The Star Carrier Series Books 1-3: Earth Strike, Centre of Gravity, Singularity. Ian Douglas
to oversee the evacuation of six or seven thousand colonists, to make sure that the women and children were evacuated first, to prevent the men, however dedicated they might be to staying now, from panicking and attempting to rush the shuttles … then pull those last Marines out without triggering a deadly riot.
And all of that was assuming the Turusch stayed out of the picture.
Gorman watched the shuttle lift off, to be replaced by another dropping from the orange-yellow sky.
He saw a group of locals gathered off to one side, near the enlisted mess hall. They weren’t doing anything in particular; they were simply … watching, silent, anonymous in their e-suits.
If Gorman remembered accurately, fifteen thousand locals had made it inside the Marine perimeter from the nearby colonial capital of Jahuar when the Turusch first appeared overhead weeks ago, roughly a third of them women and children. The refugees had been crowded in with the Marines ever since, occupying supply warehouses turned into huge open dormitories. There’d been no incidents, fortunately. The biggest problem the Marines had faced had been simply getting their work done with so many civilians in the way.
If that mob down there turned on the dwindling number of remaining Marines, they could end up being just as deadly as the Turusch.
MEF HQ
Marine Sick Bay
Eta Boötis IV
1720 hours, TFT
For Gray, it was as though he were deep within the folds of a lucid dream.
He knew he was dreaming, but the reality of the scene was startlingly crisp and real, like being inside a VR threevee. There was nothing automatic or canned about it. He could choose to turn his head, looking north, toward the skeletal towers of Central Manhattan looming against the night. Or he could turn and look south, to the submerged and tumbled-down ruins of the ancient financial district projecting above the surf, the warning lights and buoys winking in the dark.
He was standing on a rooftop above something that had once been called East 32nd Street, just north of the drowned section of the old city. He could hear the gentle susurration of the surf fifty meters below.
A UT-84 utility hopper, with Periphery Authority markings showing in blue and white light against all three black wings, hovered overhead, eerily silent, faintly illuminated by the sky-glow of the New City, twenty kilometers to the northeast. Then a shaft of dazzling light speared down from the aircraft’s belly and he could not see anything at all. “Halt!” a sharp, neutrally inflected voice called, amplified and immense. “Stay where you are, in the open, your hands clearly visible! Authority peaceforcers will be there momentarily!”
The scene was a virtual reality, a near-perfect replay of events that had occurred five years earlier.
In fact, there were software programs available commercially that acted exactly like this—fed directly into the brain through a marginal AI. You closed your eyes … and could go anywhere, see anything, engage in any sport, have sex with any celebrity, and have it all be just like being there.
“What are you feeling right now?” a woman’s voice said in his mind. It was, he knew, the voice of Dr. Anna George, a psytherapist with the 1st MEF. She was linked into the program with him, seeing everything he was seeing, experiencing his memories, and his decisions.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. He spoke aloud, the voice sounding distant, somewhere off in his mind, somewhere behind the silently hovering hopper, the ruins of the old city. “Fear, I guess.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Them. The peaceforcers.”
“But you know they’re there to help you.”
“No. I don’t. They’ve always been the enemy!”
“Who has been the enemy, Lieutenant?”
“The Authority. The peaceforcers. Watching us. Hassling us. Telling us what to do, what not to do. They call us squatties. Squatters and primitives. And ferals. To them, we’re not people. We’re just … pests. Problems to be dealt with.”
“But they got help for your wife.”
“And they turned her against me. She’s not my wife anymore.”
“You sound … bitter.”
“Am I?” He laughed. “Just because they swept me up, wrecked my life, turned my life-partner against me? Why the hell should I be bitter?”
“This will go a lot easier, Lieutenant, a lot faster, if you let go of the sarcasm.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“The hopper has you spotted on top of that building. What will you do now?”
“I don’t know. Do you mean what do I want to do now? Or what I did then?”
“Either one. This program lets you explore all possibilities. What happened. What might have happened. Good choices. Bad choices. It’s all up to you.”
In his dream, he looked away from the glare overhead, looked at the broom at his feet.
It wasn’t literally a broom, of course, but a Mitsubishi-Rockwell gravcycle. Three meters long and gleaming dull silver, it was mostly a straight, lightweight keel, with compact grav-impeller blocks front and back, braces for his feet, a long, narrow saddle for his torso, and a small virtual control suite. In street slang they were called gimps, pogo sticks, or brooms, and they were hard to come by on the Periphery. He’d found his eight years earlier in an abandoned, burned-out shop up in Old Harlem, somehow overlooked in a storage room for a century and a half, still in its manufactory-sealed packaging.
Okay. His choice? Well, he remembered what he had done that night.
The peaceforcers probably had weapons on him—stunners and a tangleweb, if nothing more. He had to do this fast. …
He dropped to his belly, landing on the saddle full length, his legs stretched out behind, his feet slipping into the foot-brace stirrups, his hands grasping the handles to either side of the control suite. Gripping hard with hands and knees, he rolled hard to the left, throwing himself and the broom out of that hard, tightly focused circle of illumination, off the roof of the building, and into the darkness below.
For a giddy moment he was in free fall, the sudden blast of air triggering his helmet safety protocols and snapping down the visor. He felt the brush of something insubstantial across his leg … and then the sensation was gone, a near-miss by the hopper’s tangleweb projector.
“Citizen Gray, this is the Periphery Authority. Land your vehicle at once.”
But he’d already twisted on the handles, engaged the cycle’s grav-field, and brought the pogo around, pointing toward the southwest, out over the encroaching sea. Both feet moved, pointing his toes back and down, and the impellers caught with a sudden surge of acceleration.
“Where do you think you’re going, Lieutenant?” George’s voice asked. It wasn’t judgmental, not condemning. It was simply … curious.
“Anywhere,” he replied. “Nowhere. Away from them.”
He took the broom down to the deck, skimming now a scant meter and a half above the waters rolling between the steel and concrete cliffs of ruined skyscrapers to either side. Late in the twenty-first century, rising sea levels and the final insult of Hurricane Cynthia had battered through the Verrazano-Narrows Dam and sent the waters of the Atlantic Ocean surging past the Narrows into Upper New York Bay and across the lower half of Manhattan. The total mean rise in sea level across the island and nearby Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey had been over twelve meters—nearly forty feet. For decades after, there’d been plans to rebuild, even plans to transform lower Manhattan into an enormous artificial island rising above the intruding