Skyfall Dawn

“That’s good. He was a real son-of-a-bitch.”

In less than two hours Ajax watched the Pallas asteroid recede through the viewport of a shuttle. In five he was on a small, in-system transport moving coreward. Before a 48-hour watch rotation had been completed, Earth was in sight.

***

SOL-3/Earth

The Palmettos planted along the shoulder of East Elgin Boulevard finally stopped moving outside her window seat. Jena took a deep breath of salty Florida air as she stepped out of the shuttle-bus she’d taken from the spaceport, the new southern hub built on land reclaimed from the Tampa Bay. There was one last thing to do before she left Earth perhaps forever.

Virtually indistinguishable from the urban clutter of Niceville to the north, the mid-rise housing complexes of the ELGIN USAF base needed painting, as she remembered they always had, one of the many deactivated military bases nationwide where families of deceased service-members were issued apartment billets.

Everything, even meals and sanitation, was done by contract and the quality fluctuated, given the nature of government work, but all the services guaranteed to be provided were done so unfailingly. The base commissary was restocked with food and sundries once a week, the air conditioning worked during the oppressive heat of summer, and the roads were repaved every twenty years. The statue where the main gate once stood was of a winged figure with an arm uplifted; symbolizing that which those who constructed the “Curtis Lemay” DFC sought to capture for the people housed there… a helping hand, a guardian angel.

Children playing nearby stopped their antics to gawk at her as she adjusted her white formal uniform. She opened her regulation handbag and removed a clamshell compact and her small auto-tinting wand, brushing up the color on her eyes, lips, and checks with several practiced strokes. Once she was satisfied that the image reflected in the compact mirror was close to ideal, she returned the items to her handbag and oriented herself toward home, or what was once home.

Her steps clicked smartly on the sidewalk as she passed the base educational facilities. Elgin High School looked much worse for the wear than what she’d remembered, perhaps only because it was empty or perhaps because she was appraising it with an adult eye. She paused to reflect on the fates of those classmates she used to call friends but after several moments realized that she had forgotten them, worse, that there’d been noone that she’d considered as such.

Four blocks away from the schools was Bombadier Street, a wide boulevard that ran the length of the base. Her eyes followed the ground as she turned down Bombadier, seeing not service boots on her feet, but child-sized, patent leather pumps. She followed a route she knew by heart, home-to-school, school-to-home- 500 steps from door to door.

“Four hundred ninety-seven, four hundred ninety-eight, four hundred ninety-nine, five hundred” Jena counted aloud and stopped when she came to a familiar crack in the sidewalk. The words “Start/Finish” had been written above in red chalk when she was eight years old- lifetimes ago.

When she looked up the walkway, the rowhouse that she’d long considered her prison greeted her eyes, without the melancholy it held when she’d left it after graduation. Rose sprouted from the window-boxes of house number 216, and behind the blooms she could see the orderly interior of a sitting room.

She stepped aside to let a tracked robot pass with a dog leashed to its chassis and then started for the door. There was movement inside as she walked up and rang the bell. Her sister Jessie opened the door.

“Oh, it’s you,” Jessie said and adjusted her baby, Nicole, on her hip, sounding none too happy to find her sister smiling on the stoop. “Mom’s been waiting for you.”

“So this is my niece,” Jena said as she stepped through the open door and waved at the drooling cherub. “Julie’s a wonderful name and she’s a beautiful.”

“She’s MY daughter,” Jessie said and gave Jena a cold glare. “And get a good look, because by the time you get back from your little adventure she’ll be grown up, and won’t even remember you, if you come back.”

Jena felt tears form in her eyes from the venom in her older sister’s voice. She doffed her service cap and said, “You don’t have to be so mean.”

Jessie stepped closer as her voice dropped to a whisper. “You’re killing Mom. Do you know that?”

Jena stepped past her into the living room and did a brief scan. All the furniture there was still where it rested in her memory.

“I don’t understand.” Jena said. Fury tinged with sadness filled her sister’s eyes when she met them again.

“We lost Dad because of the goddamned Neo-Colonial War,” Jessie hissed. “Now here you go following right in his footsteps. Fine. Go off and get yourself killed.”

“Jena?” The spry voice of Mary Mitchell called out from the dining room. “Is that you? Come in here.”

“Julie needs baby food,” Jessie said, her hard eyes remained locked on Jena’s, slowly shifting them to their matriarch. “Do you need anything, Mom?”

Mary Mitchell sat at the table with spreads of glossy photograph prints and a large plastic storage box in front of her. She looked at Jessie and said, “Thank you, dear, just the list we discussed.”

She smiled when she saw Jena.

“You look wonderful,” Mary said and eased out of her seat into a standing position. “I’m happy you made it. I almost thought you were going to leave without saying goodbye.”

Jena wiped at her eyes and said, “You know I wouldn’t do that. One of the things you always taught us was to check in before we went anywhere.”

“True enough,” Mary said as she opened her frail arms for an embrace. Jena had been at school and unable to attend her 60th birthday. “But for God’s sake, I hope you learned more than that.”

“I learned that you have to follow your dreams,” Jena said and broke the embrace. “And what the price of that sometimes is.”

“Look at this.” Mary said as she picked a glossy out of the pile and held it up to the light. The plug in the data-jack installed through her left Mastoid bone pulled memories and printed them out as video captures. The picture was of young Jena in a white dress seated at a piano.

As she took the picture, Jena heard music begin to play inside her head, Fur Elise, from a piano recital she’d forgotten about. Her mother smiled at the wistful look in her eyes and said, “You played like an angel- every note- was perfect. Your father would’ve been so proud. I see a lot of him in you. You have his eyes.”

She offered up a photo of a rugged looking man in a vacuum suit holding a pressure helmet under one arm.

“I guess I have more than just his nose,” Jena said and offered the pictures back. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to be here for you. I feel like… like this is something I just have to do.”

Mary pressed the glossy of her father back into her hands and said, “It’s a difficult decision to make. It takes courage. Most people would be happy enough staying right here on Earth but not you, you heard the stars calling.”

“Then why does Jessie hate me?”

“She doesn’t hate you, darling, she’s just afraid for you. She’s afraid that you’re leaving her here to take care of me. Most of all she’s afraid of being left alone if something should happen to you. Both of you were very close when you were little, best friends as well as sisters.”

Jena fingered the print of her in her recital dress. After a moment the printer on the buffet behind her spit out a new picture; Jena and Jessie sister sitting on the front stoop outside the house, arm in arm, at ages 7 and 8.

“I just don’t want her to think I’m abandoning the family.” Jena said and wiped away a sniffle at the memory. “I… I just feel like this is something I have to do.”

“Then do it,” Mary Mitchell said and grabbed her by the arms, giving her a gentle shake. “Don’t worry about me or your sister. The only person who knows what’s right for you IS you. Go, have your great adventure, just try to get us a V-mail once in a while. If you decide to stay there and start a new life, none of us will blame you.”

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you too, sweetheart,” Mary Mitchell said and pressed a small memory card into Jena’s hands. “Don’t forget this.”

“What is it?” Jena said and turned the card over in her hands.

“It’s your lineage,” Her mother said with a wrinkled smile. “The last five hundred years of your family history, just in case you decide to stay out there… just so you won’t forget where you came from. It’s important you know.”

“I’ll never forget you, I promise.” Jena said and slid the plastic wafer containing her heritage into her pocket. Just then the door buzzed. Jessie Mitchell strode out of the kitchen, where she’d been working at their Worldnet terminal, and moved to open it. A tracked robot waited at bottom of the steps with a box of baby food tubes and other supplies in its cargo basket. Jessie gathered the load in her arms and returned to the kitchen, Jena behind her. Once the box was on the counter they fell into a natural routine; Jena would unload goods from the box, Jessie would put them away.

“I don’t want to leave with anger between us,” Jena said once the box was empty. “I might never see you again and I don’t want this to be the last thing I remember about you.”

Jessie leaned against the kitchen counter, as if weary, her face miserable. She stared out the window into the backyard where both had played a thousand games together.

“We were a team,” Her sister said and went back to storing plastic containers full of instant meals in the small pantry. “We always told each other that no matter what happened, we’d always be there for each other, do you remember?”

Jena nodded. They’d made many such childhood vows.

“Do you remember how Jimmy Morris told everyone that he was dating both of us at the same time, and when we both confronted him, we made him run home in tears?”

“That was grade school,” Jena said at the memory of how embarrassed the boy, then the school bully, had been. “But back then nobody messed with the Mitchell girls.”

“That’s right,” Jessie said and sniffled, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “We were there to support each other, I guess that’s the way I always thought it was going to be.”

“I’m sorry,” Jena said and put her hand to her elder sister’s shoulder. “I can’t ask you to understand why I have to leave, but I do, my dream was to go the stars. This was the only way.”

“I know,” Jessie said quietly and put her hand over Jena’s. “I knew the day you enlisted. I don’t hate you Jena, I really don’t, it’s just that with everything that’s happened to me so far, Mom’s age, Steven leaving me with the baby, has been very hard. You’ve been a rock, but you’re going away.”

Guilt lowered Jena’s eyes to the tiles on the kitchen floor. “You’ve always been stronger than me, inside and out, I have to know that you’ll be all right.”

“Maybe this will be a good thing,” Jessie said and gave a heavy sigh. “Taking care of Julie and Mom will put me in a position I’ve never been in before in terms of the family. We’ll both have to be leaders, in our own ways.”

“Whatever happens,” Jena said and stopped as the alarm on her Krono went off. She silenced it with a frown. The time allotted for her to say goodbye had expired. Her ship was waiting. She wrapped Jessie in an embrace that lasted for several quiet minutes. “Whatever happens, I want you to go outside some night and look up. I’ll be out there.”

Her lingering memory of home was of Mary, Jessie, and baby Julie standing at the door, watching her as she turned down the sidewalk toward the transport loading area. The clouds that had been gathering over the area finally burst. Jena ran the remaining distance to the passenger shelter, but not before her uniform had been soaked through, enough that noone would be able to tell that she’d been crying.

***

Jamaica Bay Metropolitan Spaceport

The air shimmered with swampy heat as Ajax framed himself in the exit door of transport shuttle.

“Gibson was right.” He said to the night and stopped at the top of the stairs to take in unfamiliar surroundings. The place had gotten bigger while he’d been away. I95 corridor was an artery that spread urban development like a living thing. The sprawl could be seen from space as a gash of light on the dark Earth at night.

“Keep moving, please.” The pleasant voice of the cabin attendant said from over his shoulder. Ajax kept moving.

Jamaica Bay terminal teemed like a massive hive, filled with travelers passing through for business or pleasure. Transients took air-conditioned shelter during hotter months. Ajax took a breath as he was slapped by a familiar rotting stink of the stacked urban cores, but there was a stiff wind picking up from the south that carried the smell of rain.

After NEO ALH-24 came down in the Pacific, it had gotten progressively colder. The asteroid was three kilometers wide and had come out of nowhere to hit like a titan, blasting a divot 20 kilometers wide into the Australian outback just north of Cape Leveque on the Timor Sea, forming Crater Bay. Disaster shows ran clips of the chaos leading up to the strike: the panicked mobs with the hand-painted signs reading “We don’t want you,” then the looting, the mass killings. The after-effects were worse: the Indonesian Petronas Towers collapsing into the massive tidal wave caused by impact, a wall of water taller than the largest skyscrapers rushing for the coast of Madagascar at the speed of sound, the devastation along the east African coast. Though still recovering from the effects of the strike, Earth could’ve taken one bigger.

“Please keep moving, sir.” One of the ground controllers called. Ajax kept moving.

He could see anti-collision lights blinking from the tops of the arcologies and super-towers in Manhattan. The slab-sided giants were packed with people, cities unto themselves. New York had stopped growing outward and started growing upward.

The super-towers were just as tall but the arcologies were micro-ecologies. They produced their own food and power, managed their own wastes, their own security and the largest ones could be seen from space. Seven thousand feet was the limit set by building codes but with satellite dishes and microwave antennas sprouting from their tops, the four arcologies within the metropolitan area were that and more. SHEL batteries protected the buildings from air and spacecraft collisions.

On the outside, in the long shadows they cast, dwelt an underworld that thrived on supplying what could not be procured on the inside. The skies burst as he neared the entrance to the terminal. Hefting his bag and rushing for the gate, he squeezed past a toothless old man, who swore at him in raspy German and shook his fist but waited in angry silence while Ajax cleared customs.

The inside of the terminal was more like a museum, or cathedral to the progress of civil space transport. Instead of a choir, the terminal echoed with the ceaseless droning of overhead courtesy pages, delivered in such an inoffensive, feminine tone that they were likely computer generated.

Art depicting various spacecraft in flight decorated the walls, gifts from the major transport lines that used JBMS as a hub. Above the customs desk, an 8' by 12' oil captured a burly Caravelle 200 in SOLCorp livery coupled to a ring on Liberty Station. Beside the passenger lounge, a smaller work explored the sleek tranquility of an Avianca trans-orbital shuttle on the ground, covered in snow.

The travel desks ringed the center of the terminal floor. Above them, exotic constructs of fragile lifting-bodies were suspended beneath settings in stained glass, great moments preserved by a protective atrium of plexi-glass; Liberty Station being completed, the VISIGARD 1 landing the first colonists on Mars. Ajax studied a watercolor of the space-liner Royal Andromeda hanging beside the entrance to the men's toilets. Once a liquid waste dump had been satisfactorilly completed, he hefted his patched travel-bag onto his shoulder and located the exit.

The terminal was serviced by the spaceport access on four levels. At ground level, the terminus of a dedicated grav-lev line that followed the expressway to a tunnel that ended beneath Union Station, level two moved auto-buses, level three carried lines of auto-cabs, level four designated for personal vehicles. Ajax hopped an automated-stairway to level three.

He made for the exit, maneuvering through a sea of travelers arriving and departing. Honda robots pushed carts of luggage through the terminal to and from the lounges where passengers waited. Ajax steered around one of the humanoid robots as he cleared the entrance.

In an orderly fashion, an auto-cab pulled into a gap in the cab stand that had just been vacated and popped its hatch, discharging a fifty-something couple wearing matching Hawaiian shirts, who brushed by him as they hurried for a departure pad.

Ajax threw his bag into the now vacant vehicle and ducked inside. It was one of the automated types guided by orbiting satellites to its destination instead of a human who might kibitz about where he was going and how lousy the Yankees were that season. Noone wanted to drive cabs anymore. Cabbies had been extinct on Earth for 100 years.

The interior of the taxi was not as resilient to damage as the exterior. The padding in the seat had been ripped out, and it seemed that every passenger the vehicle had ever transported took the time to leave a missive carved with a knifepoint or scrawled with ink on the cabin wall. He was figuring which “For a good time...” net address seemed the most legitimate when the flat, mechanical voice of the computer running the cab came through the speakers.

“Input destination now.” The onboard computer hummed in a monotone, electronic vibratto. The audio generation software in the auto-cab had likely already been obsolete when installed.

“The corner of Hunt and Holland. Scenic route… take the Queensboro Bridge and go by Yankee Stadium.”

The GPS display mounted beneath the scarred plexi-glass shield warmed and a map of the city appeared. The path the cab would follow appeared in red. Ajax could barely see through the scratches on the surface but it looked more or less like the route he wanted.

“Insert IdentiCredit card into reader to accept fare. Insert IdentiCredit card into reader to accept fare.”

He slid his card into the box and waited as it read his account information. Once it had transferred the correct sum, the card popped out, the passenger door closed, and the cab started to move. It merged into heavy spaceport traffic as the access filtered into the westbound Van Wyck Expressway and headed into the city. The computer-directed traffic was lighter on Queens Boulevard, where the cab got off the Van Wyck and went north. It was a straight shot across the old Queensboro Bridge.

NYPD checkpoints sealed off what he considered his old neighborhood. In places, natural light was blocked off by spans of the M3 elevated motorway, built between high-rises and supported by the tops of smaller structures. The automobile traffic at the top cruised along in computer regulated intervals two-hundred feet above the surface roads.

At ground level, it looked rough. There were more burned out wrecks along the side of the road than driving down it. Enforcers, police robots assembled by Mitsubishi, were used in the dark-zones beneath the motorways, slums where it was too dangerous for their human counterparts to go.

The corner of Hunt and Holland could not easily be identified, but after nearly an hour on the road, the cab stopped and the door unbolted. Drizzle still fell from the cracks in the motorways above but the air smelled washed and clean. From there it was an easy walk.