Jay Lake: Last Plane to Heaven

“You know I was in Baku when the Barclay’s bombing went off, right?”

Baku? I couldn’t imagine what the hell Azerbaijan had to do with this. “No, actually, I didn’t know that.”

He met my eyes. It was the first time I’d ever seen Nichols frightened. I could smell it on him.

“About three minutes before the bomb went off, I got a sudden headache. Like… like… a stab wound.” Deep breath, his chest shaking. “So I went outside for a smoke. Headache didn’t get better until I walked around the block. I headed back for my detail and…”

“Yeah?”

“Headache stabbed me when I got near the building. I turned around, walked away again. Headache left, bomb went off. Allen, if I’d stayed where I was supposed to be, I’d be dead right now.”

Both looney and tunes in one sweet package. He was picking a hell of a time to crack up. “Okay…”

“No.” He was shaking now. “Listen, I’m not crazy. Three, four times in my life I’ve had that. Once as a kid, when the rattler got my brother instead of me. In Baku, with the bombing. Again in Mosul last year, right before the White Shrine Massacre.”

My neck was starting to prickle. “And?”

“That girl gives me a headache. Only this one’s a bullet, not a stabbing.”

Great. Terrific. Psychic-psycho mercenaries in the Gobi desert. Film at fucking eleven.

I should have popped that damned cap on Hannaday.

“Go get some sleep,” I told him, then summoned up my best soldier-Russian and went out to see how our spacegirl was doing with an AK-47 in her hands.

One of the Belgians, Henri VerMeirssen, pulled me out into the desert after dinner. “We must talk, mijn vriend .”

I was really looking forward to more headache stories. I went with him, though. Henri didn’t usually talk much, not to me.

“Okay,” I said about forty yards from the grave rows.

“Nichols, he has een spook gezien. Eh, seen a ghost, you would say.”

I stopped, looked Henri in the eyes. Even in the dusk, I could see the cold glint. He smelled faintly of rosewater and gunpowder, just like he always did. He wasn’t laughing.

“What?”

“I do not mean a corpse, a dead person. I mean to say, Nichols is very frightened. I have never seen him frightened. Where did Korunov send you on the Antonov?”

Spacegirl had been wearing a Russian flight suit. Without a name tag. She hadn’t said a word since she’d gotten here. She’d fired her weapon with drastic incompetence, then collapsed into deep sleep.

So far our program of intimidation wasn’t working. But these guys were smart. Dumb mercs were dead mercs. They knew what a flight suit was.

“She dropped out of the sky, Henri.”

“The recovery pod of some kind, no?”

“You could say that.”

“And so what is it which frightens Nichols? Becque and I, we are to think the biologische oorlogsvoering . Eh, the, ah, biologic warfare. Is she a virus host, Allen?”

What he was really asking was whether I’d killed us all already.

The answer to that was probably yes, but not the way he meant it.

“No.” Hannaday would have been dooming himself. Hell, he’d pulled her out of the capsule. “Not a biological problem. I think she is a political problem.”

“Nichols, he is not scared of the politics.”

“No. But every man has shadows in his soul, my friend.”

“He is scared of girls?”

“You could say that.”

“Eh.” Henri turned back, took a step, paused.

I waited for it.

“Becque…” His lover, partner, squad buddy.

It was time to force a smile. “Yes?”

“Becque, he is saying the girl makes him the headache. Becque has never had the headache before.”

“Perhaps he should take an aspirin.” Could this really be a biological? Some sort of timed exposure? With Hannaday getting out fast enough to take a treatment, maybe.

“He also is saying she talks to him, though her lips do not move.” Henri shrugged. “But Becque he has been gek these many years.” He walked away.

I wondered what gek meant, exactly. It wasn’t hard to guess. I stood for a while in the descending chill, watching the hard light of the stars and wondering what precisely this girl had been doing in orbit.

The land spoke to me. Snow leopards roared from the distant peaks to the south, while lammergeyers circled overhead. Even the bellowing of the yaks carried over the miles and valleys. Together they made a voice.

“You. Airplane man.”

I tried to answer, but my lips were bound together with stinging sutures.

“Do not let them.”

Then a knife of ice slid behind my ear to fill the space between brain and mind.

“Airplane man,” the land whispered as Nichols screamed from a distant place.

“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.

“Huh?”

I looked around the ger I shared with Nichols. Had he been screaming?

Perhaps, but he was gone now.

“Aren’t you on perimeter?” I asked Becque.

“ Oui, but your Nichols he has walked to the desert and he is not returning.”

My TAG said it was just after oh three hundred hours. “When?”

“The midnight, peut-être .”

“Three fucking hours, and you come get me now ?”

“We have no SOP about the desert.”

“Right.” I shrugged into my stinking cammies, belted on the Smitty, and grabbed my Stinger rack. “Who’s got perimeter right now?”

“Moi.”

Fuck me. There wasn’t any point in yelling at him. Besides, Henri had said Becque was getting headaches too. “Show me where he went.”

The dew, such as it was, was already down. There’s a hell of a lot of starlight out in the Gobi. Nichols’s trail was clear enough. I shouldered my Stinger and followed.

The night smelled of flowers and a flinty scent off the distant hills. Dinosaur bones out here everywhere, so I’d been told. I could almost imagine one of them lumbering by. I’d rather imagine Nichols lumbering by.

The trail headed due south. I continued to follow, wondering why the hell the camp gimp was out stalking around in the darkness. There were snow leopards in those hills, for God’s sake. Worse than fucking cougars.

I didn’t trust anyone else to bring Nichols to safety.

Something rumbled in the darkness ahead of me. I brought the Stinger rack to port arms. “Nichols?”

The breeze swirled, rustling the low-stem grass clumps and kicking up damp dust. There was another noise, a sort of scraping.

Which was weird as hell, because I could see miles ahead of me, and there was nothing out there.

I walked toward the noise.

“Nichols.”

When the shambling thing popped up out of the grass, it startled me so badly I fired the Stinger. Damned backblast set my sleeve smoldering and started a grass fire. My head rang like a son of a bitch. Slapping holster for the Smitty, I charged toward it.

There was a spread of fur and guts and shattered ribs, limbs blown apart from the body. Blood, shit, and propellant battled in my nostrils. I could see that something was wrong.

I reluctantly bent to touch the fur.

Grass. Wrapped around ordinary skin.

The head lay on its crown, smashed to a broken egg by the missile. I used the edge of the empty Stinger rack to tip it face-upward.

Nichols.

Who for some fucking reason had been wound around with a huge amount of desert grass woven together so that he’d looked like a giant, vegetable bigfoot.

A giant, dead, vegetable bigfoot.

“God damned mother fucker!” I screamed.