by Gary Gibson
The old man blinked moisture out of his eyes, then shook his head, water dripping from his nose and chin. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘How much of what you told me is true? About this suicide mission to space?’
Amit cleared his throat. ‘It’s all true.’
‘Is it?’ Sam struggled to keep himself from shouting in the old man’s face. ‘Then how come you lied to me about everything else? Kim, Ethan, Irish…even the other Amit would all still be alive right now if you’d lifted one finger to help them instead of just spying on us all from up here.’ Sam leaned in close to him, almost shaking with fury. ‘Now tell me why I should believe one single word you’ve told me.’
Amit stared back at him with a baleful expression. ‘You can’t keep me tied up here forever. You could kill me, but you’d just wind up figuring out all the same things I did.’
‘I just want to know why you left the rest of them to die.’
Amit laughed nervously. ‘Can’t you figure it out yourself? Out of all of them, you’re the only one I couldn’t afford to lose.’
Crazy, thought Sam. Maybe the old man’s orbiter would never fly: maybe it was only a shell, a lunatic’s folly built from scrap. ‘They didn’t deserve to die like that. What’s so special about me?’
The old man let out a shaky breath. ‘Fine. You want the whole truth? Say I’d walked up to your lander and told you all about the mesa. I’d have been putting everything I’ve worked towards for all these years into the hands of your Vic Traynor. The best I was able to do under the circumstances was keep an eye on you. Anything else would have been suicide.’
‘You didn’t just stumble across me, did you? You followed me out to that lander of yours.’
‘I needed to keep you safe. It was the riskiest part of the whole plan. If I hadn’t, all those years building that orbiter, reconstructing the original mission parameters…all of it would have been wasted.’
‘Because you needed me to reprogram the mothership since, apparently, I’m the only one whose authority it’ll accept.’
Amit nodded wearily.
‘You could have taken some of us aside,’ Sam insisted. ‘Me, Ethan, Joshua, maybe some of the others. I’d have believed you about Traynor right from the start.’
‘It was too much of a risk!’ Amit yelled, his wrists straining at the cord binding them. ‘Besides, none of them would have lasted more than a couple of days before the indigenes killed—’
He stopped mid-sentence, his chest rising and falling. ‘I know how callous that sounds,’ he rasped. ‘It’s not the way I meant it.’
‘Really?’ Sam sneered. ‘Because it sounds to me like you let them die because it was easier that way.’
Amit’s expression grew hard. ‘You don’t understand, do you? Death means nothing to us. We’ve all been reborn, again and again and again. What does it matter if it happens even one more time?’
‘I’m pretty sure that when I’m dead, I’m dead,’ said Sam. ‘Some other guy might share my memories and my face, but he’s still not me.’
Amit made a groaning noise, twisting his head from side to side. ‘Oh, for…you’re functionally immortal, Sam! We all are. Our minds can be copied again and again.’
‘So by your logic,’ said Sam, ‘if I killed you right now you’d be okay with it?’
Amit stared at him. ‘You wouldn’t do that.’
‘What I think,’ said Sam, ‘is that you’ve spent the last several decades convincing yourself that standing back and letting people die for the sake of expediency is somehow morally justifiable.’
He turned, then, and walked to the door, unable to stomach any more.
‘Wait!’ Amit shouted after him as he pulled the door open. ‘You have to pilot the orbiter, Sam. If there was a way to bring you back, I swear I would, only—’
Sam let the door slam shut behind him and breathed in the chill night air. He could still hear Amit pleading his case, his words muffled by the door. He walked away, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the old man until his shouts merged with the sounds of the forest.
* * *
For the rest of that night and most of the following day, Sam explored the other buildings and nearly the entire mesa, which Kevin had estimated to be five kilometres square. Amit’s few personal possessions were piled in one corner of an otherwise bare room, while most of the other prefabs were stocked with parts and supplies scavenged from landers. One building had been given over to a partly disassembled fabricator that looked like it hadn’t worked in years. From time to time, when he passed the building Amit was tied up in, he heard the old man still shouting, his voice increasingly cracked and hoarse as the hours passed.
Sam tuned him out as best as he was able, but the only place to find something to eat or drink was right back where he’d left him. When he returned to the room where Amit was to get himself some water and something to eat, the old man tried a different tack, babbling about something he called “karmic engines”.
Sam rooted through a cupboard until he found some yams of the same type Kim and the other Amit had found. ‘Karmic what?’ he said over his shoulder.
‘Karmic engines,’ the old man repeated, straining at his bonds. ‘That’s what we are, Sam, all of us on these expeditions. We’re reborn again and again, making the same mistakes every time, but instead of life as the Buddhists understood it, our rebirth comes through technology. Do you see?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘We have an opportunity to create a new kind of spiritual enlightenment, one born of circuitry and metal. I call it “echogenesis”.’
Sam paused, yams in hand, and looked around at him. ‘Not a word I’m familiar with.’
Amit fixed him with a peculiar stare. ‘I’m talking about machine karma—a hybrid of technological and biological life, striving towards enlightenment through multiple iterations.’
Sam gave up listening and departed. He’d found a steel firelighter, and used it to get a small fire going in another part of the mesa so he could cook the yams. Once he’d eaten, he wrapped himself in a blanket he’d retrieved from a storeroom and lay down with Karl’s rifle in easy reach and his newly built campfire close enough to keep warm.
At one point he heard the cry of Howlers, but it sounded like they were a long way away from the mesa. He fell into an uneasy sleep but was woken frequently by nightmares that seemed all too real. But for the moment at least, he was safe.
* * *
That day wore into the next, and to Sam’s growing chagrin it became clear that the old man had indeed been telling him something very close to the truth, at least as far as the orbiter was concerned.
Apart from files stored on computers in the control shed, Amit had also kept extensive hand-written records using crude paper he’d made himself from pulped plant fibre. He’d gone so far as to bind the pages together in rough journals. Sam found at least a dozen such journals piled in a stack; it would have taken him weeks to read all of them, not least because large sections had been written in some form of indecipherable shorthand. But it was enough to corroborate the important parts of Amit’s story.
He investigated the orbiter as well, carrying one of the more relevant journals up inside the cramped crew cabin, and propping it on his knees as he studied the controls. The little ship was designed to fly entirely on automatic, requiring little, if any, intervention from the single passenger it was designed to carry. The more he studied it, the clearer it was that the little craft was much more than a maniac’s folly.
Now all he had to do was decide whether he was really going to fly into space on a guaranteed suicide mission, or wait around for the next expedition when it arrived, half a century in the future.
Either way, he thought grimly, it wasn’t much of a choice.
* * *
Sam woke in the middle of his third night on the mesa to the sound of Amit’s frenzied yells, and the smell of burning.
He opened his eyes and sat up, coughing. He had taken to sleeping in one of the other prefab buildings. When he went outside, smoke drifted past him. A red glow came through the trees from all sides, lighting the undersides of clouds in the night sky.
He hurried past the Tokamak and found Amit right where he’d left him, still tied into his chair and his face bright with sweat. For a moment he’d been afraid the old man had got loose and decided to torch everything.
‘What’s happening out there?’ Amit yelled in a half-croak. ‘I can smell burning!’
‘I don’t know.’ Sam felt suddenly indecisive. ‘I’ll find out.’
‘You’ve got to let me go! For God’s sake, you don’t know how anything works! I—’
Sam stepped back out and slammed the door shut before the old man could finish, and hurried along the path leading to the tunnel and the drawbridge. He kept going past the tunnel entrance until he was at the edge of the mesa, and from where he could look out across the forest below.
The forest beneath the mesa was ablaze in every direction he looked. Great columns of smoke rose high into the atmosphere, and when he drew breath, he tasted ash.
A forest fire, he thought in his panic. Such things were natural. Yet the thudding of his heart left him convinced the cause of the conflagration lay somewhere much closer to home.
He hurried back to the control shed and used the cameras to check the view across the rest of the mesa. It was the same no matter where he looked: endless flames.
Then he spotted a single, unwavering spark of light hovering in the night sky a few kilometres west of the mesa. He took manual control of the camera, zooming in until the light resolved into a drone. It looked identical to the ones he’d seen stacked in a bay inside the second lander.
Liquid fire jetted from a nozzle attached to the drone as he watched, spilling onto the trees below and setting them ablaze.
Sam ran back into the building where Amit was.
‘Vic’s still alive,’ Sam said breathlessly. ‘Is there any way he could figure out we’re up here?’
‘The drawbridge is the only way in,’ Amit replied, ‘unless—?’
The old man paused, his eyes drifting towards the ceiling. Sam became aware of a sound like a buzz-saw.
Or perhaps, he thought, a helicopter, such as the intact Mosquito he’d seen in that other lander.
‘The orbiter,’ Amit shouted, struggling furiously with his restraints. ‘For God’s sake, Sam, I have to make sure it’s safe!’
Sam hesitated, then untied the old man.
As soon as he stood up, Sam grabbed Amit by the shoulder, pushing him up hard against a wall. He pushed the barrel of his rifle against the underside of the old man’s jaw.
‘This does not mean I trust you,’ Sam hissed. ‘I’ll kill you if you even think of stepping out of line. Do you understand?’
The old man swallowed, looking convincingly afraid. ‘Entirely.’
Sam held his gaze for another moment before releasing him. Amit immediately bolted for the door.
Sam followed him outside. He saw Amit standing in the middle of the clearing between the buildings, staring up at a bright artificial light that shone down on him, his thin hair whipped into a frenzy by the downdraught. The Mosquito hovered a few metres above him, its rotor blades filling the air with a steady thunder.
Too late, Sam thought miserably.
‘Don’t move one fucking inch,’ a voice shouted over the din. ‘or I swear I’ll drill a hole in your fucking head!’
Jess.
But instead of obeying, Amit began to run: not towards the orbiter, as Sam might have expected, but towards the control shed.
A shot rang out, and Amit crumpled to the ground. The light flicked towards Sam, dazzling him.
‘I fucking warned him!’ Jess yelled, still only barely audible over the whine of the Mosquito’s rotors. The light flicked towards Sam. ‘Sam—I have you in my sights. Don’t move!’
Sam dropped his rifle and put his hands on his head, watching belatedly as the machine he’d last seen inside the second lander dropped to a gentle landing.
Jess jumped out, followed by Traynor, the ‘copter’s rotors winding down. Sam didn’t fail to notice there were only the two of them.
Traynor stepped towards Sam, his face dark with sweat and drawn tight in an angry grimace. Like Sam, he had a rifle gripped in both hands.
‘All this time,’ said Traynor, his eyes rimmed with red, and something haunted in his gaze. ‘All this time, and you were safe up here while we were running and dying. You son of a bitch.’
Sam opened his mouth to say something, but before he could, Traynor lifted his rifle and brought its butt crashing down on his head.
29
THE INTERROGATION
Sam collapsed bonelessly onto the hard-packed soil. He tasted blood in his mouth, but rather than losing consciousness, he slipped into a state of near-delirium broken here and there by snapshot-like moments of absolute clarity.
In one such moment, he was aware of being dragged along the ground by Jess, her face lit a deep orange by the glow from the burning forest. In another, he heard someone screaming for what seemed like really much too long.
Eventually the snapshots merged, and he became aware that he was slumped on the floor of the storeroom where Amit discarded most of his machine junk.
When he tried to stand, he discovered that his hands were secured behind his back. Eventually he managed to struggle upright and make his way over to a single window.
It was morning outside, but only barely. The sky had been reduced to a grey and ashen gloom, clouds of dark smoke still staining the vault of the sky.
He was far from surprised to find that the door had been bolted shut from the outside.
Getting down on his knees with his back to a pile of junk, Sam managed to wrap both hands around a steel bar. Carrying it back over to the window, he tried to smash the glass with his back turned to it, but the glass, or whatever it was, didn’t scratch, let alone shatter. It was impossible to put any power into the swing with both hands tied behind his back, and he gave up after losing his grip on the steel bar six times in a row.
He stared morosely out the window, trying to find some option for his future that didn’t wind up with him dead. From what he could see, the fire hadn’t spread to the top of the mesa, but he was a long way from being sure whether that was something to be thankful for.
* * *
Some hours later, Sam heard voices coming closer.
The door slammed open, and Traynor and Jess entered, dragging Amit between them. Sam watched from where he crouched with his back to a wall as they threw the old man down before him.
Amit cowered on the floor, his hands ruined and bloodied and his wrists bound in front with a length of aluminium wire that looked like it had been scavenged from the palisade.
Sam saw to his horror that most of the old man’s fingernails were missing. Fresh bandages, however, had been placed around his right shoulder, where Jess had felled him with a shot. For the moment, at least, they wanted him alive.
Sam looked at Traynor. ‘Just so we know where we all stand,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice steady, ‘you’re not even supposed to be here, are you?’
Jess stepped towards him and leaned down, slamming her fist into his jaw. Sam saw it coming and tried to twist away to minimise the blow, but she still managed to knock the wind out of him.
‘Easy,’ Traynor said to Jess, sounding more like someone talking to a dog on a leash.
Sam pressed his back up against the wall, breathing hard through his nose and waiting for the pain to pass.
‘That’s for killing Karl,’ Jess snarled through gritted teeth.
‘That wasn’t Sam’s doing, remember?’ Traynor said. He nodded at Amit. ‘Our friend here confessed to doing it.’
‘Fuck the both of you,’ Sam snarled, his jaw beginning to swell. ‘Karl was trying to kill me—and you killed Joshua!’
; Traynor nodded. ‘True enough. About Joshua, anyway.’ He walked to the window and peered outside. ‘It’s about time we talked.’
‘Another talk?’ Sam sneered. ‘About what—murdering us all so you can take over the colony for whoever the fuck sent you here?’
Traynor regarded him with raised eyebrows. ‘I see the old man’s been telling you stories.’
‘So what now?’ asked Sam, his throat thick with fear. ‘Are you going to pull out all my fingernails too?’
‘You’re quite a piece of work, aren’t you, Mr Newman?’ said Traynor. ‘It took a while, but I remembered a few things about you, after all. From back home, that is.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t remember me.’
‘And I didn’t,’ said Traynor. ‘Not at first. But then it came to me that you were the reason we were able to track Jahaar down at all.’
‘Stop talking,’ said Sam, anger welling up.
‘I’d seen an intelligence report, and that’s where I remembered seeing your name. We were keeping an eye on you because you were a link in a chain leading to Jahaar. That woman—Sarah?—she was on her way to the UN office in Geneva with Jahaar. You followed her to Switzerland, didn’t you?’
‘I said shut up,’ said Sam, a huskiness in his voice.
Traynor smiled carefully. ‘What was your intention, Sam? Hoping to rekindle an old romance?’
‘Something like that.’ He pictured putting a gun to Traynor’s head, seeing the back of his skull blown out. My fault, he thought, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.
Traynor shrugged. ‘You put her life at risk when you did that. Bad for her, but lucky for us. Otherwise, my agents might never have found Jahaar.’ He held Sam’s gaze for a moment. ‘Or her.’
Sam launched himself at him, a low growl building somewhere deep in his throat. Traynor slammed the butt of his rifle into Sam’s stomach and he fell back with a groan.
‘None of that matters now, Sam. It’s all in the past. A different life, literally so.’ Traynor stabbed a finger down at old Amit. ‘And whatever we did to him is nothing compared to what he was planning to do to you. Or did you believe all that nonsense about rebooting the mothership?’
