I am a satellite; they, too, only stay up by forever
falling forward.
The suit is dead around me, burned and scarred
and blackened and lifeless.I don't know how I
could have dreamed it was alive.The very thought
makes me shiver, inside here.
A guard droned knife missile saw the figure
skylining about five kilometres away, on a low
ridge.The little missile sized the object up
carefully, not moving from its crevice in the
rocks.It triangulated from the eyes on its outboard
monofilament warps, then rose slowly from its
hiding place until it was in line of sight with a
scout missile lodged on a cliff ten kilometres
behind it.It flashed a brief signal, and received a
relayed reply from its distant drone.
The drone was there in a few minutes, taking a
wide curve round the suspicious figure.It shook
other missiles free as it went, deploying them in a
ring around the potential target.
What to do?The drone had to make up its own
mind.The base wasn't transmitting while whatever
had hit the last incoming module was still hanging
around.It had been a long wait, but they'd survived
so far, and the big guns should be arriving soon.
The drone watched the figure as it skidded and slid
down the scree beneath the ridge, leaving a hazy
trail of dust behind it.It got to the bottom, then
started walking across the wide gravel basin,
seemingly oblivious to all the attention it was
attracting.
The drone sent a knife missile closer to the
object.The missile floated up from behind,
monitoring weak electromagnetic emissions, tried
to communicate but received no reply, then darted
round in front of the figure, and lasered its drone
the view it had of the scarred suit front.
The figure stopped, stood still.It raised one hand,
as though waving at the small missile hovering a
few metres in front of it.The drone came closer,
high above, scanning.Finally, satisfied, it swooped
from the sky and stopped a metre in front of the
figure, which pointed at the black mess of the
communication unit on its chest.Then it gestured to
the side of its helmet and tapped at the visor.The
drone dipped once in a nod, then floated forward
and pressed gently up against the visor of the
helmet, vibrating the speech through
'We know who you are.What happened?'
'He was alive when we got down, but I had no
medics left.Ablation caused a slow oxygen leak
and eventually the recycler packed up.There was
nothing I could do.'
'You walked all this way?'
'From near the equator.'
'When did he die?'
'Thirty-four days ago.'
'Why didn't you ditch the body?You'd have been
quicker.'
The suit made a shrugging movement. 'Call it
sentiment.'
'Climb aboard.I'll take you to an entrance.'
'Thank you.'
The drone lowered to waist height.The suit pulled
itself up onto the top of the drone and sat there.
The body, bouncing slackly inside the suit, was
still quite well preserved, though dehydration had
stretched the skin and made it darker.The teeth
were displayed grinning knowingly at the barren
world, and the skull was arched back on the locked
upper vertebrae, upright and triumphant.
'You all right up there?' The drone shouted through
the fabric of the suit.The suit nodded stiffly to the
eye of an accompanying knife missile.
'Yes.Everything's a little difficult though.' It
pointed at the scarred, burned surface of its body.
'I hurt.'
Cleaning Up
The first Gift fell onto a pig farm in New
England.It popped into existence five metres above
a ramshackle outhouse, dropped through the roof,
bounced off a cistern and demolished a wheel-less
tractor driving a band saw.
Bruce Losey came running out of the house
clutching his sporting carbine and ready to blast
any interloper to Kingdom Come.All he found was
what looked like a gigantic bundle of Peacock
feathers on top of his tractor, which was lying on
its side leaking fuel and looking like it would
never work again.Bruce looked up through the hole
in the roof and spat into a pile of cut logs,
'Goddamned S.S.T.s.'
He tried to shift the object that had bust up his
tractor, smashed his roof and dented his cistern,
but leapt away when it burned his hands.He went
back to the house watching the sky warily, and
called the police.
Cesare Borges, head of the mighty Industrial
Military Combines Corporation, sat in his office
reading a fascinating article called Prayer:A
Guide to Investment? The office intercom buzzed.
'What?'
'Professor Feldman to see you, sir.'
'Who?'
'A Professor Feldman, sir.'
'Oh yeah?'
'Yes, sir.He says he has the results of the
preliminary development work on', there was some
talking Cesare didn't catch, ' on the Alternative
Resources Project.'
'The what?'
'The Alternative Resources Project, sir.It was set