Last Rain

Science fiction short story

Image from the International Space Station - link

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Seven days for a cover story, and then his first assignment on a battered old lifter.

A quick contract, no questions asked, for a tiny margin. A fat pilot-captain who did not want to explain why his previous cargo handler had left. Normal, around here, according to all their intel. The local operations were all about working fast and dirty, and taking the maximum while giving the minimum.

Frankie Miller thought of his home, of the pale sands and the golden grain fields and the long gleam of the Uba-Nile flowing south, and realised that he was missing it more than he had been willing to admit earlier to his handler. He missed the sun, and the clean air, and the sight of the Luxor pyramid complex as it reached into the heavens and ran the silk-alloy elevators up into orbit.

His home was a beautiful place, and it was far away, and this place - it was not home.

This place was a stinking mess.

Frankie Miller was not even his real name.

* * * * *

“How quickly can you unload?”

“How many corners do you want me to cut?” Mansoor’s voice was raspy in the smoky gloom of the cockpit. “I can open the bays and vent everything, right here, and then you can see if you can catch a twenty-ton Magnum pod with those fancy dock flippers of yours.”

The controller’s voice was an exasperated hiss over the line.

“I meant safely, you Tarzi fool. The records here show fifteen minutes best for a Magnum pod of that size and weight - can you get that down to twelve?”

Frankie chuckled to himself where he sat in the navigator seat. Outside the Shanty Shaker, the orbit of the planet below - Tanvi, today, although it had been called something else a few centuries before - was cluttered with more ships. Some pulling up to the station, like them; others - many, many more others - heading out and away to the hyperspace ring that floated at the zenith of the system.

Fleeing, like rats in an agri bay when you popped the lights on.

Frankie did not blame them. Ethnic violence leading into civil wars rarely looked pretty. Only a very certain type of personality could thrive in that type of environment.

“Twelve we can do, yup. I hope you have spare paint to fix all those corners we’ll be cutting.” Mansoor killed the comm line and pushed himself out of the cockpit seat with a grunt. “Frankie!”

“I’m on it, bossman,” Frankie threw back as he pushed himself down the narrow throat of the ship towards the cargo station. The cabin air still smelled of Charooka City’s fumes and taint, and there was a slick of petro-chems on everything even after two cleaner cycles from the air scrubbers.

To be fair, those same scrubbers had not even worked down in Charooka either, which was why both Mansoor and Frankie had the husky voices of chain-smokers at the moment.

The Shanty Shaker was rated for atmospheric lift, on a good day, and intra-system runs only if they stocked the galley up to double capacity. With the rates the Praxis had been paying these past few years, the likelihood of that was smaller than the cut Frankie was getting on this job. But it could lift, and it could fly, and right now that meant they had to help with the evacuation. Twenty tons of food and medicine, taken from a Praxis warehouse and crammed into a standard Union Trading Line cargo pod on the Charooka City lander pads, and then stuffed into the gut of the Shanty. A contract to get it into orbit, and then a rounder clause to take an empty pod down. A bump up in the evac queue at the hyperspace ring if they completed both.

Quick, easy money, for once. The Praxis was willing to spend, now - finally - after years of being tight-fisted and skimping on everything from agri-investments to orbital defense.

Amazing what a sense of impending doom could do to corrupt assholes, Frankie thought to himself as he wedged his wiry frame into the cargo station and began firing up the controllers. Cheap labour from Moray-3, then the agreements with the dog-heads to get bulk food runs in, and suddenly no-one could explain why the Outer provinces were rioting and striking about unemployment every other weekend. A protest in Chandrassa, then the shoot-out in Pakool that left half the provincial cabinet fried to a crisp by black market combat lasers - smuggled in from who knows where - and suddenly…

Suddenly the Outer provinces were armed, and marching on the capital, and Charooka City was sending people into orbit.

The Magnum pod was a fat thing, rounded at the corners for nominal pressure values internally, and the Shanty had no issue pushing it out and down towards the waiting Bay Three. Loader arms rotated and twisted through their gangly ballet as they flipped the container first one way and then the other, and soon it was sliding into the waiting cradle that the station had extended halfway to meet them. Frankie coughed up slime, grimacing at the taste of Charooka in his mouth, and instinctively turned to the side to spit before catching himself at the last moment.

Too much time in the Cheeker district, too much time waiting with the Blue Monkey clan and their sauna obsession while the bosses talked business. Too many spitting sessions around their lithium hookahs and those chem tabs they always passed around when the nights got long.

Too much time going native.

“You better swallow that, or I’m dumping you out there with the pod,” Mansoor grated from behind him, and Frankie grimaced and did just that. “Eleven minutes and counting. That was some fine handling there on the pod.”

“Years of practice, bossman - years of practice.” Frankie twisted his arm so the guilder tattoos on his right forearm rippled in the cabin’s wan light. His eyes never left the cargo screens. “Hasn’t helped me get off this mudball yet, but soon ya? Soon.”

“Hell of a time to be leaving anyway. When the hammer comes down on this place, people like you and me are going to have a hard time. Even Khadis like you.” Mansoor took one of the wall intercoms off the hook and dialed up the station line. The channel hummed and popped before the connection tone sounded. “Station, this is the Shanty Shaker. Your pod is out and being retracted. Where’s the empty?”

“Standby. It should be coming out of Bay Seven now.” There was a pause, followed by a blurt of machine chatter. “That’s the transponder code. It will wait for your collection.”

“Transponder code on an empty pod?” Mansoor squinted at the cargo screens, where the last sight of their Magnum pod was slowly disappearing into the jaws of the station’s loading bays. “Sounds like overkill in this rush, but okay then. Let’s roll over and grab it.”

Mansoor turned and disappeared back towards the cockpit, and Frankie took the opportunity to pull the compad out of his thigh pocket. The screen flashed bright when he thumbed it on, and the first thing he checked was the network link with the Magnum pod.

Good. Still linked.

He pulled up the control views, ran through the stats on the side - atmos still good, gravity field still solid, thermal readings still at almost nil - and sent the data package down the line. Upload bars ticked and shifted on the compad, and finally an acknowledgement came back. The Magnum had heard, and understood. A secondary timer popped up in the corner of the compad screen, and began counting down. Eighty-nine minutes and fifty seconds, forty seconds, thirty seconds…

The Shanty rolled away from the reception side of the station, dimpled hull flashing beneath them, and Mansoor took them on a gentle curve over to the other side of the station’s hemisphere where Bay Seven was indicated. Massive rings, slowly spinning, rotated beneath them as the station’s outer low-gravity regions circled endlessly around the central spine. Makhmut Station was old, older than the Praxis, and had been built by people who were better at governance and maintenance than the current crop of idiot officials here. They had not managed to crack good gravity tech yet, though, which was why the old sections spun and the new sections did not. Newer sections had been added to the central spine over the years, but the older sections still worked, and still did their job. The Praxis had added palaces and conference halls and warrens filled with bureaucrats, and now they were filling the storage areas with everything they could lift off the surface.

Bay Seven showed up, a square cut-out in a mottled blue cavern that was tethered by cables to the side of one of the newer areas, and Mansoor pulled them into position just behind another lifter that was finishing its own pickup. A vast grey pod, egg-shaped and blistered with countless sensor nodules, was slowly being retracted into the gut of the waiting lifter, and when Frankie swung the cargo station’s cameras around he saw that their own waiting pod was of a similar design.

“Bossman, what is that pod design? Virgin sight for me, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Looks like a Machine World design. I’ve seen a couple of them out on the Logica circuit past Byhor.” Mansoor’s voice was tinny over the intercom system, and Frankie could hear a faint echo travelling down the ship’s interior to him a fraction of a second before each word. “Never seen them this side of the hyperspace circuit though. These Praxis pricks have been hiding all kinds of junk up here.”

The lifter before them completed its grappling, tucking the vast egg into its belly with a multitude of spider legs, and slowly began to coast away with a throb from its side engines. Frankie watched a name appear on their flanks as they rotated - the Gypsy Dancer, with a marker denoting Klarnu, two systems over - and then the lifter was dropping down, heading for Tanvi’s muddy orb below. The stream of ships lifting below them had not slowed yet.

“Okay, our turn. Let’s see what the transponder has to say.” Mansoor hummed and grunted to himself as he worked in the cockpit, and Frankie watched their own shadow loom over the waiting orb pod until they were in position. He was busy reaching out for the first of the grabbing points on the pod when there was a shout from the cockpit.

“Hold up, hold up. Park those arms, we have an issue.”

“What now, bossman?” Frankie rested his hands on the controllers and watched the pod below him wait as well, patient in the shifting outside light. The compad ticking away on his thigh felt like a burning coal.

“It’s not an empty, that’s the issue. Contract says we take an empty down, and this pod is definitely not empty.” Mansoor’s exasperated sigh shotgunned down the central corridor and the comm net alike. “Time to talk to the idiots.”

As if on cue, the external line crackled.

“Shanty Shaker, this is Makhmut Station. We see you have ceased loading operations. What is the issue?”

“Looks like you gave us the wrong pod, Station. My contract says we take an empty down, and this pod ain’t that. I did my fuel numbers on an empty down…” was as far as Mansoor got before the station’s reply overrode him.

“Standby for confirmation.”

Frankie heard Mansoor muttering something to himself, but aside from something that sounded like a comment aimed at someone’s mother, he could not be certain what it was. The external line hummed again moments later.

“We have checked and confirmed: this is the pod you are contracted to take down. Please resume loading operations stat.”

“Check again, Station. This pod is not empty, and I’m contracted for an empty. My scans are showing pressurized liquids in there, and the last time I checked, pressurized liquids do not count as ‘empty’ for transit purposes,” Mansoor grated back.

Frankie frowned at that, and studied the grey pod anew. If it was pressurized, then that would at least explain the shape. As for all the sensor blisters on the outside - surface monitors?

“Standby for confirmation.” The station controller’s voice clipped out and off again.

“Frankie!”

“Yes, bossman?”

“Get ready to dump that pod on my signal. These goddamn zool-heads are messing with us, and so help me, I’ll leave right now…” Mansoor ranted down the ship’s inner corridor, not even bothering with the comms.

“Shanty Shaker, this is Makhmut Station. Your contract has been amended, and your payout has been increased. Please proceed with the loading stat.”

An alarm bell was starting to ring in Frankie’s head.

“Bossman! Are we go-go or no-go on this one?”

“Wait, let me read this new clause.” Mansoor’s voice drifted off, and he was quiet for a while. Frankie zoomed in on the cargo pod, looking for clues on what it could be, but the surface was devoid of anything except the sensor blisters. The more he looked at them, the more he started to doubt his initial assessment. Were those even sensors?

“We’re a go-go. Grab that pod and let’s get going.” There was something new in Mansoor’s voice when he finally spoke up, and Frankie could almost hear the grin. “New price is twenty points over the old one, and they upped our ring jump priority by five - they must be desperate to get this thing down.”

“Sounds too good to be true, bossman. I’m on it.” Frankie wanted to say more, but kept his mouth shut and his hands busy, and the pod slowly but surely drew into their cargo bay. The Praxis was supposed to be rushing to get assets off the planet - so why the sudden pressure to get this down again?

The pod eventually settled into place beneath them, lifter arms locking into place around it, and Frankie gave the all-clear from his station. Mansoor pulsed the engines and began to roll them down towards the planet moments later, and Frankie watched Makhmut Station receding behind him.

The compad timer had fallen below eighty.

The ride down into the atmosphere was bumpy, and plasma boiled around them in fat fingers of white heat. Frankie stayed in the cargo station, buckled down, and listened to Mansoor whistling and coughing from the cockpit. Going down with weight always felt rougher than lifting with the same weight, for some reason. Frankie decided he would ask the tech boys about it when he got back, this time. He had been meaning to for years now, but somehow…

“...ayday, mayday, this is Gypsy Dancer, we are losing ship control at this time. I say again, we are losing…” The emergency channel struggled with the plasma around them, and kept cutting out before soaring back with ear-splitting volume.

“Frankie!”

“Yes bossman?”

“Get up here! We need a camera angle on that lifter.” Mansoor’s voice was tinny over the internal comms, the hull susurrations of plasma meeting ablative tiling drowning out every other noise in the ship. Frankie slapped his seat releases and bolted up, fighting the shaking hull plates and shifting gravities as he tottered down the spine corridor before tumbling into the rear of the cockpit. The external viewscreens showed nothing but plasma waves, and Mansoor was shaking along with the shuddering control stick from his position in the pilot seat. His jowls were jiggling along even on the back of his neck.

“See if you can spot them once we clear this last plasma layer,” Mansoor growled, eyes never leaving the screens ahead of him, and Frankie collapsed into the navigator seat again and began tapping away at screens that wanted to dance away from him with every shake and lurch of the lifter. The mayday calls from the stricken Gypsy Dancer were still ringing out in fragments, one moment loud and clear, the next garbled and indistinguishable from the static that flooded around them.

They cleared the last of the atmospheric plasma with a lurch, heat peeling away from the hull in long streamers, and Frankie got the external camera pods open and peering downwards the moment the viewscreens cleared. The Shanty Shaker was falling in belly-first, using the bulk of its own cargo bay as a shield, and the landing cameras on the nose showed miles and miles of clear night sky below them. Charooka City was a light in the darkness, a bright yellow dot surrounded by the darkness of the Diwa swamps and the soft coastlines to the south of its sprawling mass. The old battered pyramids to the north of Charooka were blue dots, barely visible in the sprawl that had overgrown them over the centuries.

“Got them. Mother of Sekh…” Frankie swore when his cameras locked onto the other bright spot in the night below them, and the resolution began to sharpen. “Bossman, I don’t think we can do anything for them. They look a bit… ah… screwed, ya?”

The Gypsy Dancer was a disintegrating, flaming ball of tumbling metal and hull segments several kilometers below them. A corona of smoke surrounded it, barely visible in the darkness, and a constant dandruff flutter of hull tiles and other unidentifiable bits was flaking off it in every direction.

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Mansoor gave one look at the screens, snorted, and pulled the Shanty Shaker back, flattening their descent. The belly view from the cameras changed, cameras shifting and trying to stay locked on as Frankie worked, and they watched as the stricken lifter below them began to tumble on its long axis. It rolled belly-up, showing the grey cargo orb it had collected from the station mere minutes before them, and Frankie scowled and sat closer to the screen.

“Bossman, what’s going on with the cargo pod of theirs?” Lines and lines of black dots had opened up on the side of the pod, too uniform to be random damage, and Frankie managed to get only a single in-focus shot of it before the tumble of the craft carried it out of view again. He pulled the image up on a secondary monitor and worked to clear it up a bit, but after a few seconds his hands fell still as his brain finally caught up with what he was seeing.

Mansoor must have seen and realised it at the same time, because he was yelling and reaching for emergency release controls and turning around to shove Frankie out of the navigator seat all at once.

“Frankie! Get to the cargo station! Move that pale Khadi ass of yours, boy, move!”

Frankie needed no second invitation, and bolted back down the spine corridor to the cargo station again. The grey cargo pod, captured in that single in-focus frame, was in the process of splitting open, and the contents that had been flowing out of it were a silver-grey haze barely visible around it amidst the raging flames and the inky night sky.

Fucking Machine World nanite swarms.

People learnt about them in technical schooling, and in history courses, and in general whenever you spent time around any space dock or cargo station. People talked about things, especially the dangerous things. Banned tech so illegal that even the black marketeers would kill you if you so much as asked about it. The Machine Worlds had signed treaties to stop using it after the Euro-Pluton Wars two generations ago, but the nightmare was still there.

The cargo station cameras showed their own grey pod still intact, and Frankie was already slapping at controls and getting the emergency diagnostics up before he was properly into the seat. They had scant seconds before they were at the same altitude that the first Gypsy Dancer mayday call had come through. He was halfway through the emergency release preparations when he realised what he was doing.

“Bossman!”

“What?” Mansoor’s irate yell echoed down both the comms and the inner corridors. “You ready to jettison that pod?”

“Bossman, we can’t! If we ditch it here, it will still get out. We have to go back up.” Frankie had their altitude diagnostics open on a side screen, and was frantically plotting their own route against what he assumed was that of the Gypsy Dancer minutes before them. “I think those Makhmut assholes rigged the pods for altitude. The Gypsy started broadcasting just after they dropped below eighty clicks.”

“I don’t give a rat turd, boy, get those arms loose and prepare to dump!” Mansoor’s howl screeched through the ship. “I want that thing out of my ship!”

On Frankie’s screen, two of the graph lines intersected as the Shanty Shaker crossed through the same altitude layer, and one of the cargo monitor alarms began to blink red.

Shift alert - something inside the cargo bay was moving around, when it should not be.

“Too late,” Frankie muttered to himself, and watched with growing ice in his belly as the lines and lines of sensor modules on the grey cargo pod began to widen, opening up in a strangely organic and decidedly eerie wave. When they were fist-sized, they stopped - and Frankie had a fleeting moment of hope that nothing else would happen - and then the first of the silver-grey mist began to haze out of them.

Mansoor was screaming about emergency overrides not working, but Frankie was already out of the cargo station and scrambling for the escape pod tubes in the rear of the ship. The engineering section stank of jawuli juice, incense, and the piss-scented hooch that Mansoor had been brewing in there when Frankie first found him, and he made sure to close and lock the bulkhead door behind him. Mansoor’s screaming cut off as the door clanged shut, and then Frankie was stumbling the rest of the way to the pods, the decking underfoot shaking as the atmospheric turbulence suddenly began to build again around the outside of the lifter. Dust mites with machine minds were eating into the coating of the ship, billowing everywhere and into every nook and cranny as they descended, and every moment saw them converting more material into more of their kind. Frankie had seen training videos on the technology, and the only advice from the instructor had been to get the hell away as fast as you could.

His bug-out bag was still where he had left it, stashed just before the escape pod hatch. The first pod was gene-locked, and refused to open. Red blocker lights flashed as he mashed his palm into the scanner for a second try. Typical of this cheap Tarzi asshole! Frankie grabbed a hammer from a nearby tool rack and put two craters into the scanner panel before running for the second pod.

Good luck getting the scanner to read anything now, you cheap bastard, Frankie thought.

The second pod stuttered awake and showed a status that fluctuated between eighty and ninety percent. Something popped and banged outside the hull at the same time, and the rating suddenly dropped to seventy.

“Good enough for government work.” The hatch complained when Frankie hauled it open, and he took a moment to pull a contamination mask out of his bag before stepping into the tiny space. The contam-mask flared briefly as it settled around his head, then contracted into a skin-hugging mesh of greys and blues, with a dog-like snout. The bug-eyed lenses settled over his eyes with a hiss as he settled into the pod itself, lashing restraints around his midriff with swift hands, and the first of the data infographics were already scrolling over the mask’s virtual display as the pod hatch clanged shut again.

Something shifted outside, the mass of the Shanty Shaker shifting downwards for a moment, and then the pod spat fire and threw Frankie upwards and backwards with bone-crushing force. He glimpsed smoke and sparks trailing from the rear of the lifter, cargo arms still tightly clutched around their toxic cargo, and then the lifter was gone from sight. Wind howled and screamed around the edges of the pod, tapering off as it reached the apogee of its graceful curve, and Frankie was just reaching for the landing beacon panel when the comms unit crackled into life.

“Frankie! You Khadi asshole! What have you done to my ship?” Mansoor’s voice was alternating between anger and fear. “Open this damn door immediately, boy, or I’ll flood that whole bay with argon gas. Don’t test me, boy!”

Frankie grinned. The fat pilot thought he was still in the engineering section, behind the door he had closed. The pod was picking up the ship’s internal broadcasts even as it soared away from the spreading mass of silver-grey that was enveloping it. No amount of pleading or threatening was going to help Mansoor now.

“Go fly the damn ship and think of all your money, you greasy pig,” Frankie muttered to himself, and tried to figure out where the pod was going to drop him. The map panel was fizzing in and out, and none of the navigation beacons from around Charooka City were being detected. “Come on, you cheap piece of sh…”

There was a clunk outside as the parachute panel opened and deployed its orange payload, followed by a jerk as the canopies opened and swung the pod to the side in a wide pendulum curve. Frankie had a keyhole view of tumbling fire outside, in the distance, as the Shanty Shaker continued its disintegrating flight path down to the waiting city below - and then something twanged and popped above his head, and the pod was suddenly picking up speed again.

Downwards.

Numbers plummeted into the red on his virtual display, and Frankie bent himself in half to grab at the kit bag bundled around his feet. The whistling sound was increasing again outside, and when he ripped his restraints off he almost went flying up inside the pod itself from the speed of the fall. He had to get the wingsuit on, and get…

* * * * *

Frankie came to his senses in a pool of water, and his first instinct was to vomit up a stream of salt water that went spattering away from him. Figures were clustered around him, voices concerned and hands reaching down, and they hauled him into a sitting position even as the second round of vomiting propelled more water from his aching chest.

“He’s alive! Sintaba be praised, he’s alive!” The speaker, whoever he was, had a thick Tarzi accent, and a moment later a dark, bearded face crouched down beside Frankie and grabbed him by the shoulders. White teeth gleamed in the dark as the man smiled, and his eyes were fever-bright. “A miracle! A miracle man from the sky!”

“WhereamI,” was all Frankie managed before a third bout of water came gushing out of his throat. The pain in his chest was being eclipsed by a rising wall of pressure and raw nerves from inside his skull. Deck panels between his outstretched legs glistened with wetness and reflected light, and when he finally managed to look up he could see night-stained waters rolling on the other side of a low wall.

A gunwale, a detached part of his mind remembered, and these were Tarzi fishermen who had probably hauled him out of the water just after he went down.

“You are in the Diwa, my friend, and you are very lucky to be alive.” The speaker sat back, still smiling brightly, and extended his hand. “Captain Janpoor, at your service. You have been my luckiest catch all day, I tell you. We were expecting fish and chakka crabs when we left this evening, but you - you are a miracle indeed!”

Someone was on his other side, a medical monitor in their hands and a sensor wand passing over his soaked torso, but Frankie brushed the man away the moment he could get his hands and arms to coordinate with his brain again. He could feel the contam-mask hanging around his neck, deactivated now but hopefully still intact. Something in the back of his mind was complaining about a concussion, but he could feel his implants already releasing a hormone cocktail to counter it. Tomorrow morning was going to have the mother of all headaches, once those wore off.

“I’m okay, I think the pod did its job.” Frankie coughed up another mouthful of water and throat slime, and spat it to the side over what he hoped was a clear patch and not someone’s feet. “What time is it?”

“Oh, just after midnight, my friend.” Captain Janpoor looked up and pointed up with a bony hand a moment later. “You made quite the show, ending the old day. Tomorrow is going to be a great day for Charooka City.”

Above them, at a height that took Frankie’s eyes a while to focus on, fingers of light and fire were slowly curling through the night sky. One of those must have been the Shanty Shaker, Frankie thought, but there were many fragments coming down in multiple directions, and he remembered about the distressed Gypsy Dancer as well, and realized that both craft must have fully disintegrated well before hitting the surface.

Which meant maximum dispersal for the silver clouds.

“We need to get the hell out of here. We really need to get the hell out of here right now,” Frankie mumbled, and felt for his thigh pocket. The compad was still there, and his fingers were dull, but he finally got it on. The display lit up and showed the timer at thirty-five and dropping. “How quickly can we get to shore?”

Captain Janpoor laughed, long and deep and rich, and the surrounding men laughed with him. Frankie concentrated on them, saw the mixed clothing, saw the rifle slings across their chests, and the green armbands of the Outer Resistance Movement, and the spinning radar array positioned on the ship’s cabin behind them, and something clicked behind his eyes.

“Oh, right.”

“Lucky, and smart. I told you he is the miracle man.” Captain Janpoor stood, hands on his hips, and smiled down at Frankie. “What was in those ships? What did you do?”

“My name is Frankie Miller, and I’m a cargo handler. Second class rating, eight years experience, and guild affiliated. I’m here on a contract between Makhmut Station and the Union Trading Line.” Frankie rattled off his cover story, then sighed and shrugged. “I got paid to move cargo pods, and then my ship was breaking up and I was running for the escape pods. I don’t know anything else, and I’m not affiliated with the Praxis government or anyone else.”

He paused before saying the last line, which he knew was a gamble.

“I’m Khadi. I’m not from here.”

The men muttered, and Captain Janpoor looked at him with that smile, and Frankie felt like every second was an eternity. He had a skin-blade grafted into his left forearm, and the tattoos on his legs were actually speed grafts for emergency situations, but with the numbers he was facing now - and with the concussion battling the hormone shots from his implants - he did not want to take those odds.

“Okay. I believe you.” Captain Janpoor reached a hand down, and pulled Frankie to his feet. The captain’s hands were hard and calloused, matching the rest of the man that Frankie could make out. “You have dropped in on us at a bad time though, my friend, because we have more than just fish to catch tonight. Your show is going to give us just the cover we need to get where we want to be.”

Captain Janpoor pointed off to the side, and Frankie squinted off into the darkness to realise, eventually, that the captain was pointed at the distant lights of the fishing district on the southern side of Charooka City. The Umatta Pinnacle, with its prominent elephant statues and pink spotlights, was an instantly recognizable landmark even at night.

“Can I sit this one out?” Frankie reached to the side to lean on the medic who had earlier tried to med-scan him, and eager hands helped take his weight a moment later. “My head doesn’t feel great right now, and I’m still trying to understand just how I survived that fall.”

“Only a Khadi would fall from the sky, and then say he is a bit tired,” Captain Janpoor said to his men, and the laughter rang out in waves over the ship. Frankie plastered a chagrined smile over his face, and waved the men away as the medic pulled him to the side and onto a seat next to the ship’s main cabin. It was a simple ship, bulk-cast from some plastic derivative and outfitted for simple coastal operations, and everything had the greying, sun-burnt texture of too much air and too little maintenance. The air stank of fish and unwashed bodies and the Diwa itself, and Frankie had to swallow back bile when he remembered how the Blue Monkey clan had gossiped about the things that happened in the Diwa when no-one was looking.

“Why the rush to get away though, Mister Miller?” Captain Janpoor had dismissed his men, but followed Frankie to his seat. The captain’s eyes were intent in the dark. “Do you know what those ships were carrying?”

“We had a contract to lift food up, and take empty pods down. I was seconded to a Tarzi pilot, and that’s all he told me.” Frankie sat back against the cabin behind him, feeling bruises already flaring. “We were told to clear the airspace before a certain time, but Makhmut Station never said why. I just figured it wasn’t a good idea to stick around after that.”

“The Praxis are cowards. They will probably do something that only cowards will do.” The captain glanced at the men scattered around the ship, then leaned in for a conspiratorial whisper. “We are not cowards though. We will take Charooka City tonight, and tomorrow we will tell the Praxis how the future is going to look.”

Frankie looked into the captain’s eyes, and saw fierce determination mixed with bright hope. The captain did not know what the Praxis had released into the atmosphere mere minutes before.

The captain did not know about the Magnum pod filled with hardened Amath-Ra specialists that were waiting up in Makhmut Station’s Bay Three, or the other Magnum pods that had been delivered over the past several days filled with similar teams.

“I’m sure tomorrow will be a great day for your cause, captain.” Frankie pushed out a smile, and tried to make himself comfortable for the remaining time. He felt the contam-mask around his neck and wondered how long it would last. “I think your world is at the dawn of a new chapter.”

Kilometers overhead, the nanite swarms spread and multiplied, eating raindrops and riding wind currents, utterly uncaring about all the plans that they were turning upside down at that very point in time.

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