Shattered Sky Read online

  Table of Contents

  1 Happy Ending

  2 Symptoms

  3 A Day in the Life

  4 Grasping at Carbon

  5 Heaven

  6 Patch

  7 Arrival

  8 Iron Sky

  9 Privacy

  10 Balcony

  11 Routine

  12 Deathtrap

  13 The Incident

  14 Reporter

  15 Safe-Zone

  16 Claustrophobia

  17 Puncture

  18 Rod

  19 Last Words

  20 Armor Piercing

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About David Colby

  Coming Soon Lunar Cycle Book 3 Luna’s Lament

  To the random musers.

  For small creatures such as we, the vastness of the universe is bearable only through love.

  —Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

  1

  Happy Ending

  4/2/2068

  California, North American Economic Zone

  T-Minus L-Day: 141

  Happy endings were supposed to be a hell of a lot easier than this dà qiāng wú dàn. I had been on Earth for a whole twenty-four hours and in all those seconds of all those minutes of all those hours, I had gotten to kiss the love my life a grand total of once.

  “This sucks.”

  Jillian stood next to me, her back leaning against the wall as she looked out at the vast sweep of Edwards Air Force Base. When I looked out at it, it just made me feel queasy and impatient and claustrophobic in a way that I had never felt before. I didn’t even need to move my eyes to splash the images all over the wallpaper of my brain: the three or so buildings the size of entire habitation blocks, the kilometer and then some of blackened tarmac that sucked up heat like a sink­, and spread through it all the real reason why I was here and not with Sarah.

  The troops. Specifically, the ten thousand or so troops that used Edwards Air Force Base as a way of getting to the next leg of their various deployments. Huge cargo hauling VTOLs landed and lifted off, while suborbital streakers burned hard to slow down and let off troops. Their uniforms spanned a spectrum of military minutia I’d never seen before, like looking through the world’s shittiest spectrometer. In space, the officer pool had been decidedly shallow, with maybe three lieutenants before General Lau. Down here, I saw every single rank that I had been forced to memorize during Basic: Gunnery Sergeants, Staff Sergeants, Second Lieutenants, First Lieutenants, Colonels, Majors, and Captains. It was a relief from the endless stream of PFCs and Corporals and Areos, like sunspots breaking up the eye scorching brightness of the sun.

  Most of the Earthers were kitted out differently from Spacer soldiers, too. No laser weaponry, no bounce in their steps, no breathers and enclosed helmets. The enlisted pukes had slugthrowers on their backs, while the officers tended to be unarmed and glittery with medals, but they all trudged along, looking …

  Actually, most of them didn’t look that unhappy. For most of them, this was a life they had chosen. A comfortable life with good pay, free medical coverage, honor and prestige. A life that I could have—something that fascinated and repelled me at the same time.

  I wished they were unhappy. It’d be easier. It’d make more sense, if I could share that misery. Instead of being …

  “So, Corp,” Jillian said, deorbiting my thoughts.

  “Jillian, we’re out of the Marines now,” I said, rubbing my face with my hands.

  “So, Dru,” Jillian started again. “What are you going to do once we get out of this?”

  “Buy a farm.” I stood. The gravity down here was intense. I had to actually use my hand and the wall to get my knees to unbend, rather than just kipping up. I had never thought that one-G would be so … so much more than the gravity on the Hub. It wasn’t even that I hadn’t been exposed to one-G before— it was more that it was all the time, everywhere. Standing didn’t feel worth it, but I felt too confined by sitting, too passive. I started to pace back and forth, my body wanting to bounce, but gravity glued me to the ground. “I told Sarah I’d be in Quebec Arcology as soon as I could get there. At this rate—”

  Jillian shuffled to the left. I shuffled into the space she had vacated. The Space Marine—one of the survivors of the Battle of the Forge, as they were calling the last big battle of the war—behind me shuffled over to take up the spot that I had held. And so, the line continued to process, and so I got closer and closer to getting out of this endless waiting.

  But I still felt trapped, stuck in adhesive, forced to do nothing but endure. Endure the sounds—the babbling conversations that overlapped and drowned each other out—endure the smells— the thick, cloying stench of the tarmac, the scent of the scrubland that surrounded the base, the smell of jets and jet fuel—and endure the heat. The pounding, unstoppable heat, pouring through my skinclothes and broiling me in my own juices. I had never imagined that an uncontrolled environment could be so horrifyingly unpleasant.

  “I miss air conditioners,” Jillian muttered.

  “I miss Sarah.”

  “I miss air conditioners and I miss Sarah. She was cute. You never said she was that cute.” Jillian chuckled.

  “I didn’t?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. I tried to ignore the aching feeling that started to suffuse my head, starting right behind my nose and working its way down my jaws. A stress headache. That was what I needed. That was just the perfect addition to this day, thank you, body.

  The line shuffled forward again. My heart skipped a beat. Did it just start to go just a bit faster? The line, that is, not my heart. I knew that was going faster: The idea of getting out of this heat and into Sarah was just about the only reason why I hadn’t started wishing that I wasn’t in space again.

  “What are you planning to do?” I asked, looking at Jillian.

  “That’s hard. I don’t have any desire to waste my life poking at the ground with a sharp stick—”

  “You have no idea what farming actually involves, do you?”

  Jillian didn’t stop, speaking over my interruption with a grin. “—but I also don’t have any friends or family down here. I’m technically old enough to vote and smoke. Not drink, mind you. But I can still take my back pay, rent an apartment …” She trailed off, shaking her head.

  “Why not come with me?” I asked. “I mean, you … you probably can’t stay with the Cayers, but if there’s not an apartment somewhere in the Republic of Quebec, I’ll speak nothing but English there. We can hang out, you can help farm, maybe I can set you up with a fair-haired farm boy. Mostly to get them off Sarah’s back …”

  Jillian snorted. “Earther farm boys, Earther farm boys. That means I’ll want to do a Mkundu ng’ombe msichana and they’ll run away screaming to their moms.”

  “Think of it as an educational process.”

  Jillian stroked her chin as we shuffled forward again.

  After what felt like five eternities (and I knew something about eternity, having ridden a fully packed ROVer from the Sun-Earth L1 point to GEO) Jillian got sucked into the front doors that the whole line was riding through. She was the first person I’d actually physically seen go in, thanks to the curvature of the line and the building blocking the view. Now that I was closer, though, I saw that a second line was heading into the same place, a far longer line of Earther soldiers going in for their processing. I had to wait for four Earthers to cycle in before I got to head in—hoping that Jillian would be waiting nearby after I got out, or else I’d never find her again.

  After losing Liam, Chuck, Jason, David … after losing all
of them, the idea of losing Jillian—even if only for a second—made me want to hyperventilate.

  The office that I stepped into was exotic enough that it gave me pause. Normally, stepping into an office was like stepping into private quarters. In space, offices were virtual, with all the paperwork handled by computers, the information thrown up by wallpaper and contained within handheld tablets. On the ground … well, on the ground, it felt a bit like getting smacked in the face by excess. Everything in the office—the books, the paper in the books, the ink on the paper, the shelves holding the books, the computer, the heavy metal desk, the clock, the ornamental piece of printed artwork depicting an old USA Marine Corps logo in three dimensions—all of it wasn’t measured in fuel and credits and effort to get it out of a stubborn gravity well. It took me a few seconds to jerk my point of view around, to reorient myself with a mental burst from my imagination.

  The furniture wasn’t the wasteful bulk of a wealthy showoff. No, the metal framework of the desk had the blunt functionality of a mass produced, tough, reusable military surplus product. The bookshelves were crammed with books because, down here, netwar attacks weren’t regulated and tightly controlled. Down here, a single worm downloaded from the blacknet could wipe any file that wasn’t printed out on paper … so they printed everything out in paper. But what struck me as the most out of place thing in the office was the bureaucrat himself.

  He was Latino—an ethnicity I’d only seen on vids till now—and he was a bit portly. The implications clicked home as I saluted and he saluted back.

  Dietary restrictions weren’t enforced down here. Gym wasn’t state mandated.

  “Please, Sergeant Zhao, have a seat.”

  I sat down.

  “Sorry about the delays. It’s a mad house down here.” He smiled thinly at me. He looked at a small laptop set on the desk, his other hand writing quick notes in short hand, a pen scraping against paper. I tried to not stare, but … but the whole office was so damn old-looking. Pens? Laptops? What was this, the dark ages?

  “First things first …” He paused. “I’m required to inform you that you are no longer of the rank Star Sergeant. The space-born forces, now that we can integrate them with the official Alliance military, will be folded into the standard military organizational system. Due to your age and lack of battlefield experience and the abundance of qualified NCOs, you will be made a Corporal again without any negative repercussions on your record,” he tapped a few buttons on the laptop. “This won’t change your back pay, but when you are recycled back into the service after—”

  “Excuse me, sir, but …” I coughed. “What was that?”

  He looked at me. “When your leave is over, Corporal Zhao.”

  I blinked. I blinked again. A ringing filled my ears. “I-I …” I put my hands over my face, breathed in, then breathed out. Losing a pay grade? Didn’t even register as an issue. Hell, after what happened on the Forge, I wasn’t sure I deserved anything above Private. But …

  I slid my hands off my face and asked the man. “Sir, respectfully, how would I go about, uh, mustering out? Retiring? I’ve served my term, I thought—”

  He held up his hand, silencing me. I shut up, clenching my jaw—hard enough to make my teeth ache. It was what I needed to keep myself from sobbing in his office. Or beating the guy to death with a chair as he explained it.

  It.

  It being the thing that I would hate more than anything save Omar Kaufman.

  It being … the Emergency Acts of 2022.

  “The Emergency Acts of 2022 state that, in a time of emergency—civil insurrection, global unrest, catastrophic climate change, or impending extinction events—the Chinese American Alliance is within its right to conscript anyone deemed of acceptable age, mental health, and physical health. While the state of emergency lasts, the state of conscription persists and the citizens conscripted under said act are compelled by law to perform their state mandated service.” He tapped his fingers on the desk. “Or, to put it in English, you’re lucky to be getting leave at all, Corporal.”

  I sank into my chair and listened numbly as he started to move onto the rest of the checking out process. He asked me my name, parents, date of birth—“just checking our records”—serial number, rank—“procedure, have to follow procedure”—and then moved onto a question that actually required a bit of thought.

  “Do you have a legal guardian that you will be remanded to for the duration of your leave?” he asked. “Or would you prefer to be put in the custody of one of the CAA’s state orphanages?”

  Sarah and I had discussed me going to her mother’s place after I finished checking out. As a guest. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d need to visit there as a legal ward … after all, I had killed people for the state. You’d think that would mean you count as an adult. Legally. Right? Nope. Apparently, when the Emergency Acts gave the senate and the President powers to decide who was ‘of age’ to be thrown into a uniform, it didn’t give them the power to decide that those people were adults. Or …

  Or to think more like Jillian, it totally did give them that power and they just preferred their teenage soldiers to be defanged completely while in civilian life.

  The bureaucrat kept looking at me, waiting for an answer.

  “Mary Cayer,” I said, feeling a weird, sinking feeling. That kind of feeling that comes when you take a leap and you’re not sure if you are going to reach what you’ve pushed towards or be left flailing in the middle of the corridor to the sound of your friends mocking you.

  “Mary Cayer …” he said, frowning.

  I gave the extra details that Sarah had told me over the years and during our conversation yesterday.

  “Ah, she applied to be your legal guardian last night,” he said, nodding. “Very well, you are logged as being a ward of Mary and George Cayer. Your back pay, all rated at an E-5, not E-4, will be forwarded to a private account for your own use. Report to the Quebec International Airport for recall on the first of next month.” He stood up, holding his hand out to me. I stood as well, taking the hand by reflex. He shook.

  “Enjoy your leave.”

  He let me go and gestured me to the door that led out of the room. I opened it and found myself in the main building of the base, a huge chamber that had even more troopers, most of them waiting for their chance to board a VTOL. They were sitting in a few dozen rows, lined up along the floor and snaking around terminals for VTOL loading, their packages by their feet and their uniforms creating a sea of conformity. I didn’t see Jillian.

  I walked towards the exit, which was large and obvious, and walked outside. An autobus terminal sat next to the highway that ran along the base. Huge buses—the same kind that had been pioneered in China before the Slump, big enough that smaller cars could drive underneath their rectangular bodies, picked up troops and drove off to who knows where. The autobus terminal also had what looked like half a dozen charging stations for mobile electronics. I had turned in my kit—my armor, my honest to god raygun, even the mining pick I’d used in a pinch—in orbit, so all I had on down here was my skinclothes. That still included a phone built into the sleeve, but I didn’t dial for Sarah just yet.

  I just stood there.

  My emotions felt as if they had done hundred and eighty degree turns once too many times. Jealousy at the other soldiers and their belonging. Their happiness at being part of something larger. That…that moment when I had felt like I had been a part of that too.

  Fear. The intense, clinging, stinking fear that comes when you know you are not immortal.

  Pain. Separation.

  Elation at being welcomed back in.

  Horror at being dragged, screaming, back in.

  “Dru!”

  I spun around and saw Jillian stepping out of the exit. Her eyes were streaked with red, her cheeks glimmering and wet. That was almost as shocking as being told I w
as still drafted, seeing hardass Jillian crying. She stepped closer and in the moments between a blink, she managed to completely wipe her face off with her hands and looked like she had never sniffled in her whole life.

  “Hey, you walked right past me,” she said, putting her hand on my shoulder, practically shoving me towards the autobus terminal. “So, I’ve radically altered my whole life course in a few seconds. Got a bit of temporal whiplash.”

  “Yeah. That … whiplash … a bitch … ” I said, vaguely, rubbing my neck, as if the joke had become real.

  Jillian bit her lip, then forced a grin. “How about instead of spending that back pay on apartments or jobs—”

  “Can’t get either …” I mumbled.

  “We blow it on thirty days in Neo-Vegas? Thirty days of binge drinking, gambling, whores—”

  “Can’t do any of that …”

  Jillian stepped around and looked me in the eyes. “Dru. Come on. Focus here.”

  I looked into her eyes, shaking my head. “I need to call Sarah.”

  Jillian closed her eyes. “Dru, you’re going to kill her.”

  I stepped past her, ignoring her as I tapped my wrist. The cloth of my skinclothes shimmered—quantum dot projectors flicking on and showing the holographic display and interface for the phone service. I started to tap in area codes, mentally cursing the fact I’d never programmed in Sarah’s speed dial. Never thought I’d be on the ground in these clothes until about five minutes before the ST3A showed up and pulled my ass out of the fire. Jillian grabbed my wrist—the hologram fuzzing around her fingers like ghosts.

  “Dru,” she said. “Dru, if you go to Sarah, you’re going to spend thirty days with her, then go back into the meat grinder. Surviving it once was a miracle. Surviving it twice, with a definite one hundred percent chance of going into space again, is going to take the intervention of pretty much every single deity we both do and do not worship. Thirty days with that hanging over your head …” She trailed off.

  I looked at Jillian, frowning. “It’s worth it,” I said, my voice holding that steel that put me through the hell of Basic. Squash the feelings, all of them, and find the one you want. Use it. Use that steel. “Besides, it isn’t going to be thirty days of moping. It is going to be thirty days of you and Sarah and I working to find a way out of this.”