The Klaatu Terminus (30 page)

Gheen swung the stick. Lia hopped back on one leg, raising her crutch to deflect the blow. Gheen’s stick, larger and heavier, snapped Lia’s slender branch in half. Lia fell, landing on her back. Gheen raised his stick. Lia hurled the broken branch at him. The short length of wood struck Gheen’s bad leg; he collapsed with a cry.

Lia crawled rapidly up the hill toward the Gate, gaining the higher ground, then climbed onto one leg to face him again. Gheen approached, more cautious now. He was breathing hard, his face red with anger and frustration.

Let your opponent’s emotion devour him
, Yar Song had said.

“I come to you with arms open,” he said, “and you reject me. I should have known — once a Yar always a Yar.”

Lia felt weirdly calm. She had faced this version of Master Gheen before; she was on familiar ground. She let him come closer. He made a tentative jab at her with the stick; Lia batted it aside. Gheen reached into his jacket pocket with his free hand and pulled out something wrapped in a black cloth. The cloth fluttered to the ground. In his hand was the obsidian dagger, the same blade that had once sliced open her face.

Lia stopped breathing. The sight of the dagger sent a quiver of fear through her.

Your fear is powerful. Use it.

Lia set her jaw and willed strength into her limbs. It was just a piece of sharpened stone. A rock in the hands of an angry old priest.

Holding the stick in one hand and the dagger in the other, dragging his leg, Gheen backed her toward the Gate. Lia could hear its excited buzzing. When she felt the emanation from the Gate stir the hairs on the back of her neck, she stopped and assumed the pose that, at Yar Song’s insistence, had consumed many of Lia’s hours in the dojo.

“Why is this called the warrior pose?” Lia had asked Song, as they each balanced on one leg, bodies parallel to the mat, arms thrust back. “It is a poor defense posture.”

“It is the
worst
defense pose,” Song agreed, “which is why you must know it. It is a lesson in gravity, balance, focus.”

“That makes no sense,” Lia said, whereupon Song had kicked her in the ribs.

Gheen, bemused by her odd stance, hesitated. “More Yarish tricks?” he said.

Lia smiled.

Gheen lunged, faking a jab with the stick as he slashed at her with the knife. Lia thrust her leg back and spun her body in midair, dropping to the ground on her back. The blade sliced though the air inches above her face. Her hand shot out and grabbed his wrist as it passed. She brought her good leg up, planted her boot in his belly, and catapulted him into the Gate.

The Gate flared orange. Gheen’s hunting cap fell to the ground. The stone knife struck a rock and shattered. The Gate’s surface pulsed and faded to gray.

Master Gheen was gone.

Lia lay on her back, heart pounding, her chest shuddering with each breath. She rolled over and, on her hands and knees, crawled away from the buzzing Gate. She pulled herself up onto the log where Master Gheen had recently sat. She stared at the Gate, looked down at the red dust scattered before it, at the broken black blade, at the bright orange cap.

It had really happened. Awn had told her that all who passed through this Gate would die. Master Gheen — her
father
— was gone. She searched inside herself for feelings of triumph or regret, but found neither. The Gate sputtered; its swirling gray surface began to break apart, its edges growing indistinct.

Lia looked up at the rustle of footsteps on leaves. A head appeared over the brow of the hill — long tousled hair, blue eyes. . . .

“Hello, Tucker Feye,” Lia said.

Tucker looked from Lia’s face to the fading Gate, then down at the blaze-orange cap on the ground beneath it. He took a deep breath and let it out shakily.

“I thought you might be in trouble,” he said.

“I’m okay.” Lia smiled. “Except for my ankle.”

Tucker sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulder. Lia winced.

“And my shoulder.”

“Sorry.”

She held out her bandaged fingers. “And a few other things.”

“You’re alive,” Tucker said.

“That is something.”

Together they sat and watched the Gate fade slowly out of existence, leaving behind only the cap, the blade, and a few grains of reddish sand.

M
ARS, 1976

A
THIN WIND, INHUMANLY COLD AND DRY, SWEPT
across the Chryse Planitia. Powdery grains of sand moved near the surface, tumbling over one another as they had for uncounted millennia. The scant Martian atmosphere transmitted the soft hiss of colliding silica crystals, though there was no one there to hear it. The sun, small and distant, teased at frozen fragments of water and carbon dioxide, but not enough to coax them from their solid state.

Time passed.

Three meters above the surface, an anomaly appeared. A spark of orange became a miniature orb, then flattened to become a shimmering disc the size of a manhole cover. The disc continued to grow until it was 1.3333 meters in diameter, and the thickness of a hydrogen atom. For the next three rotations of the red planet, the disko hovered patiently above the rock-strewn sands.

A new star mounted the horizon, rose high over the plain, then separated into two lesser objects. One continued in its orbit; the other entered the atmosphere. A parachute blossomed, slowing its descent.

Three intensely bright points of light erupted from the bottom of the object. The parachute broke free and drifted off as the craft continued its descent toward the surface. The three points of light resolved into spikes of blue flame supporting a complicated-looking metallic construction. Slowly, the spacecraft sank through the thin atmosphere. As it neared the surface, three gangly legs unfolded from its belly, giving it the appearance of an arachnid amputee.

The disko, almost directly beneath the descending spacecraft, awakened. Its gray surface became mottled, turned sickly green, then flared bright emerald and spat out a Klaatu. The Klaatu was followed by several others. Their numbers grew to become a crowd of several dozen hovering, ghostlike figures, all looking up at the approaching craft, now clearly recognizable as the Viking 1 lander.

At first, it looked as if the lander would collide with the disko and the waiting crowd of Klaatu, but it missed them by several meters. The touchdown was abrupt; the legs struck the surface, flexed, sprang back. Dust exploded from beneath the rockets and billowed out, creating a huge torus of particulates that quickly distorted and was swept away by the thin wind. The jets sputtered and winked out, the lander settled, the dilute roar of its arrival gave way to the near silence that had persisted for millennia.

Six hundred seconds later, the quiet was interrupted by a buzzing sound. A dish-shaped antenna unfolded from the top of the lander and rotated several degrees until it was pointed at Earth. The Klaatu watched. More buzzing and clicking came from another part of the lander as the camera began to record and transmit images of the rocky plain. From time to time, the sounds would cease, then start up again.

The Klaatu became bored. One by one, they floated back to the disko and were drawn inside, until none were left. The disko remained. The lander continued to perform its various functions. The wind blew. The planet rotated as it continued its long, ponderous journey around the sun.

For several Martian years, the Viking lander continued to transmit information back to Earth, although the clicking and buzzing occurred less frequently. On the 2,248th Martian day after its arrival on Mars, the lander emitted its last click, then fell silent.

Time passed. The disko remained dormant. Dust built up around the legs of the lander and filled its crevasses and openings, making it look less like an alien presence and more like a native thing that had emerged from the sand and stone of Mars.

On the 2,522nd day after the landing of the Viking, the disko awakened, flashed green, and spat out a man wearing a camouflage hunting jacket.

The man landed on his back. The impact drove his last breath from his lungs — a cloud of moist, oxygen-rich air crystalized, then fell like snow to the arid surface. Master Gheen staggered to his feet, gasping for air that was not there, looking around wildly as the surface of his eyeballs froze. He clawed at his chest and staggered toward the lander, but he made it only a few steps before falling to his knees, then pitching forward to bury his contorted face in the red earth of Mars.

Cell by cell, the process of freeze-drying began. Plasma membranes burst, spilling cytoplasm, mitochondria, nuclei. Proteins, prions, and other complex, carbon-based substances flaked from the frozen corpse to violate the delicate Martian ecosystem.

The thin wind blew.

Flecks of silica collided with the alien particles.

The sun rose and fell.

The planet began to die.

H
OPEWELL
, C
HRISTMAS
E
VE, 1997 CE

T
HIS HAS GOT TO BE THE WEIRDEST
C
HRISTMAS
E
VE EVER
, Kosh thought.

He had been trying to talk Red into serving him a beer when this kid walked in off the street — a kid with longish sandy hair and the fuzzy beginnings of a beard. Strangers were rare in Hopewell, especially at Red’s Roost, especially on Christmas Eve. But what made this kid
beyond
strange was that Kosh felt as if he knew him. At the same time, he was sure they’d never met before.

The kid walked closer to the bar. He was dressed in gray coveralls, like a janitor, and what looked like bright blue plastic socks. He was saying something to Red, but Kosh was too astonished by the kid’s face to hear what they were saying. Except for his hair color, the kid looked like what Kosh saw every morning in the mirror.

“Do I know you?” Kosh asked.

The kid looked at him. One corner of his mouth turned up in a smile.

“Not yet,” the kid said.

Before Kosh could ask what he meant by that, the door banged open and Adrian strode into the bar.

“Adrian,” Kosh said, his heart pounding.

Adrian Feye had changed during his months in the Holy Land. He was thinner, his features more crisply defined, his skin dark from the Middle Eastern sun. But what Kosh saw most clearly was the anger and pain in his brother’s eyes.

Adrian
knew
.

Kosh didn’t know what else to do, so he walked to Adrian and held out his arms and said, “Welcome back, bro.”

He never saw the punch coming. Adrian’s fist took him on the point of his jaw, snapping his head back. Kosh staggered into the bar, his elbow knocking Henry Hall’s beer into his lap.

“What was
that
for?” he asked, even though he knew
exactly
what it was for — and he knew he deserved it. Adrian was coming at him again, yelling something about his car. Kosh dodged Adrian’s second swing and tripped over a chair. He scrambled to his feet just as Red came around the bar and grabbed Adrian.

“Take it outside, boys.” Red marched Adrian to the door and shoved him outside. “You too, Curtis. Out!”

Kosh followed his brother out onto the sidewalk.
Maybe I can explain
, he thought.

There was no explaining. The moment the door closed behind him, Adrian attacked.

Kosh had been in fights before. Too many fights. Every time, there was a point when a sort of berserker rage took over — it didn’t matter who he was fighting, or why. He would feel it first as a numbness in his spine that rose up through his neck and filled his head. At that point, he stopped feeling the punches, and all that remained was an animal part of his mind telling him to lash out, destroy, defend.

The first time Adrian hit him, it hurt. The second blow felt like a distant explosion. After that, Kosh felt nothing but the satisfying crunch of his fists crashing into Adrian’s face, chest, shoulders, head. They were on the ground, on the sidewalk — Kosh didn’t know how they’d gotten there. It didn’t matter.

A sound from Adrian penetrated his rage. A sob. In a moment of clarity, Kosh saw himself rolling around on the sidewalk, hitting his brother, the man who had raised him, the man he had betrayed. He thrust Adrian away and jumped to his feet. Adrian dove at him and wrapped his arms around Kosh’s leg. Kosh punched him on the forehead, jerked his leg free, and staggered over to his bike.