Chris Randolph - Stars Rain Down

As Jack second guessed his fleeting idea, one of the flyers high above slowed and entered a tunnel in the facility’s side. The angle from the floor made the entrance itself invisible.

“Who’s got some climbing experience?”

“You didn’t just ask that,” Nikitin said.

Albright, Trash, and one of the demo men raised their hands. “Good. Looks like there’s a docking port for flyers up there. That’s where we’re getting in. There isn’t another option. The rest of you stay behind. Stick to the shadows, and be ready to get the hell out. Clear?”

“Clear,” they all said.

Just then, Jack noticed a pair of rhinos walking in their direction and he motioned for his team to shut up. The two creatures, an adult and child, walked right past the circle of false monks and stopped at the street corner a couple paces away. The adult, a female, pulled out a glowing crystal and looked deep into it, while the child stared up at the mess of traffic above.

Then the young rhino turned and looked right at Jack, and he knew it saw his face. Its big, bright eyes showed surprise, and then it smiled and waved to him. It tugged its mother’s hand, but Jack raised his finger to his mouth in a silent hush. To his amazement, the motion was understood.

The small rhino giggled and waved again, then its mother put the crystal away and started walking, pulling her child along behind her.

Jack heard Albright’s voice in his memory, from the day she dissected the alien specimens. “I haven’t identified everything yet, but most of it’s more like us than not.”

Right at that moment, Jack realized what sort of demon he’d become, and he couldn’t shake the thought from his head no matter how hard he tried.

The climbing team stripped off their robes and left them folded up on the ground. The disguises wouldn’t matter, since a group of monks climbing the generator would be as suspicious as anything else. Fortunately, the generator complex was of little interest to the citizens of the blue city and there was no traffic nearby, flying or on foot. Their chances of being seen were small, and if they were lucky, that would be enough.

Jack didn’t like trusting in luck.

All four were former corpsmen with jumpsuits dyed darker colors. Each also wore the standard corps duty pack, which housed a climbing-harness with built in rappelling cable. The hooks allowed corpsmen to latch onto each other and form a human chain, great for climbing but also useful in strong winds and flood waters. A large part of Corps Basic Training was devoted to the harness’ effective use.

Albright was the most confident climber and she volunteered to take lead. They all hooked up to her, and then off they went up the side of the giant, twisting structure. It felt like they were making quick work of it, but the entry ports remained a long way off, and they seemed only inches closer after a half-hour.

The surface was covered in handles and was as difficult to climb as a good ladder. Albright supposed the handles were for use in zero-g, and her theory made a lot of sense, but things that made too much sense were often wrong in Jack’s experience. Jack’s experience was surprisingly cynical.

They fell into a comfortable rhythm, ascent interspersed with short rests in shallow alcoves they found, and thanks to the many hand-holds, they rarely had to backtrack. At each new rest stop, they could see more of the city stretching out beneath them, and Jack was beginning to admire the view. What was foreign and deformed at first was becoming familiar, reminding him not only of Manhattan, but also of Hong Kong and Mumbai. It was a rainbow of brightly colored clothes, spicy smells and strange produce.

After nearly two hours, they came to the entry port, which was a tunnel just barely large enough for one of the flyers to squeeze through, located half-way between the colony’s floor and ceiling.

Once everyone was safely on the ledge, Jack took a good look down and the scale of it struck him with a touch of vertigo. He had a tingle at the back of his knees and a sloshy feeling in his stomach, and then it was gone.

“Hustle up,” he said, moving away from the ledge. “Let’s get this done and get out of here.”

They scurried down the tunnel, and fifty meters later, it opened into a round room full of golden light, brighter than midday.

Jack shielded his eyes and looked for cover. From what little he could see, the room was filled with circles of alabaster columns, and pieces of equipment whose shape he could hardly make out.

The team moved in, ducking behind one column and then the next. After a few moments, Jack’s eyes adjusted to the light, and his movements became less frantic. He was reasonably sure they were alone.

“It’s a damn sauna in here,” Trash grumbled.

Albright said, “No kidding. Seems we found the furnace.”

Jack waved the team forward, and idly wondered if they’d find a monster shoveling coal at the center.

The columns were staggered so that they were never in direct light for long, and soon they reached the innermost columns where the heat grew unbearable. Jack had just started thinking about how to proceed when their amazing luck struck again.

They heard the clothes-washer sound of a flyer. The team ducked down into the shadows and did their best to fade into the woodwork. Moments later, a set of eight monks came walking by, their robes shining like glittering gems in the fierce, burning light. As with every other set of monks, they kept their heads down and marched by obliviously.

“I understand the robes,” Albright whispered to Jack. “Betcha those guys are nice and cozy with all that heat reflecting off ‘em.”

Jack was sweating profusely. “Wish I’d known that earlier. I feel like a Christmas roast.”

Then Jack heard a sound unlike any other come from the center of the room. Countless warbling tones were layered atop one another, each warping the sounds around them. It was a choir of songbirds singing in chorus through a collection of transforming distortion pedals. If Jack didn’t know better, he’d think only a synthesizer could produce a sound so starkly unnatural, so beautifully beyond comprehension.

When he peaked out from behind his column, he saw something even more perplexing than the sound: the eight monks stood around the center of the room, where a miniature sun floated in mid-air surrounded by a cage of the glowing orange cables. The burning ball had grown darker since Jack and his team had arrived, and it was now dark enough to look at directly. The red-orange ball slowly rotated while small tongues of flame arced out from its surface.

The monks had their arms raised toward the tiny sun, like refugees in a war torn land crying for someone to take them away. Their synthesizer sounds grew louder, and the sun darkened in response.

Then the noise stopped and the monks lowered their arms, shrank, slumped down as if energy had been sucked right out of them. They stood there in silence looking at the ball of fire, then turned, headed back to their craft and left.

“What the hell?” Jack asked.

Albright shook her head. “I don’t know, but I wish I had a Geiger counter. Something tells me we shouldn’t stay in here any longer than we have to.”

The sun pulsed, throbbed, and slowly brightened.

The demolitionist had a thoughtful look on his face. “If that’s a fusion furnace,” he said while scratching his head, “this might just work, chief. We take out its containment and the whole reaction goes out of control. Kablooey! Everything in a hundred klicks is black fertilizer.”

“Jack…” The tone of Albright’s voice spoke volumes.

“I know,” he said.