Providence

by Max Barry

  A notification. Messages. People. Oh, thank you. She activated it and found two clips awaiting her attention: one from Anders and one from Gilly.

  She was so awash with relief that it took her a moment to remember that Gilly was supposed to be dead. He had died on the ship. Then Anders was filling her view, standing on a landscape of blasted rock.

  “Beanfield,” he said. “I’ve got a ping on Gilly. He’s alive.” He pointed at something in the distance, a smudge like a low hill. “There’s an entrance to a burrow. I’m going to try to get him out.”

  She blinked. First, that didn’t sound like a good idea. Anders hated confined spaces. She wondered if it was too late to do something. Get Jackson on the line, tell her: Do not let Anders enter a burrow. Second, could she get some elaboration on the part about Gilly? Because as far as she knew—

  “Jackson’s dead.”

  Her heart jumped. Anders kept talking. Something about a salamander, a chase, the gun. She couldn’t get past the first two words. How could Jackson be dead? She was bigger than that.

  “I have to take the matter converter. I’m sorry. It’s our only chance. Stay put. If Gilly and I make it out, we’ll find you. If we don’t . . . well, I’m sorry I was such a shit to you, Beanfield. I always liked you.”

  The recording ended.

  She felt like: Excuse me? That couldn’t be it. You couldn’t abandon someone on an alien planet and leave them a message like that.

  She swept her ping again. Nothing.

  It occurred to her to check the timestamp, to establish when Anders had sent this message. When the number came up, it was six hours ago.

  Time distortion. Her suit was confused. The days were longer. It was the time zone. Did they do daylight savings here?

  If Anders had sent that message six hours ago, he wasn’t coming back.

  A trembling began in her legs. She flipped to Gilly’s message. It was enormous, with multiple parts and what seemed to be days of video. She couldn’t make sense of it. She skipped ahead, but that was even worse, so she rewound to the beginning.

  “Hi, Beanfield.” Gilly. Definitely alive. Somewhere dark. Not on the ship. Behind him was shadowy orange rock. “I’ve been trying to ping you, but we’re too far apart for a synchronous connection.” He glanced at something in the background. A slumped form. She already knew what he was going to say and turned away but of course the projection followed. “Anders found me. But he didn’t make it.”

  The timestamp. She backgrounded the vision so she could expand the message details. Five hours ago.

  “I’ve been documenting what I’ve seen. It’s useful intel, if you can get it home. I guess that’s impossible. But I figure you’ve got a better shot than me. I don’t have enough time on my core to get out of here, Beanfield. But Anders and I might have figured out how salamanders breed, and I’m going to see if I can stop them.”

  She shut off the recording. She wrapped her arms around her head and keened.

  Everyone is dead but you.

  Go.

  In the ravine, something scraped against rock. She raised her head. She rose and hobbled ahead to the next turn of rock. At first there was nothing. Then a salamander appeared, picking its way through the fissure toward her.

  She began to retreat. A soldier, she thought, an enormous black salamander as big as a bear, and she moved as quickly as she could but her legs were shaking and if she put her foot in the wrong place, she would slip and fall and that would be the end of her. She could hear it behind her, its hard skin on rock, and she forced her eyes to stay focused on what lay ahead. Only when she reached a turn did she glance back, and it was there, thirty feet behind.

  She shrieked and stumbled forward and heard the salamander start after her. It was going to catch her and she scrambled up the ravine wall, which was possibly idiotic, because it could almost certainly scale the rock faster than she could. The salamander galloped toward her and its jaws opened and she pulled herself upward onto the lip of the ravine and rolled away.

  This was not a good feed. This was not amusing, relatable vulnerability. This was horrible. It was Feed Talia being torn to pieces by an alien. She found her feet and began to stumble across the rock on her bad ankle. She should have stayed where she was. She shouldn’t be here at all. When she looked back, the salamander was clawing its way out of the fissure, its black wings spreading, beating for lift, and then they folded down and it began to gallop after her. Its jaws cracked open and it issued a sound: “Pak! Pak! Pak!” The sound cut through her. There was a pressure, a feeling like the clouds were coming down on her like a vise. More salamanders began to emerge from the fissure, one by one, as if there were a procession of them down there and she’d encountered the band leader. They echoed its cry, “Pak! Pak!” which, she now knew, meant, Quick, come eat this human! She stopped running and they swept toward her.

  I’m sorry. I don’t think I can continue with this roleplay.

  I think that’s scene.

  The first salamander was twenty feet away when its front half disappeared. She was looking at its insides, at thick twitching meat. Its legs jerked and it fell over. She didn’t know what had happened. She wasn’t sure where the rest of it had gone. There were sharp kicks in the soles of her feet and she didn’t know what they were, either, but the salamanders jerked and split and became dark stains on the rock. In moments, they were dead.

  She looked around. From farther away, more salamanders began to emerge from the fissure.

  The pressure in her head was unbearable. She felt as if the air had compressed, as if the sky was falling in a solid slab.

  There was a noise like the wail of dying angels. Above, the roiling cloud split open. From it, the ship emerged.

  Its hull was almost entirely the burnished yellow of new skin. Wind tore at her. The ships’ mass projectors were rotated onto its belly, flashing. They pounded the rock and obliterated salamanders. After a minute, it fell silent. There was only her and the ship. The wail sounded again.

  A white disc glowed hotly at the center of the ship’s belly. She’d never seen that particular weapon powered. It was the plasma cannon, the one they called the planet-killer.

  Oh, she thought. Of course.

  The ship hadn’t come for her. It had come for the salamanders.

  She’d known her relationship with the ship was largely invented. She had just forgotten that for a minute. The wail came a third time. It was the warning siren that meant imminent discharge. The white disc was enormous, like the blind eye of a god. Gilly had been right all along: She was insignificant in the scheme of this war, which would be won by forces larger than any of them, and go on even then, in new and unpredictable forms. She was a bystander. She stood on the rock against the buffeting wind and waited for the ship to destroy everything.

  A few hundred feet away, rock burst open. A black torrent of salamanders sprayed forth. A second place exploded, then a third, until the air was thick with them. The rock beneath her feet jolted and she stumbled. Everywhere the ground opened up and black salamanders flew out. In the distance, she saw a swarm like a black cloud swinging toward it from a mountain. As she clung to the rock, they came as if there was no end to their numbers, as if the planet were made of them. One thumped against her, its wings warm and heavy, and did not stop but flew on toward the ship. Even the salamanders realized she was meaningless. The ship’s mass projectors began to cycle again. Salamander bodies plunged around her. But there were so many. As they rose, they filled the air with sound: Huk. Huk.

  Through a torrent of salamander bodies she saw the ship’s foredecks split through by a thousand little gluon-quark balls until the structure could no longer support its own weight and broke off toward the rock. Everywhere the ship was punctured and breaking. “Shoot!” she screamed. The planet-killer was primed. It could end this. It would kill her and maybe itself but it
would take the salamanders with it.

  Although now that she thought about it: Why was it so close? It didn’t need to breach atmosphere to use the weapon. It was better not to. It should have stayed clear to avoid the incredible amount of flying debris that would exist after it put a lightning bolt through a quintillion tons of planet. She knew she wasn’t supposed to try to read the mind of an AI, but this was insanity.

  A dark shape fell toward her, a maimed salamander, perhaps. There was an engine roar and a flaring of hot thrusters. The bull-nosed shape of a jetpod set down. Salamanders flew by, ignoring it. She stared dumbly and then scrambled toward it. When she slapped the tactile panel, the door opened. “Gilly?” she said, but there was no answer, and no occupants. Before she could process this, the door closed behind her. The engines kicked. She felt herself begin to lift off. The viewports were thick with dark salamander bodies. The acceleration drove her toward the floor but she was able to crawl to a harness and work the straps. Salamander bodies thumped against the hull. As she rose higher, they began to thin, and she could see more of the ship and the terrible damage it was sustaining. Its engines began to crumble. “No,” she said, because it was dying. It wouldn’t survive long enough for her to reach it. Then she realized the jetpod was arcing away. It wasn’t taking her to the ship.

  The accelerative force increased. There were charts and numbers on the viewports but they were shaking too much to read. She saw the ship falling to pieces and then the viewports fogged and were enveloped by cloud.

  She fought the darkness creeping in from the edges of her vision. When the shaking stopped and the viewports filled with inky starfield, she saw the path the ship had plotted for her: a hard burn and a skip to take her all the way out of VZ and then to home.

  “Wait,” she said. She twisted until she could see what she was leaving behind. The ship was invisible, submerged in a balled mass of cloud. The numbers on the viewports blanked. A word appeared:

  GOODBYE

  The planet heaved and went white. The jetpod began to skip ahead even faster. A minute later, a wave of turbulence passed through so violently that she thought it would pull the teeth from her head. She fought to stay awake but this time could not.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually she raised her head. It had been three hours, according to the viewport numbers. She had traveled forty thousand miles. A little under fifty trillion to go. The jetpod continued to accelerate, making movement difficult, but she managed to free herself from the harness and grab a support bar. She was approximately ten months from home. There was no food, no water, no anything. The only way to survive this trip was to crawl into a medbag and let it put her into a coma.

  She wasn’t ready for that. She brought up her comms and rewatched the message from Anders. Then she played the one from Gilly, the one she hadn’t gotten to the end of, not even to the parts he’d apparently recorded as an exposé of his captivity in a salamander hive.

  “One more thing,” Gilly said. “This isn’t on any of the recordings, because it’s not about the mission, but I wanted to say, I don’t think I ever told you I think you’re good at your job. It took me a while to figure out what you really did. I didn’t appreciate that for a long time.”

  Her teeth chattered. The jetpod was cold. She couldn’t postpone the next part much longer.

  “Anyway,” he said. “I should go. I hope you get this.”

  She dragged herself to a locker. She pulled free a medbag and forced herself into it. She peeled the film from her face. She had to zip the bag all the way up, which was not the greatest sensation, being basically suffocated by a bag, but as it pressed around her body it gave a kind of comfort. She could feel them with her, Gilly and Anders and Jackson and the ship. She closed her eyes and let the engines carry her home.

  THE RETURN

  When the escort fighters break out of the cloud, people clap and cheer. They’re tightly packed all around you, crackling with excitement, these people who were drawn together like they’ve congregated all over the world, in New York and London, São Paulo and Bombay, every town large enough to erect big screens in an open space. Like you, they’ve come to watch with as many fellow human beings as possible, because that’s what you’re celebrating today, the thing that unites you. For the last few hours the screens have been playing backstories, feed clips, and mission highlights. But now it’s happening. She’s here.

  The fighters bank and turn in opposite directions. From the cloud behind, the jetpod emerges. People start yelling. You’re struck by how small it is: a toilet paper tube with a rounded nose. It moves slowly, with no visible engine exhaust, and a moment later you see why, as a big helicraft comes out of the cloud, four rotors blasting. It’s lowering the jetpod to the ground. Because, of course, that little ship isn’t well designed to land by itself; that’s not its main job. Its job is to bring her home.

  A man to your left throws out an arm. Suddenly you’re hugging. Together you watch the jetpod descend until the helicraft’s rotors are blasting dust across the Vandenberg tarmac. Cables detach, fall to the ground. The helicraft peels away.

  Now there’s a minute where the jetpod is just lying there. The crowd quietens.

  The thought crosses your mind: Something’s gone wrong. After all this, there’s been a fatal mistake. But that can’t be right. You know this moment must have been engineered down to the smallest detail—that Talia Beanfield returned eight days ago, and since then has been in low orbit, being cared for, debriefed, and, you assume, told how to act once she makes it down. You know she was packed back into the jetpod for show, even though a shuttle would have made more sense. You know that a lot of what you’re told isn’t the plain truth—and not lies, either, but rather satisfying stories wrapped around cold facts. Everyone understands that you only get to see the best side of these things: that Providence crews aren’t really that noble; the ships not as infallible; Service and its corporate partners not as uncompromised.

  But so what? People don’t care about the cold facts. If the salamanders weren’t really driven by a hatred of humanity; if Jackson, Anders, Gilly, and Beanfield didn’t have quite as much agency in the destruction of the hive planet as has been suggested—hell, if the whole thing really was providence, and once the ships were built, nothing any mere human did at any stage made the slightest difference to the ultimate outcome at all—that doesn’t matter. You don’t want a universe of absent gods. You want meaning and purpose. What happened to those people matters because that’s the part of the story you care about. And so when Talia Beanfield comes home, it’s because she deserved to.

  There’s a puff of white smoke on the jetpod. A hatch shifts, opens. The screens zoom in.

  She pulls herself out. You’ve seen her image more times than you can count but in this moment she’s unearthly. Her eyes are calm and clear and take in the wide ring of people and equipment around her. Then she looks straight into the camera. It could be planned, but it doesn’t matter: It feels as if she’s looking right back at you. You know her. The journey she’s been on, it’s been your journey, too. In that way, you make each other matter.

  The man beside you jumps up and down. He’s screaming something. The crowd noise is incredible but you can make out his words. It’s over, he’s saying. We won.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A long time ago, in high school, I wrote a story about two people on a spaceship who encountered this other ship, which was all abandoned and spooky, and one of the people went in to see what was going on, and when he came back, he was infected with something. It was a short story, only a few pages, and most of it was concerned with a stand-off in a corridor between these two people, only one of whom was still human.

  I shared this story with my best friend, Freddy, who had a major problem with it. “They don’t fire the guns,” he said. “At the start of the story you say their ship has these huge guns, but they
never use them.”

  This was true. I did describe huge guns. I was thinking it was clever, because in the end, weapons couldn’t save them. It was ironic. Freddy disagreed. “You can’t have a spaceship with huge guns,” he said, “and not fire them.”

  This was my introduction to a storytelling principle known as Chekhov’s Gun, which was a good thing to learn. But it was also an early experience with a reader who disliked a story not because it was implausible, or badly written, or made no sense—the usual reasons—but because it didn’t go right. Freddy was totally on board for a story of infected astronauts. He just felt short-changed about the guns.

  I’m endlessly grateful to the people who let me into their minds a little bit and help me figure out what happens when I put different words there. They have been doing it forever, and without them, I would still be writing stories with huge guns that no one fires. I have a lot to learn, but at least I’m not doing that.

  For reading early, incoherent Providence drafts, thank you to the usual suspects, especially Kassy Humphreys and Charles Thiesen. For pouncing on later ones and championing them with passion and insight, all my thank-yous to Luke Janklow and Claire Dippel.

  For believing in me and this story, and giving me the most wonderfully useful analysis of it, thank you to my editors, Mark Tavani at Putnam and Ruth Tross at Mulholland. Thank you also to Ivan Held, who, before he became my publisher, was on the very first cover of my very first novel, which just goes to show that some people never get punished for anything.

  Thank you, you who picked up this book and read it all the way through. There are so many distractions now, so many forms of entertainment that are quicker and easier and only a tap and a swipe away. But nothing beats a good novel, if you can find one. I hope you did.