blood.
They’d been gone from the plane, or at least out of their seats, before the orbital kinetics had struck the aircraft. In flight.
And the missing door? Had the pilot and guards just stepped out in mid-air? Ask imagined the prisoner, straining to follow whatever trumpet had called his captors away. Then shrieking in fear as the cockpit exploded in sizzling splinters, the engines shredded and died under the orbital strikes, and the plane had glided in to its final landing.
He hoped the poor bastard had died in the landing, but suspected he might have starved chained to the seat.
This also meant that people who had been unable to move from a position would not have been taken up by whatever had snatched everyone from Redghost’s surface. Prisoners? The few jails he’d visited had stood empty and open-doored. The guards had taken their captives with them. Hospital ICUs? That explained the several medical beds he’d found dragged into gardens and on outdoor walkways.
Still, he knew where to look.
Ask went back for his bolt cutters and freed the dead prisoner. He didn’t have a shovel and the ground was too cold to dig in anyway, but he spent two days making a rock cairn next to the airplane.
“The second-to-last man on Redghost,” he said by way of prayer when he was done. His fingers were bruised and bloody, several of his nails torn. “You and I are brothers, though you never knew it. I wonder if you had it better or worse than those who were taken away.”
On the sixth year of his hegira, Aeschylus Sforza entered the city of Pelleton. He had not found a living animal indoors in five years. He had not found a living animal penned outdoors in over four. He had not seen evidence of a human survivor other than himself on the planet at any time. He had found six bodies in various improbable circumstances. The hardest had been a little girl locked in a closet with a piss pot and a water bottle. She’d obviously been there a long time before Day Zero. And a long time after.
Ask devoutly hoped whoever had done that to a child had been taken directly to the lowest circle of whatever hell had opened up and swallowed the human race.
In any case, he’d buried them all. And he obsessively checked closets after that child. It took more time, but what was time to a Howard walking home all by himself?
Pelleton was located on an eastern curve of the Eniewetok Sea. It was the first city he visited with buildings over four stories tall. Some optimist had built a pair of fifteen-story office towers along the waterfront. By then, Ask had seen enough of the planet’s architecture and development to understand most people wanted it small and simple.
Not so unlike the Tasmania of his youth. People who had wanted the big city moved to Melbourne or Brisbane or Sydney. People who wanted the big city here on Redghost had moved to Atarashii Osaka or taken up a line of work with off-planet demand.
He’d taken up the habit of visiting airports first, when it was at least sort of convenient to do so. Not just for the sake of any other trapped prisoners, though he’d never found another one of those. But rather, in hopes of finding something useful. Anything, really.
The gasbags of the heavy-lift freighters were all long since draped in tatters from their listing semi-rigid frames, but he kept wondering if he’d find a fixed-wing aircraft or a gravimetric flyer that hadn’t been gutted by orbital kinetics. Not that Ask expected to build an engine or power pack with his bare hands, but it would have been a start.
Most of the cockpits were smashed or shattered. Too many electronics in there. Likewise, power systems. And in most cases, the airframes as well. He’d amused himself for a while calculating the total number of separate surface targets that had been subjected to bombardment by orbital kinetics in a single twenty-five point six-hour period—the local planetary day—and how many launchers that implied. How much processing power in guidance systems that implied.
Ask had concluded that no power in human space had the resources to commit such a saturated attack. Not so quickly and thoroughly.
That of course raised several more difficult questions. The one that concerned him most was whether this had happened to every human-settled planet in the Polity, or just to Redghost. He almost certainly would not have known if a spaceship or starship had called here since Day Zero. Short of catching a glimpse of it transiting in orbit, how would he find out? Not a single comm set on the planet still worked so far as he was aware.
Was he not just the last human being on this planet, but the last human being in the universe? Ask couldn’t figure out if that thought was paranoia, megalomania or simple common sense. Or worse, all three.
By now most of the airframes had acquired layers of moss, grass and in some cases, even vines. Another decade and there would be trees poking through the holes in the wings. He clambered around Pelleton’s airport all day without finding anything novel, then sheltered inside the little terminal as the dark of the evening encroached.
The dog packs were getting worse all over. Sleeping outside at night was no longer safe as it had been in the early times after Day Zero. The question of weapons had re-entered his mind. Especially projectile weapons.
On the twentieth year of his hegira, Aeschylus Sforza began to compose epic poetry. His Howard-enhanced memory being by definition perfected, he had no trouble recalling his verse, but still he took the trouble to refine the rhymes and meter so that should someone else ever have call to memorize the tale of his walk home around Redghost, they could do so.
Over the years he had found and buried twenty-three people. None of them appeared to have long survived Day Zero, as whatever confinement had prevented their ascendance had also prevented their continued life and health unattended by outside aid.
The towns and cities were changing, too. Rivers in flood-damaged bridges and washed-out waterfronts. Storms blew down trees, tore off roofs and shattered those windows that had survived the orbital strikes. Plants, both native and Terranic, took over first park strips, lawns and open spaces; then began to colonize sidewalks, rooftops, steps, basement lightwells.
The edges that civilization draws on nature were disappearing into a collage of rubble, splinters and green leaves.
He’d spent the years hunting clues. He’d dug the payloads of the orbital kinetics out of enough wrecks and buildings to realize that he wouldn’t know much about them without a lot of lab work. In a lab he didn’t and could not have access to, of course, in the absence of electrical power. They appeared deformed, heat-stressed metalloceramic slugs about two centimeters in diameter that had probably been roughly spherical on launch. That left the question of guidance wide open.
Likewise the various bodies he’d found. None of them told Ask any more than the dead prisoner had. Every human being who was physically able to do so had walked outside the afternoon or evening of April 27th, 2977 and vanished. Presumably along with their clothes and whatever they had in their hands at the time. He’d found plenty of desiccated sandwiches on plates and jackets hung on chair backs indoors, but nothing equivalent on the sidewalks and in the backyards of Redghost.
The light show in the sky had subsided years earlier, though the occasional re-entry flare still caught his eye at night. He periodically found batteries and even small pieces of equipment that had survived both the orbital kinetics and the electronic pulse attack by dint of shielding either deliberate or accidental. So far he’d declined to carry those things with him, for fear that whatever it was might still be monitoring from orbit.
And that was it.
So one day he began to compose epic poetry. It was a thing to do while he passed the time hacking through vines and checking closets.
