#22 WRATH OF THE CLOUD RAIDER
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Mercury and Venus had been nicknamed the “Planets of Hell” because of their proximity to our star. Of course, establishing sustainable colonies there appeared to be impossible. Yet, the humans being as pragmatic as they are, decided a while ago to turn them into factory-worlds; building foundries, robotic production lines and storage platforms of insane dimensions on their searing surface. After decades of outrageous exploitation, the two Inner Planets turned into nothing more than enslaved worlds disfigured by highly artificial canyons similar to deep scars, and horizon-breaking synthetic rings. Made of metal, the latter displayed millions of thin panels which semiconductors collected the solar storms’ fury. Their purpose? To feed in energy—alongside geothermal power—the mega-factories and the few highly polluted cloud-cities.
Earth possessed an analogous ring, but served a different goal. Under Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the Technocratic Government had engaged in the recolonization of the Blue Planet. For that, the mess WW3 made had to be cleaned up and the high level of radiation taken care of to rebuild the entire atmosphere.
Years of research and engineering led to a gigantic technical wonder, wide as a starscraper, to be assembled in orbit. In addition to being financially draining, it never worked the way intended. Yet, being honest, it was still a pity to see it being pulverized by a burning ship.
“Wolverines!” A messy sloppy joe in hand, Ali savored her victory at the rail gun while lining up her obscure references to Patrick Swayze’s filmography.
Meanwhile, I painfully straightened the Kitty’s course to avoid hitting head-on one of the ring’s voltage converters. Despite my efforts, the right wing still grazed the flap of a large cylinder that crackled in the starry night.
“Don’t get too complacent!” I huffed as the temperature inside the cockpit reached 50 °C. “There are probably others around!”
“Man, I’m slammin’!” my partner exclaimed while joining me in the cabin to jump on her seat. Droplets of sweat flew from her long dirty hair. “How’s the others doing?”
A forced vertical loop brought my sapiens back against her copilot seat. Chilled, she grabbed a hazardous soda brick drawn by the violent deceleration. Once our flight trajectory stabilized, she turned on the Blaupunkt with a nudge, and the audiocassette crackled.
“We’re cooking without air-conditioning! Those weird drones had to ambush us at the worst moment!” I resumed, panting.
“Didn’t stop us from frying them,” Ali bragged. Her feet dancing on the dashboard, she bite her ship-made burger. “Ouch!”
“You okay?”
She massaged her stomach. “Feeling crampy again. But, whatever! The High Score is ours.”
“Do you think you’re in Space Invaders?” I couldn’t change my partner. And, trust me, I had contacted tech support many times. “Besides, I believe our time in the arcade irrevocably belongs to the past. Like our bounty hunting career, and everything else for that matter! We probably just attacked the Lunar forces!”
“Counterattack!” she corrected me, picking ground beef and onions from her hair.
It was true. The Kitty and Nora had laid hands on safe conduct and we were supposed to land on the Moon with Braun and the DIA. Instead, we obviously fell into an ambush in Earth’s orbit. Soviet-boy’s little inquiry may have finally made the Gods lose their temper. Or was it Ali, destroying a whole lab baking a new generation of cryo-fluid despite Nora’s reluctance? Hard to say.
The radar biped anew over Eddy Huntington’s USSR before my partner finished her drink. Half a dozen light ships had just entered the airspace of the artificial belt.
“I’m cutting all the instruments but the incoming comms,” I declared as the control computer let us drift out of the area. “They can detect us despite the stealthy signature of this good old Kitty shamefully dressed in green!”
“Any word from Nora or Braun? Is the radio still scrambled?”
I checked the dashboard. No message from the Ark or Nora’s Ambiorix.
Right after, the computer made a cracking sound before a missive appeared on the left monitor. “Wait!” I looked at it immediately after making sure the drones chasing us could no longer sense our presence. “It comes from Rasputin!”
“Sum it up, please—need another sandwich…” she replied, lifting the belt she hadn’t fastened before slowly gliding towards the hold.
“They crashed!” I uttered. “They boomed on Earth with the Ark.”
My sapiens settled back down beside me. “For real?” A deep concern appeared on her face, hollowed out by exhaustion. “We gotta move!”
The radio suddenly sizzled. We heard another voice. Nora’s. “You guys still there?”
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“Nora!” Ali answered, allowing a dangerous liaison. “Braun crashed on Earth. We’re going after him!”
“What? Are you sure?” her sister asked through the static. We could barely hear her. “Where are you? I’m on my way!”
“We—sacrebleu!”
An alarme made Ali jump, and I was startled. The Lunar dogs had pinpointed us, and a laser lock was suddenly targeting the Swallow. I hardly had time to deploy our last salvo of decoys when a rocket narrowly missed the cockpit and got lost in the infinite.
“Fuck! Already?” Ali yelled. “Sorry, Lee!”
“Don’t worry. We had to respond anyway!” I reassured her. “We can’t run away from them now. We have to do something about it before we push the Baltimore right towards the sand-seas of Earth!”
“Where are you?” Nora insisted.
“Dip the orbit sis’, it’s not safe!” Ali ordered before diving towards the hold. Turning back, she then asked me: “Lee? What are the odds to get out of here alive and reach the planet?”
“Those are Lunar killer pancakes,” I sighed, cutting the radio as Nora’s curses got lost in the interference. “The control computer estimates or chances at around 15%!”
My sapiens laughed through her microphone before I could hear her cocking the half-melted railgun. “This old machine either sucks at math or is belittling us,” she joked as a first impact shook the fuselage.
There wasn’t a second left to lose to those pesky Lunar vultures. After all the machine-gunning brushing her hull, the Swallow’s original coral color slowly surfaced again. Our Auxiliary glory may belong to the past as much as the Italo Disco and the Brat Pack, but the Kitty still had rage to spare!
The Techno-President Carter and his peers have been living in a fool’s paradise, lulled by archival images of their home planet: an idyllic blue world on which white clouds danced above shy continents in shades of green and brown. A sweet melancholic memory far from reality because our late mother Earth we flew over after escaping the Gods’ pawns, was unrecognizable; just a hopeless ocher stone flayed by various meteorological plagues; a tortured purgatory that no artificial ring would ever bring back to its former glory.
The Dead Planet had, however, a handful of inhabitants that day. Stranded in a forgotten land, the crew of the Noah’s Ark was still transmitting their secret S.O.S. to the Swallow. Alas, joining them proved to be a formidable challenge. As I pointed out to my copilot, the analog instruments were going haywire. We couldn’t determine our position. Nor theirs.
“Does the computer detect daily solar winds?” I asked over the hum of the air-conditioning, which was once again functional.
“Negative!” she deciphered on the main monitor, which radioactive and magnetic activity had rendered almost useless. “But a storm is shaking the northern hemisphere and regurgitating corrosive sand.”
The polychrome screen crackled and the AC cut out once more, as did most of the major equipment. With the Baltimore turned off, the Swallow slowly hovered with her simple inertia.
“The silence is absolute,” Ali remarked, sponging down the sweat already dripping from her nose. “Where are we?”
The reactor started again. After dodging a satellite carcass held in the air because of the hazardous gravity, we flew over a vast expanse of brownish silt that never seemed to end. The Pacific Ocean, like Mount Fuji, had disappeared. The once “Land of the Rising Sun” was just a rugged plateau overlooking a gelatinous, stinking swamp.
On the horizon, a luminescent golden veil enveloped a massif. A gigantic tornado of sand was rising towards the sky like an inverted waterfall. Slowly tearing the rock and dunes from the ground, it spit them out into the nearly non-existent atmosphere. This natural marvel caused a deluge of lightning covering the entire known spectrum. The hurricane collapsed, leaving a fine shower of dust over the desert region we were traveling through.
Below, I could discern the ruins of an immense vitrified city where only persisted a few walls and twisted steel spikes emerging from the earth, as if asking for a never-coming aid. “Tokyo Metropolis…” I whispered as Ali was browsing an old black and white map of her implant.
“Weren’t there skyscrapers?”
“They’re still here.” Of those once resplendent towers, only the roofs remained visible. The top floors, blown apart by the winds, formed a simulacrum of a labyrinth.
But this dying landscape of Honshu converted into a more pleasant surprise. In the mountain ranges erased by the ages of Hokkaido, the ruins gave room to wooded plains of white trees frozen by the radiation. Higher up, hugging the foothills of the nearest massif, a valley swore by what appeared to be the pink foliage of an orchard, encircling a traditional castle which shone with pride.
The computer beeped anew. “There!” Ali uttered, pointing her finger to the outskirts of the mysterious black and white fortress.
The Interceptor had landed near the estate, in the grove. As we flew the Kitty in, improbable petals began to twirl and draped the cockpit windows, making the approach as delicate as poetic.
“The Geiger counter is spinning like crazy! Beware of the Kaijus!” I alerted my sapiens as she left for the hold to put on her space suit.
A preventive anti-radiation shot on the shoulder, we prepared to disembark. When the hatch opened, a gust of wind covered us with grit and colored corolla.
“They’re fake,” Ali informed me, sliding pink petals between her gloved fingers. “So does the orchard. Check this out!” With a precise shot, she broke a branch that snapped like a crudely molded plastic rod. “All this nonsense should have melted ages ago,” my partner commented as she stepped on Earth.
“Unless it’s more recent.”
Indeed. Judging by the state of the trees and the rehabilitated shiro, someone moved here after the last humans emigrated to Mars.
A shrilling bullet grazed my tail and made me suddenly turn around. Ali had had the same reflex before she hit the ground, her finger on the trigger.
“You good?” she whispered through the suit’s microphone as she snuck behind a trunk.
“Miraculously,” I said, joining her among the sick ferns. “We’ve been careless. Do you know where it came from?”
She answered negatively. The echo had been lost in the rows of identical, silent trees. “Did you feel that?” Ali asked.
“Yes! He’s hiding right behind that log!” With these words I pointed to the body of a burnt android hovering in the distance, inches above the ground, on the path leading to the castle. It was one of the same puppets that had boarded the Marco Polo.
“These weird MKs again?” said Ali. She smashed to pieces this dismal copy of a Gallic warrior before emptying half a magazine in its face. “It’s definitely us versus the Gods after all…”
As she lifted the metal skull, it turned to dust with the first gust of wind.
“Let’s move.”