Red Lightning (10 page)

And a lot of people just didn't want to go there.

I won't even mention the second, third, fourth, and nine hundred ninety-ninth theories about what the object was, nor their almost infinite variations. The nature of the cybernet, since the time we were calling it the internet, is chatter, and anybody can do it. Crackpots breed like lice on the web. You can find support for absolutely any proposition on the web. Naturally, the big impact had generated a lot of noise.

I take it back, I
will
mention the third most popular explanation for what it was: The Wrath of God. Actually, some polls put it in the number two spot, with a bullet.

Most of the Rapture people had already packed their bags, those who hadn't already packed when Tel Aviv and Cairo were bombed. Figuratively, of course, since they expected to be Raptured physically out of their cars and clothes and lifted straight to heaven while the rest of us remained on Earth to duke it out with Satan. (What about us Martians? I'm hoping we can sit on the sidelines and wait till it's over.)

Plenty of other religions saw it as God's revenge for one thing or another. Many Muslims thought it was September 11 on a bigger scale, and thanked Allah.

Personally, I discount all supernatural explanations until more data is in.

But if it was a starship, that meant one of two things:

Aliens, or one of ours.

Which is where the various governments of Earth were pretty much united. They
really
didn't want to go there, in either case.

Aliens? What can you say? We haven't encountered any so far, but not many of our starships have come back yet, and space is vast. It seems almost beyond question that there are other intelligences out there, and if we can find a way to get to the stars, I'm sure they can, too.

But like I said, with aliens you got nothing but questions,
all
of them unanswerable because we don't have the faintest notion how aliens would think.

Why would our first contact with them be an attack? Why not land at the United Nations and say howdy-do?

Well, maybe they've been watching us and seeing how warlike we can be. Maybe they wanted to get our attention. They sure got it, if they're out there, but why not show up afterward and tell us about it. Otherwise, what's the point?

Answer: We don't know. They're aliens.

That's the answer to
all
the questions about aliens. We don't know. So there's not much point in worrying about it until they show themselves.

But if it was one of ours, the possibilities multiply.

One theory floating around the net was pretty simple. Starship arrives at Planet Mongo, lands, explores, finds it's not worth staying, and heads home. Somewhere along the way an alien virus kills everybody on board. The autopilot keeps it on course. When it gets to Earth, there's nobody alive on board to slow it down.

Could happen, I guess, but a lot of experts doubted it. More likely the autopilot would turn around at the halfway point and the ghost ship would automatically take up a parking orbit around Jupiter, where all starships have departed for fifteen years, by international agreement. On the other hand, there was nobody with the authority to mandate what kind of electronics and programs an interstellar vehicle shipped out with. Some of the countries that sent out ships back when it was a point of national or religious pride were pretty poor; they might have cut corners.

You can come up with a hundred accident scenarios without breaking a sweat, and I'd read dozens of them in my spare time aboard the
Sov
.

Then there was the scariest possibility of all.

Maybe it wasn't an accident.

Somewhere in those nightmare scenarios I guess I drifted off to sleep. Weak orange morning sunlight was in my face when Mom shook my shoulder, and I looked out to the east as the plane descended into Orlando.

The sky was black with smoke.

I had meant to look at Disney World and all the related attractions as we flew over them, to see if I could spot the final landfall of
Red Thunder
in one of the vast parking lots. There was some kind of monument. But I kept looking at the smoke as we descended into a sooty black layer of air.

As far as the eye could see – which wasn't all that far, that awful morning – columns of smoke rose into the air. At some point they reached winds in the upper atmosphere and swirled and merged into a thick layer. Soon we descended into it, and the morning darkened. By the time our wheels touched on the runway it looked like twilight, not morning. The sun was an orange ball near the horizon. You could look right at it.

We were going into
that
?

I realized I didn't have much of an idea just what we were going to do when we got off the plane. Last time I landed in Orlando I got on a train and was in Daytona Beach an hour later. Somehow I didn't think it would work that way this time.

Mom and Dad hadn't told me much about their plans. I'm not blaming them; I hadn't asked. Now I was kicking myself because I realized I'd been acting like a little kid, letting the parents handle everything. I hated it when they still treated me like a kid. I hated it even worse when I gave them an excuse to do it. I resolved to get more involved in the family. Not going to be easy, I realized, because I'd spent the last four or five years distancing myself from them.

Uncle Dak was waiting for us as soon as we got off the plane. Dad gave him a bigger smile than I'd seen from him in days, and they hugged each other, then Dak hugged Mom. He was going to hug me and Elizabeth, but pulled back, looking alarmed.

"My god, you guys are sure growing 'em tall on Mars. This can't be little Ramon and Elizabeth?"

"Ray, Uncle Dak," I said, and took his hand. He was fairly tall himself, for an Earthie – and I'd have to remember not to use that term too freely while I was actually here – but I had three inches on him.

"And Elizabeth, holy sh – you must have to beat 'em off with a stick. The fine young men, I mean."

Elizabeth shook hands solemnly, and Uncle Dak seemed to remember why we were here, because he dropped the glad-handing immediately.

"No news since we spoke, my friends," he said. "It's a fu – it's unbelievable over there. Worst thing I ever saw."

Uncle Dak was the same age as Dad, still skinny as a rail, with long-fingered hands, dark skin, and a forehead a lot higher than I remembered. The hair he had left he wore naturally kinky and short-cropped, against the current fashion for trendy Africans worldwide. There was a lot of gray around the temples.

Dak was introduced to the Redmond family, and we set off down the concourse, past long rows of slot machines and shops and restaurants and a chorus line of dancing Mickey Mouses. After about a mile Dak started to look concerned.

"Dude, you want me to get y'all a cart?" he asked.

"I might as well get used to it," Dad said, huffing and puffing.

"Is that a yes or a no?"

"Get used to walking, I mean. In one gee."

"Like God intended," Dak said, with a grin. "I told you you'd regret it, living the soft life on that damn place."

Dad gave him a dirty look. I knew there was some sort of history there, but I didn't know much about it. Dak and Dad had been best friends for some years when they were my age, and for a while after they got back from their first trip to Mars, but they hadn't actually gotten together since my family moved to Mars. I don't think they even talked on the phone anymore, which was why I was a little surprised to see him waiting for us.

"So how is your father?" Dad asked him.

"Retired to California, two years ago. Sold the speed shop, got good money for it. He still tinkers with the cars out there, but mostly he putters."

"Putters?"

"In the garden. Yeah, I know, the man knows bupkis about plants, he used to could kill a lawn just by walking over it, and he's not doing much better out there in the golden west, but he seems to enjoy it. Christmas, he FedExes me a box of oranges from his trees. I figure they cost him about fifty bucks each, and they ain't as good as the ones they grow here and sell for five bucks a pound. Or used to. Who knows what they're going for now?"

Everybody knew the American economy was in the toilet, and had been for over a decade. All the bills coming due, Mom said, and nothing to pay them with. According to Dak, the tsunami had hit the financial world almost as hard as it hit the beaches of America.

After we passed out of the security zone we reclaimed our luggage and stepped out into the pleasant air of Florida. I'm kidding. It was ghastly.

Even in the wintertime Florida can be blistering or, even worse, smothering. Consider that I'd spent most of the last ten years in a totally temperature-controlled environment. It hit us like a hammer. Ninety in the shade. Temperature
and
humidity. In five minutes my shirt was sopping.

There was a long line of people just outside the entrance, and I figured we'd have to join that one, too. In fact, I was headed that way already, just like a docile American, when Dak called me back.

"No need, Ramon... sorry, Ray. That's for weapons."

"Weapons?" I'm pretty good at feeding the straight line sometimes.

"Folks who feel naked without a piece. They can't bring 'em on airplanes, so they send 'em ahead."

I looked at people retrieving packages, mostly small ones but a few long and thick. Some of them unwrapped them right there on the sidewalk and stored them away in shoulder holsters or purses.

"Does everybody go armed now?" I asked him.

"Pretty much." He pulled back his light windbreaker and showed me a big ugly lump of metal stuck into his waistband. He grinned at me. "You gotta remember, Ray, you ain't on Mars anymore. You in America. Worse than that, you in
Florida
."

The road away from the airport was lined with stores that all seemed to have the same name: GUNS! Okay, there were a few liquor stores, too.

Dak had taken us to a rental agency, where we picked up a vehicle large enough for the nine of us and Dak. We loaded it with our stuff and he punched in a destination and the vehicle moved automatically onto the web of autoways that crisscrossed and ringed Orlando. The adults were in front, Dak and Mom and Dad reliving old times, the Redmonds mostly staying quiet. Elizabeth and Evangeline were talking to each other, and the brats were busy plotting the downfall of human civilization, leaving me with not much to do but look out the window.

Naturally, there are no road signs on the autoways, since no manual driving was allowed, but it seemed to me we were going in the wrong direction. I've got a pretty good navigator in my head, but it's not much use in strange terrain when you can't see the sun. So I opened a GPS window and confirmed my hunch: We were heading west on State Autoway 528, not north on Interstate 4. Looked to me like we should have been going north on 417... but what did I know?

We took an exit that had an animated arch over it, advertising the twenty or so theme parks in the Lake Buena Vista area. A few minutes later we were pulling up to a fanciful hotel that looked like a log cabin garnished with lollipops.

"Here we are, kids," Dad said. "This is where you get off."

I turned around and watched the brats tumble out along with their mother. Good riddance. I hoped the hotel would still be there when we returned. Then I turned back around and saw that Dad was looking right at me.

"No fucking way!" I shouted.

"Language, Ramon."

"My name is Ray, Dad, and there's no fucking way I'm staying behind."

"Ray, we've discussed this and –"

"Dad, I'm seventeen. Mom, you guys can't do this to me."

"What about me?" Elizabeth wanted to know. "Are you dumping me, too?"

"Ray, Elizabeth," Mom said. "This is going to be dangerous. Dangerous, and very, very ugly. We have decided it wouldn't be responsible to take you into this mess. You can stay here with Mrs. Redmond and her kids."

"
Mom
!" I was horrified to hear a note in my voice I'd tried to stop using when I was about twelve. Not satisfied with that, I went on with another childish argument. "This isn't
fair
. If you were going to strand us here, why the hell did you drag us along in the first place? Why not hire a babysitter and leave us back home?"

"Ray, you're just going to have to accept this."

"I don't think so," I said.

Dak muttered something. I saw him grinning in the rearview mirror.

"You say something, Dak?" Dad asked, dangerously.

"I said, 'Told ya.' And I did."

"You stay out of this. You don't have any kids."

"You're right," Dak said, not seeming to take offense. "But if I did, I'd hope they had the sort of balls Ray has."

"Dad," I said, with no idea where I was going. Then I had it. "If you leave me here, you'd better tie me up. Because I'll follow you."

"Oh? How?"

"I'll... I'll get a taxi!"

"And how will you pay for it?"

"I've got money." Not a lot. There was a trust fund for me that I would get when I turned eighteen, but my allowance was fairly generous, and I'd saved up a bit. Frankly, there's not a lot of things I wanted to buy on Mars, after Dad bought my airboard.

"How much cash?"

That's when it sank in. Cash?
Cash
? What would I need with cash? It's practically obsolete back home. You pay for things with credit and a retina print. I had a stack of Martian redbacks back home in my closet. Why bring them?

Because if you're under eighteen a parent can shut down your savings account and/or line of credit in two seconds and not even have to get out of his chair. Isn't modern banking wonderful?

We glared each other down for a while. I knew the money business was a fight I couldn't win, and he knew it, too.

I'll give him one thing. He didn't look happy about it.

"I'll hitchhike," I said.

"No, you won't," Dak said. "Manny, this is –"