. I took a walk.”
“During the daylight?”
“No.” He tilted back his head. “When I woke up it was night, as deep as this. Still is.” He glanced up at the sky, picking out a complex of glowing clouds. “What do you think of the view?”