by Gary Gibson
Sam’s eyes darted towards old Amit, but the old man had his face pressed to the floor, hands curled in close to his chest. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I guess he didn’t mention how he packed that orbiter of his full of high explosives,’ Jess said dryly.
Sam looked at her like he hadn’t quite heard her correctly. ‘What?’
‘She’s not talking about fuel, to be clear,’ said Vic. ‘The funny thing about torturing people is sometimes they tell you more than you wanted to know. They’re hoping if they give you everything, you’ll stop hurting them. And some people,’ he added, regarding the old man balefully, ‘harbour a deep-seated need to confess.’
‘He was going to blow you to shit the moment you docked with that mothership,’ said Jess. She took a step towards Amit, who responded by letting out a panicked gasp and shuffling back from her on his knees. ‘Go ahead, Newman,’ she said. ‘Ask him if it’s true.’
‘Bullshit,’ said Sam. ‘If he was going to blow the mothership up, why would he need me? The orbiter runs on automatic. He could have launched it and done the deed any time he wanted—but he didn’t.’
‘It turns out,’ said Traynor, ‘that the mothership can defend itself. Usually, that means random asteroids or anything else it can’t steer clear of in time, but it can’t distinguish between a lump of frozen rock and ice and another ship. But if you’re on board, it won’t shoot. And that, Sam, is the sole reason he needed you alive: so you could pilot a giant bomb up the mothership’s unsuspecting ass.’
Sam looked at Amit, then back at Vic, feeling a rising sense of desperation. ‘Or else he fed you a bunch of lies so you’d stop torturing him.’
Jess laughed. ‘We threatened to push his damn orbiter over the nearest cliff if he couldn’t convince us he was telling the truth. Believe me, he is.’
Amit met Sam’s eyes briefly, then looked away. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why?’ Sam asked, horror welling up inside him. ‘What’s the fucking point of just…blowing it up?’
‘I wasn’t sure my plan would work at first,’ Amit said, his voice heavy with fatigue and pain. ‘I was going to monitor the entire process from down here. If the mothership didn’t accept your authorisation, I was going to trigger a detonation big enough to destroy it entirely. That way we’d still bring the cycle to an end.’
‘You said we might be the last humans left alive anywhere,’ said Sam, his voice rising to a shout. ‘And you want to blow the mothership up? You’d be wiping out what’s left of the entire human race!’
‘Only if you failed,’ the old man muttered under his breath.
‘There’s also the fact,’ said Traynor, ‘that he hates your guts.’
Sam looked at him, befuddled.
‘He figured out that you, Sam, were our mole inside the Initiative,’ Traynor explained. ‘So you see, you were the one who compromised this mission. Both of us, it turns out, were working for the same people all along.’
Something cold slithered through Sam’s heart. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
Traynor nodded at Amit. ‘He told us you’d seen part of the briefing, but not all of it. Is that correct?’
‘I hardly had time, what with Karl doing his level best to murder me.’
‘Actually, he—’ Jess began.
Traynor put out a hand to stop her. ‘If you’d seen the whole thing,’ he continued, ‘you’d know all this. You—the original you, that is, back home on Earth—arranged for the memories and genetic patterns of the people we were working for to be stored onboard the mothership, along with our own.’
When he saw the look on Sam’s face, Traynor shook his head with something approaching sympathy. ‘Not that you’d remember any of that, of course. That all happened long after the date we last remember. But it was quite the kicker when it turned out you were the reason I’m here.’
‘That…doesn’t make any sense,’ Sam insisted. ‘If any of this is true, then why, for God’s sake, did you send Karl to kill me?’
‘You’ve got it wrong,’ said Jess. ‘We sent him to try to make sure you didn’t come to any harm.’
‘You…’ Sam halted, remembering how Karl had been distracted. How he’d peered constantly around, hardly seeming to pay attention to him…
He stared at the old man sprawled before him with growing horror. ‘Karl wasn’t trying to kill me, was he?’ said Sam. ‘He was trying to keep me safe from you.’
‘Now he gets it,’ said Jess with a smirk.
Sam looked back up at Vic. ‘It doesn’t matter what that other Sam Newman did or believed. There’s no way in hell I’d ever agree to help you. I don’t care how many years passed between 2050 and whenever that ship launched. Even after a million years, I’d still want you dead.’
Traynor picked up a chair from next to the door and sat facing Sam with his rifle laid across his lap. ‘I watched the whole briefing, Sam. Twice. Me and DeWitt had to work pretty hard to fill in the blanks, given how much of our memories we’d lost.’
‘And Joshua? Did he see it?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Traynor shifted in his chair. ‘We caught him trying to sneak away after we all watched it the first time, and…well, you know what happened next. That other, original you was facing the end of the world, same as this old fuck told you: runaway environmental degradation and mass extinctions. You had good reasons to make the choices you did.’
‘People change, Sam,’ said Amit, his voice forlorn. ‘Even you.’
‘Not that much,’ Sam insisted.
‘Really?’ the old man regarded Sam with clear pity, despite his own dreadful state. ‘The Amit you knew believed in non-violence, even in self-defence. I remember him well. I was him, and yet I killed Karl right before your eyes. And yes, I let those others die too when I might have saved them. I admit it. But you changed too, sometime between when you last remember and when you became part of the Initiative.’
‘He’s right,’ said Traynor. ‘You realised sabotaging the mission was the only way for a much greater sample of humanity to survive the coming extinction than the narrow segment of fellow travellers Tenenbaum allowed to join him. A man like him couldn’t be allowed to decide who could be saved, and who wouldn’t.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘So this is the way I see things going from now on. There’s a way we can still fly up to that mothership and fix whatever needs fixing, without turning it into some kind of fucking suicide mission.’
‘We’ll disassemble the fabricator from our lander and drive it back here with the truck,’ said Jess. ‘Either that, or we can fly it up here in pieces aboard the Mosquito. Then we’ll scavenge whatever supplies we can from all the other landers the old man found. It might take a while—months, possibly even years—but given time, we’ll add a second stage to that orbiter so we can make it into a return trip. We’ll go up there and talk to the mothership, and get everything back the way it’s supposed to be.’
‘This girl knows her shit,’ Traynor said approvingly. ‘But we want you on our side, Sam. You’re no good to us dead.’
‘Why the hell should I trust you? You think I didn’t see what you did to Ethan and Kevin?’
‘They tried to stop us!’ snapped Jess.
‘So you killed them,’ Sam shouted back at her.
‘Don’t you understand?’ said Traynor. ‘This isn’t about us. It’s about the future of the whole human race. If Tenenbaum and the rest of those Mannite-worshipping idiots had their way, they’d have kept our colony so small we’d never amount to anything more than a bunch of inbreeds trapped up here, all so we could avoid interfering with the Howler’s evolution. Does that seem like any kind of future you want to be a part of?’
Traynor stood and prowled back over to the window. ‘The Initiative had the foresight to try to secure a future for our species, but it was a narrow vision, however good their intentions. That other Sam Newman saw sense once he realised what kind of world Tenenbaum wanted to build.’
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�So what happens to the Howlers in the meantime?’ asked Sam. ‘Are you going to keep on slaughtering them?’
‘They don’t give a shit about the Howlers,’ said Amit. ‘I warned you.’
Traynor ignored him. ‘Less successful species die out in the face of competition. It’s a fact of life, regrettable but necessary. We need this world a hell of a lot more than they do.’
‘Lies,’ hissed Amit. ‘People like you raped the Earth for generations, and you’ll do the same to this one and every other world you get your hands on.’
Jess raised her foot like she was going to kick the old man in the head.
‘Hey!’ Traynor grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. ‘What part of needing him alive did you not understand?’
‘Ever consider the idea once your bosses wake up in their nice new bodies,’ asked Sam, ‘they’ll simply kill the both of you rather than risk anyone else finding out about the things you did on their behalf?’
Traynor’s face darkened. ‘Take all the shots you like, Sam, but the facts of the situation are still the same. You can help us, but you need to decide if you’re going to do it willingly. Don’t take too long.’
Jess jerked her head towards Amit. ‘What about him?’
Traynor shrugged. ‘Leave him here for now. Let them talk if they want.’
Jess and Traynor stepped back outside, locking the door after them. Sam stared at it for several long seconds.
Amit chuckled under his breath. ‘You’ve got them in a hell of a bind, you know that?’
Sam looked at him sharply. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘They can’t do a damn thing without you, because you’re the one with the authorisation to talk to the mothership. And yet here you are, being all uncooperative.’
‘If I’ve got them over a barrel, that’s good. Right?’
‘Of course, they might just torture you until you’re ready to do whatever the hell they want.’ Amit lifted his ruined hands so Sam could see them. ‘Or perhaps Traynor is right, and eventually you’ll come round to his way of thinking—the same way the original Sam Newman did when he betrayed us all.’
‘If you’re trying to get me on your side,’ said Sam, ‘you’re doing a shitty job of it.’
The old man made a croaking sound that might have been a laugh. ‘You know what’s going to happen? You’ll convince yourself you’re only playing along with them until you can turn the tables. Except that day will never come. You’ll start to believe what they tell you, and once they’ve got what they want from you, they’ll kill you. And that’ll be the end of it.’
Sam fought down a surge of anger. ‘You think you know me,’ he snarled, ‘but you don’t.’
‘You betrayed us then, and you’ll betray us all over again,’ the old man hissed, his face a mask of petulant fury. ‘The indigenes aren’t the monsters: you are, you and Vic and Jess. You think blowing up the mothership is genocide against humanity? Life is precious, Sam, no doubt about that, whether it’s our species or theirs. But letting people like Traynor take over this world would be the true act of genocide.’
The old man was silent a moment, his expression momentarily contemplative. ‘Besides, maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. There are other seed-ships out there, hopefully, ones that aren’t infected with the likes of you and Vic. Maybe they’ll have better luck: I certainly hope so.’
Amit lifted himself back onto his feet with painstaking care, his face twisted up in pain. Sam watched, filled with mute rage, as the old man shuffled over to the opposite corner of the room before sitting on the floor beneath the window.
‘Listen—’ Sam began to say heatedly.
Amit dismissed him with a wave of one hand. ‘I don’t want to hear it. At least let me enjoy my last few days in something like peace. I should be grateful I won’t live long enough to see what’s coming.’
Sam tried to get him to keep talking, but the old man fell obstinately silent, lying carefully on his side with his knees pulled up close against his chest.
Eventually, Amit’s breathing grew more even, and Sam gave up. Instead, Sam stared out at the sky, visible through the window, still heavy with smoke and ash.
He thought of that other Sam—the one who had betrayed not only the Initiative but even himself—and realised he was a stranger, an unknown, someone whose life decisions would have been impenetrable to his younger self.
But more than anything, he realised, that other Sam was an enemy.
30
THE DRAWBRIDGE
From time to time Sam heard Jess and Vic moving between the other buildings and guessed they were doing the same thing he’d done: taking stock of supplies, studying the equipment inside the control shed to see how everything worked and investigating the orbiter.
Amit remained obdurate in his silence even as the day moved inexorably towards evening. Eventually, Sam lost his temper, shouting at the old man in his fury, but Amit’s sole response was to pull himself even further into a ball, as if physically retreating from the world.
Then came nightfall, and with it a familiar sound.
* * *
Even Amit looked up when the howling began.
Sam stepped past him to look out through the window. The underside of the clouds still glowed orange from the forest fire. He couldn’t see the Howlers, of course, but they were out there somewhere.
Even so, it wasn’t quite the terrifying sound it had been. For one, it sounded like there were far fewer of them, and there was a human, almost mournful edge to their song.
Amit dropped his head back down without comment and fixed his gaze firmly on the wall beneath the window.
Hurried footsteps approached the building before coming to a halt outside. The door rattled open and Jess stepped inside, a rifle carried loosely in both hands. She kicked the door shut behind her and took a firmer grip on her weapon as she faced them.
‘Back over to that corner there,’ she ordered Sam, motioning with the rifle.
Sam moved back across the room to where he’d been. ‘I can hear the Howlers. What’s going on out there?’
‘All I can tell you is there’s a couple hundred of them gathered directly below the mesa. Guess there’s no place else left for them to go.’
She moved further into the room, turning her back on Amit, who still lay curled up facing the wall beneath the window. With his badly injured hands, she clearly didn’t regard him as a threat.
‘Vic wants to try an experiment,’ she said. ‘He wants you to try radioing the mothership using the computers here, in case that gets it to respond.’
‘Where is Vic?’
‘Keeping an eye on the Howlers.’ She let out a sigh and moved her rifle so that she held it with only one hand. ‘Look, I don’t want to have to hold a gun on you. And we know you can’t fix anything on your own. So have you thought about it?’
‘Thought about what?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Helping us save what’s left of the human race. At least we’re not asking you to kill yourself in the process.’
He hesitated, then said: ‘I have conditions.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Yeah, I thought you might somehow.’ She stepped towards the single chair in the room and put her free hand on the back of it. ‘Go on.’
‘I’ll agree to work with you as long as wherever the colony gets permanently established is some place a long way away from the Howlers—some island or continent where they haven’t reached. And we don’t interfere with them, now or ever. I also want some say in the makeup of the first wave of colonists.’
‘I can see Vic being able to accept some of that,’ she said. ‘I’m not too sure about the last, though.’
‘I mean it,’ he snapped. ‘Or we might as well stop talking now. So does this mean you’re finally going to untie me?’
She gave him a look like she was a long way from trusting him.
‘If you’re worried I’ll try something,’ said Sam, ‘then bring Vic here. But you
’re still going to have to cut me loose at some point, so it might as well be now.’
She glared at him for a moment. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Turn around and face the wall.’
Sam did as he was told. A moment later, he felt the barrel of her rifle press against the back of his neck.
‘One wrong move,’ she told him, ‘and we’ll figure out some way to do without you.’
She tugged at the cord binding his wrists with her free hand, and he felt it come loose. He stood there without moving as she took a step back from him.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘you can turn around and—’
Sam heard a faint creak, followed by an indrawn breath.
Jess suddenly slammed up against Sam, flattening him against the wall. Then she was pulled back from him again, her rifle clattering to the floor.
Sam twisted around to see that Jess had her hands up to her throat, her lips drawn tight over her teeth as she scrabbled with her fingers at a thin length of wire digging deep into her windpipe. The two ends of the wire were knotted around Amit’s bloodstained wrists and drawn close together behind her back.
The old man stood with his nose to the back of her head. Sam watched in horror as he twisted around, drawing the wire even tauter and pulling her head back against his shoulder. Then he leaned forward to take her weight until she was lifted bodily into the air, both feet kicking wildly.
Sam stood, frozen, until Jess’s eyes rolled up into the back of her head and her body went limp. Amit dropped her back down like a sack of coal, then stood there, panting hard. Sam fought a surge of nausea when he saw just how deep the wire had cut into her neck: the same wire that had been used to bind Amit’s wrists. How many hours of agonising work had it taken the old man first to free himself, despite the terrible mutilation of his hands, and then retie the wire so he could use it as a garotte?
Amit regarded him with an unreadable expression. ‘So tell me,’ he asked Sam, ‘do you know anything about building a secondary fuel stage for a home-made orbiter?’
