“Let’s go,” Vicky said, “before those cowboys all run away from the aliens.”
“Who the hell are you guys?” the old cowboy demanded.
A bushy, gray-streaked beard framed a rounded chin and chubby cheeks and from the Stetson on his head to his boots. The only thing that didn’t fit in with the frontier image was the pulse pistol held loosely in his right hand, down by his side. It was a military-issue weapon, which had me curious. Guns were tightly controlled on Earth, though I wouldn’t have been surprised to see them out here on the private reserve of the people who made the rules and didn’t have to live by them. But not a pulse pistol.
The two younger men on either side of him weren’t visibly armed but they were visibly terrified, and I was sure both of them would turn and run if I yelled boo at them. Me, I was armed, and even though I’d left my service pistol in its holster, I was fairly certain I could clear it and put a round through the older guy’s head before he brought up that pulse weapon. That would have been a suboptimal outcome, however.
“I’m Captain Cam Alvarez of the Fleet Marine Corps,” I told him again, hoping the words would penetrate his stunned surprise this time. “This is Captain Vicky Sandoval, my wife and second-in-command.” Vicky nodded to the cowboy, hands resting on the pulse carbine slung over her shoulder. “Captain Rafael Nance, Space Fleet, and Captain Emily Nagarro of Fleet Intelligence.”
“I’m Jose Contreras,” the cowboy told us, boots shifting in the eight centimeters of snow that covered the field. “People call me Joe. I run this place for the Damiani family. You say you’re with the military,” he went on, gesturing at the Ellen behind us with his pistol carelessly enough that Vicky’s right hand wrapped around the grip of her carbine. “But what the hell is that thing?”
“Joe,” I said, trying to phrase my reply to keep this all plausible for him, “we’ve been gone quite a while on an extended assignment well outside the Commonwealth. Part of our mission involved salvaging Predecessor technology.” I nodded back at the ship. “That’s where this came from. But like I said, we’ve been away a long time. We got back and found…” shrugging helplessly, I motioned around us, “… all this. The cities are abandoned, everything’s destroyed. Your fusion generator was the first sign of habitation we found. We were hoping you could tell us what happened.”
Joe stared past me, still regarding the ship with a mixture of awe and distrust. It loomed over us, twice as big as the ranch house yet barely putting an indent in the snow, most of its weight being supported by the gravitic field.
“You… found that thing?”
A stiff breeze knifed through me, and it took every bit of self-control I had not to stuff my hands into my jacket pockets. Nance didn’t even bother, huddled under his field jacket like it was a tent, the holstered pistol on his belt forgotten and abandoned to comfort. Nagarro at least tried to look prepared, though she openly shivered. Joe and his cowboys had the good sense to be wearing gloves of course, as well as hats. My ears at least had the manners to go completely numb so I wouldn’t have to feel how cold they were.
“Hey, you know, I figure you’ve all been living out here your whole lives so this weather is nothing to you, but we’re all cold as shit. Any chance we could take this inside?” I jerked a thumb back at the Ellen Campbell. “I could show you around the ship, if you’d like, get out of the wind.”
Joe shook his head.
“Naw, I don’t think I’m ready to get inside that right yet. But we have coffee on inside the house. You can come on in and I’ll tell you what I know.” He grinned. “We got central heating and everything.” He eyed Vicky dubiously. “I’d appreciate if you’d leave the artillery outside though.”
Vicky frowned, but I made a quelling gesture.
“No problem. Captain Sandoval, you can leave the carbine in the ship.” I offered Joe a tight smile. “After all, if anyone here means us harm, this ship has gravitic weapons that can blow apart an asteroid. Compared to that, what’s a pulse carbine?”
Joe blanched but didn’t rescind his invitation. Vicky handed her long gun off to a Marine inside the airlock at the nose of the ship and followed us inside, though I noticed she kept her hand inside her jacket where she’d concealed her shoulder-holstered duty pistol. She watched the far-off faces watching us as Joe led us to the main house, workers eyeing us from the bunkhouse. No, not just workers… children too, half hiding behind their curious parents, their eyes white and wide.
“How many people live out here?” I asked Joe, trying to estimate in my head given the size of the buildings.
“Before everything that happened, we only had about a dozen,” he told me, pushing the front door open and holding it for us. Warmth shimmered through the door like a heat mirage in the desert, and I sighed in relief as I crossed the threshold. “The families of the ranch hands used to live in housing a few klicks down the road. But since… well, we have to share the same food, and the power plant here is a lot more reliable than the solar collectors they use in the older houses. So now we must have about thirty, I think.”
“You can’t grow your own food here, can you?” Vicky asked, glancing over her shoulder at the snow before she wiped her boots on the mat and stepped inside. “Not just the weather, but that soil didn’t look like much for crops.”
“You a farmer besides being a soldier, Miss Vicky?” Joe asked her, an amused chuckle rumbling in his deep chest as he pulled off his gloves and sheepskin jacket. Just the jacket would have been worth more than the average Surface Dweller in Trans-Angeles made in a month, and that was if it was made from cloned skin. A jacket made from an actual sheep would be worth more than any of them made in a year, though I thought this guy might have gotten it the old-fashioned way, given the flock of sheep we’d spotted in an adjoining field, fenced in and grazing.
“I was, for a while,” Vicky sneered. “And I’m a Marine, not a soldier, Mr. Contreras. Before that, my husband and I used our separation bonus after the war to start a small farm and ranch on Hausos. And before that, we fought from one end of the damned war to the other.”
“Well, thank you for your service,” Joe said, offering an off-handed salute. “Though at this point, I don’t suppose it would matter if the Tahni had been running things instead of us.”
“Yeah it would, Dad,” one of the hands who’d come along with him to meet us objected, and I finally noted the family resemblance between them. Both the younger men were his sons. “The Transformation Virus didn’t affect the Tahni. If their military hadn’t been destroyed, they would have walked right in and wiped out everyone who was left.”
Joe grunted but waved the boy off.
“Go grab us some coffee, George. Bring it in here.”
Here was a living room bigger than the entire enlisted barracks for our company back on Inferno, reaching up the entire height of the two-story structure, framed by polished wood beams and decorated with the mounted heads of bison, elk, pronghorn, and black bear. I wondered how old those were, and if even the Corporate Council Executive Board would be bold enough to hunt the local wildlife, given the strict conservation laws on Earth.
“They’re all new,” Joe told me as if he’d read my mind, though he’d most likely just followed my gaze. “Ain’t no hunting laws when there ain’t no government. And as your wife pointed out, we need food. And yes, we do grow some of it here. Seed genetically engineered for this soil, but the rest… well, sit down and I’ll tell you all about that.”
Two couches faced each other, a polished oak coffee table between them, both of the sofas upholstered in what had to be real leather. Joe sat down on one of them and waved us into the other, which might have been crowded if the damned things weren’t as long as a queen-sized bed. The kid who I assumed was Joe’s younger son, maybe sixteen years old, sat at the other end of Joe’s couch and watched us carefully, though what he intended to do if we tried something wasn’t clear.
Joe said nothing, waiting for the older boy to bring out a tray with seven coffee mugs—real ceramic, of course, given whose ranch this was—and hand them around. No one had asked how we wanted it, so I assumed it was black and wasn’t disappointed when I was right. It was also strong as hell, and only a lifetime of perfecting a poker face kept me from grimacing in distaste. Vicky took a sip with a neutral expression and Nagarro actually seemed to enjoy it, but Captain Nance spluttered his first gulp of the stuff, looking as if he would have done a spit take if it weren’t for the bear-skin rug on the floor—which was, undoubtedly, real.
“Sorry,” Joe said, the upturned corner of his mouth demonstrating he wasn’t the least bit apologetic. “Cowboy coffee can take some getting used to.”
“Joe,” I said, cutting through the niceties, “what happened? I got a ship full of people who’ve been waiting to see their families and loved ones for years and they’re all pretty keyed up, as you can imagine.”
Joe’s mischievous smile faded away, replaced by something bleak and forlorn.
“You have t’understand,” he began, “we’re a little isolated here. Even though we can get onto the net here, most of the time we’re too busy to spend much time on it. Even the kids. So we didn’t get the beginning of this. All I know is that it started in orbit…”
“It started in another system,” George interrupted. At his father’s peevish glare, he shook his head. “I looked up everything I could once it all started. They said that the outbreak started somewhere in the Periphery systems or the Pirate Worlds even… somewhere far away. And from there, it came through Belial.”
I nodded, knowing what Belial was even if I’d never been there. A private pleasure station in the Alpha Centauri asteroid belt, it was a gray area legally, without the stricter customs regulations of a place like McAuliffe.
“But then,” George went on, “whoever started it arrived at McAuliffe, and you know how the traffic from Earth to McAuliffe is.” The boy’s cheek twitched. “Was. It hit the megacities from there and spread like wildfire.”
“There’s some… strange videos that came outta McAuliffe there at the beginning,” Joe allowed. “I think I got one of them saved on the house’s local server.”
The cowboy pulled out his ‘link and scrolled through the menu for a couple minutes before a hologram sprung up from the center of the coffee table.
The video was two-dimensional and poor quality, not because Belial had poor quality security systems—I knew they didn’t—but more because something unknown was interfering with the electronics. Static blossomed in the feed every few seconds, making it hard to discern depth or details. It was a fairly open space, one of the many zocalos on the station from the look of the sales kiosks. People were running, and from their motion I thought it was likely in one of the outer layers, somewhere the angular momentum from the cylindrical station’s spin was close to Earth-normal gravity.
