John Barnes - Mother of Storms

MARCH—JUNE 2028

THIS IS THE good part. Hassan Sulari loves this one. When the magnetic catapult on the mothership throws his little spaceplane forward and he kicks in his scramjets, somewhere over Afghanistan, he’ll sail up and away into a high suborbital trajectory over the pole. Hassan has never gotten authorized for orbit, but this is pretty close.

It’s his first real mission. He’s carrying four cram bombs—“Compressing Radiation Antimatter” is what it stands for, and when they talk to the media they are supposed to stress that they are “mass-to-energy, not really nuclear” weapons, because for all practical purposes they are baby nukes and that’s bad PR.

The catch is that damned jack in the back of his head. He accepted a lot of extra money from Passionet to have it installed and to fly with it, it’s going to make him rich—and in UNSOO that’s not common—but there is still the nagging feeling of showing off. After all, he’s a pilot, not an actor.

“We’re getting ready to go plugged with you,” the voice from Passionet says. “If you’ve got any embarrassing thoughts to get out of the way, think them now.”

“None I know of. I’m at orbital injection minus four minutes.” Hassan does his best to sound bored.

“We know—timing’s perfect. Give our folks a ride.”

Just as they click off and it goes live, he does have the strange thought that there really don’t have to be human crews for UN Space Ops like this—a machine could do a prohibited-weapons interdict just as well. He finds himself wondering why he does this—no, to his shame, why he is fearing doing it.

That makes his stomach knot hard during the last instants of countdown. Then he hears the word “inject” and the mothership catapult flings him forward over the nose of the big airplane; watching his stability gauge, he sees it’s all go, waits a few more seconds till the navigation computer has a fix, and then flips the scramjet lever.

He is slammed into his seat again, and the brown-and-white mountains of early spring morning fall away below him. The vibration is heavy, and the pressure is intense; he sees the West Siberian plain open out beneath him, wrapped in its canopy of blue air. He is as high up as weather satellites go. His heart is pounding and despite the military reason for the mission he is mentally lost in the scenery.

By the time the scramjets cut out, there is polar ice on the horizon, and his hands automatically begin their ritual of arming and readying the shots.

He arcs higher still, coasting upward on inertia, and now the Earth begins to return toward him. He is weightless—not because there is no gravity but because he is moving with it—and he has an intense recollection of his childhood fantasies about space travel. He hopes they won’t mind having that in the wedge they are recording—

Over the pole now, falling nose-down across the ice cap ninety miles below, and the countdown begins; his weapons lock on target and he need only pull the trigger on cue to turn over control to the missiles themselves. He receives the go-ahead and initiates.

There are four hard shoves on the little spaceplane, and he sees his missiles falling away like sparklers thrown down a dark canyon. He will miss their impact off the North Slope, but the pleasure of launching them was exquisite.

And from the jack in his head, he is informed that 750 million people shared the experience.

There’s a cherry-red glow around the bottom of the spaceplane, and weight begins to return as the plane once again resists gravity rather than rides with it. It was more like a training flight than he expected. He’s never seen Pacificanada, but he’s told the new, struggling nation loves UN Peacekeeping Forces credits, and he will have plenty.

As he falls back toward home, life seems pretty sweet when it can include things like this.

Randy Householder is cruising I-80 out of Sacramento in a car so old it had to be retrofitted to drive itself. It runs and it’s what he can afford, and he doesn’t worry about it.

But he’s trying to get onto the net, and that is unbelievably slow and frustrating tonight. After fourteen years he’s learned that this always means the same thing—some damn crisis tying things up. Back in i when the Flash happened, it was six days before he could get on and get his messages. At least this time he can get them, but they’re slow.

It’s been a long time since he’s been impressed by getting a hundred messages. That’s normal traffic. About half of it will be some small-town police chiefs, sheriffs, magistrates, proconsuls, ombudsmen, whatever they call them around the world, mostly letting him know they’re still looking for evidence and that nothing has come in. A few will be new ones taking over, some will be old ones leaving and letting him know their successors may not be helpful.

The other half will be people like Randy, mostly just passing along support notes. There are seven others Randy hears from most nights—all the ones who had children killed in a way similar to what happened to Kimbie Dee. They’re always there. Sometimes he talks with them live; they’ve traded pictures and such over the years.

There will almost always be at least one reporter. Randy does not talk to reporters anymore. The damn media take up too much of the bandwidth on the net—like they’re doing tonight. And they’re no help.

Last time he talked to one, she kept wanting to know about how he lives his life. Shit, Randy told her, he didn’t have a life. He stopped having a life fourteen years ago when the cops came to the door of his mobile home, and made him and his then-wife Terry sit down, and told them that Kimbie Dee had been murdered, and it looked like a sex murder. Life stopped when they told him they had the man who did it and no clues about motive, but they knew damned well from the jack driven into her skull why she’d been murdered and raped—Christ, Christ, the coroner had said she’d been jammed with a mop handle hard enough to rupture her intestines, and then raped while she hemorrhaged, but she’d still been conscious when the man hanged her.

Randy’s clutching at his keyboard with his fists and that does no good. Stay relaxed, stay calm, keep hunting. It’s going to be a long one, you’ve always known that.

Kimbie Dee was killed to make an XV wedge. There’s a big underground market in those things. Once or twice a year, someone is arrested for selling the one that features her death. Sometimes they arrest the guy he bought it from; sometimes Randy is able to hack the files about one of the suspects, and find more people who might be involved. Now and then—the last time was three years ago—something cross-correlates, and Randy’s datarodents bring him back one more piece of information, move him another step up one of the distribution chains.

When that happens, there’s an arrest. Randy gets reward money. Like he cares crap about that. But Randy and the world’s cops get one step closer to the guy who paid for it; somewhere out there, some big shot, someone with more income to spend on his “fun” than Randy ever made in any year of his life, is still at large and unsuspected. He’s the man who handed all that money to a man and said, “Here’s what I want you to do to a pert little blonde girl.”

The man who killed and raped Kimbie Dee Householder has been in his grave for eleven years. Randy was there to see him strapped into the chair. The man who hired it done is still out there.