Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  2

  He fell.

  The ground rushed toward him, he swept past the limbs of towering Ponderosa pines to the ground of dead needles and rough stone, and he didn’t feel pain. He was pain.

  He opened his eyes and found himself flat on his back, bright lights burning his retinas, tubes in his mouth and nose. He heard the sound of rushing air, felt his lungs expand with a stab of agony, and then felt the air slowly seep back out. Dimly, he realized he was on a stretcher being pushed down a long, white hallway. Heat rushed down his cheeks.

  “James,” a familiar voice said.

  His gaze followed the sound, and he found himself staring into his father’s hazel eyes. They were red-rimmed with tears. His father never cried. “James! Stay with me,” his father said. He pulled James’s hand to his cheek. James blinked. His hand was pale next to his father’s darker Eurasian skin. His mother was dark, too. His father and mother had struggled so hard to make sure that their blonde-haired, blue-eyed child wouldn’t face any disadvantages. And he hadn’t. James had had a wonderful life. A perfect life of mental stimulation, meaningful work, good friends, and adventure. He wanted to say so, but the mask over his face prevented him from speaking.

  He heard shouting, and the sound of many footsteps, rubber on linoleum, a beeping long and slow, and someone saying, “Sir, you must step away.”

  “No,” his father said. “No!”

  His father’s words echoed the feeling in James’s heart. He couldn’t swallow, but his body tried to. A gurgle rose up from the tubing, and the furious whir and beeping of machines became more furious still.

  Blue-gloved hands wrapped around his father’s shoulders, pulling him away, and James was moving through the long white hallway alone, the shouts becoming muted. He closed his eyes. He hadn’t had a chance to say what he wanted to say—but the time capsule, his father would find it. Everything was in the time capsule … the world went dark behind his eyelids.

  His eyes opened again. He was flat on his stomach instead of his back. Instead of pain he felt cold; it sizzled from his hands and the front of his legs and torso to his spine like an electric charge. He scrambled up, and for a moment he was suspended in a white blur. Trying to get his bearings, he spun in place. Was he in the hospital? But then why was it was cold? And there was no sound of beeping, footsteps, or the whine of antigrav stretchers—just a soft whisper.

  His head ticked to the side, and the white blur came into focus. He found himself alone, outdoors—the ethernet strangely silent. He blinked. Beyond the snowflakes, there were trees. The whisper he heard was the sound of millions of snowflakes colliding with the pines, the ground, and his body.

  Snow whispered.

  He didn’t think he’d ever noticed that before.

  He blinked snowflakes from his lashes. The trees were Ponderosa Pines, which meant he was on Earth near the accident he’d just been dreaming of … no, remembering. He took a deep breath, and instead of the scent of pine, a different fragrance like mint and lavender flooded his senses—Luddeccean pine. He shook his head, blinked again, and saw that the trees he’d mistaken for Earth’s Ponderosas had needles in gradients of red and purple, and silvery-gray bark. The morphology was almost identical to Ponderosas, hence his confusion. Similar gravity and climate on Earth and this planet had produced some of the most dramatic examples of convergent evolution in the galaxy.

  How had he gotten here? He brushed snow from his chest and his hand encountered a strap. His eyes slipped down to a belt slung over his shoulder to his side … a holster … for the rifle on his back. Why did he have a rifle on his back?

  He looked down at the outline his body had made in the snow. He must have fallen. Again. He shuddered, feeling a crawling sensation under his skin. Over the whisper of snow came the loud whine of antigrav engines above the treetops, ten kilometers away, south by southwest, and approaching at a rate that would put them here in 3.5 minutes.

  He shook his head and clutched his temples as the recent past jolted to the forefront of his consciousness. He’d come to Luddeccea from Earth to visit with his parents at their vacation cottage—just as they had done every year since he was ten years old. The rifle was for hunting, as was the camouflage he was wearing. This year he’d come early. The recently elected Luddeccean government was very conservative. He’d heard things over the ethernet that made him suspect that the planet might have become inhospitable for outsiders. He had come to Luddeccea a week before his family, just to make sure things were safe.

  He winced—the expression didn’t go further than his eyes; his lips felt odd, stiff. The last thing he remembered was being in the shuttle he’d rented from the time gate … He’d had the proper authorizations; but, before he transmitted them, the Luddeccean Guard had begun firing. He blinked snow out of his eyes. His parents had said he was paranoid—things didn’t get dangerous that quickly. James was a historian; his specialty was twentieth century Earth. Cuba had become dangerous in the 1950s very quickly … and apparently Luddeccea was undergoing such a dangerous revolution just as quickly. He couldn’t remember ever being so unhappy to be right.

  After the Guard had begun firing, he remembered a jolt as the shuttle’s engines had been clipped. His body had been flung against his safety harness, and over the ethernet he’d heard, “Archangel down, Archangel down.” Everything after that was a blank. But somehow he’d made his way here from the crash site …

  He looked back at his footprints, rapidly filling with snow.

  Archangel down. What could it mean? The ethernet was still silent—something must have become dislodged in his head in the crash. He shook his head in frustration and tried to access his own data banks. For a frightening moment he couldn’t … but with another furious shake his neural interface kicked into gear. Although his specialty was twentieth century media, he had other historical data on hand. His neural interface picked up his last question and began to project images of archangels into his mind: illustrations from medieval manuscripts, paintings, and photo manipulations from the late 1900s and early 2000s, all of men with wings, often with weapons. At the same time the images flashed, nanos piped words. “Archangels: ‘high angels,’ mythical creatures, first imagined in 300 BC in the Judaic tradition: Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, Raguel, Remiel, and Saraqael. Lucifer was also sometimes considered to have been an archangel before he fell from grace. Archangels were present in the religions of all the Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.”

  He exhaled a long breath. The Abrahamic traditions were popular on Luddeccea; had they been comparing him ... Professor James Hiro Sinclair ... a historian, to the devil? His head ticked violently to the side. He was certain he could feel his synapses blinking in confusion at the lack of logic.

  A shout on the ground drew him from his thoughts. James looked over his shoulder. The whine of antigrav was louder—as was the sound of wind above the trees. He still could not see anyone or even a ship; the snow was falling too densely. He stood, transfixed. The right thing to do would be to put his hands over his head, wait for an actual human, and explain the situation. If only they saw his authorization chip, they’d realize it was a mistake—he was a citizen of Earth, and purposely firing on him could be grounds for sanctions. Surely they’d merely deport him? On the other hand, if he ran, he would be a fugitive.

  The approaching voices grew louder. He found himself backing away from his pursuers without conscious thought. He wanted to stop and think—but his body seemed to have a mind of its own.

  … And then it occurred to him, in a bright moment of lucidity, that maybe his body had caught on to what his brain seemed determined to ignore. When he had told his parents the world might be unsafe for off-worlders, he thought maybe they’d have rocks thrown at their cottage windows—he didn’t think he’d be shot out of the sky.

  Could he reason with a government that broke the laws of the Republic under mythological pretexts?

  Before his mind had even fo
rmulated an answer to that hypothetical, he found himself spinning in place. He started to run, calling on his data banks of the local terrain. A three-dimensional holo appeared to superimpose itself over the scene before him, an illusion his nanos were piping into his visual cortex. The perceived holo showed a map with a blinking light for him, the cottage a tiny block of light 234 kilometers away, and a refueling station twenty kilometers away demarked by a tiny glowing triangle. Could he catch a ride there? Or at least hide and find food and shelter before he died of exposure?

  There was one other light. In his auditory apparatus the name “Commander Noa Sato” rang. He leaped over a large boulder, and, with the impact of landing, more memories hit him in a rush. Just before he’d been shot, he’d heard the Luddeccean authorities declare her “dangerous.” An image of a woman in a crisp Fleet uniform came to his mind. Her eyes … Noa Sato’s eyes, he was almost sure … were sliding to the side at someone out of the camera’s line of vision. A wide smile was on her face. Her skin was so dark it made the drab gray of her uniform appear silver. Her cheeks were round and plump despite the sleek athleticism of her form. He knew, like he knew her name and face, that she was forty-two years old in the picture, though the Fleet’s anti-aging regimen meant she looked closer to twenty-five. She looked vibrant, healthy, and very alive. In the cold, running for his life, the image impossibly made him want.

  James felt the urge to frown, but his numb lips did not respond. He didn’t know her … he couldn’t remember anything about her other than that picture. She was in the opposite direction to his current course. He couldn’t go to her. It was too risky. He stumbled, clutched his head, and stumbled again. His footsteps slowed, until he was standing, panting, staring at his feet, his breath curling in front of him.

  He tried to move along his intended trajectory.

  … And found he couldn’t. The shouts rose behind the curtain of snow. Someone said, “It fell down here!”

  It?

  James looked in the direction he wanted to go, and then in the direction of Commander Sato. His feet moved toward the Commander … and at least he was moving away from the people calling him “it.” At first he went slowly, but when he didn’t stumble, he started to run faster. Every stride became longer, and faster, until the world was a blur. A fallen tree loomed before him, the crest of the felled trunk a meter and twenty-four centimeters high. He leapt over it before he’d had time to think—he had to have misjudged the height because he cleared it easily and landed lightly on his feet.

  Noa wasn’t running through the forest. She was shambling. Her limbs were cold, and it seemed that in every direction she could hear pursuers.

  “Ashley,” she muttered. “I am so angry with you … making me do this alone, making me leave you, making me so cold … for being right that you wouldn’t have made it this far.”

  “Did you hear that?” someone shouted.

  Noa didn’t turn her head. Her Fleet-implanted locator app plotted the speaker as a glowing light a few meters behind her. She tried to run, but all that came to her limbs was a slightly faster shuffle.

  She heard her own breath, raspy and loud. And she heard antigrav engines, the big kind, just clicks away. It was all strangely muted. By the snow? Or was she finally losing her mind? “I can’t lose it now, I can’t, I can’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

  “I hear her,” someone said.

  Noa wanted to run, but sending that message to her limbs didn’t work. It was like her body was a puppet that belonged to someone else. Without warning, the puppet master ripped her feet out from under her. Noa went sprawling forward and bellyflopped with the cold ground. She heard men, too close behind, looked back, and only saw a large root jutting out of the snow. “Damn you for tripping me,” she muttered, trying to drag herself to her feet. “Stupid root. I hope you die of rot. Or weevils. Or … ” She groaned. It took too much energy to talk, and breathing sent daggers of ice into her lungs. She managed to pull herself up on all fours, but couldn't rise further. So she crawled, hands burning with cold in the snow. She found the ability to speak again. “And damn you body. I hate you. Giving out on me at a time like this.”

  “Well, she still has energy enough to talk,” someone said with a laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh.

  The boot that connected with her side a few moments later shouldn’t have taken her by surprise. Pain seared through her. I’m sorry, body, she wanted to say, but couldn’t. Sorry, I don’t want to leave you yet. Don’t give up on me.

  Someone kicked her again. Lungs aching, she found herself staring up at white. Snow? Or had she fainted? She wasn’t sure. But then her vision half-returned and she was looking at the dark arms of trees reaching for the sky. Someone said, “End of the line for you, throwback.” She heard the click of a safety and found herself facing the barrel of a pistol. Beyond the pistol was a tan face, with Eurasian eyes, above a thick down coat in Luddeccean Green.

  “Don’t shoot her, Art,” someone else said. “Command wants to interrogate her and to yank her port out. Fleet pulled a number on us.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Joe?” said the guy holding the pistol.

  Noa could actually hear the guy who must be Joe shrug, even though she couldn’t see him. “Orders are orders.”

  The pistol pointed at Noa slowly lowered.

  Out of her line of sight, Noa heard a soft thud.

  “What was that?” someone who wasn’t Joe or Art said.

  She willed her body to swivel in the snow, to knock the feet out from under her closest pursuer, and steal his pistol. Instead she just managed to scoot backward like an upside down snake. Did snakes move upside down? They were a recent addition to the Luddeccean fauna from Earth. A tiny, obviously useless, part of her brain tried to access the ethernet.

  Over the sound of his breathing and his pounding feet, James heard someone say, “End of the line for you, throwback,” and then the click of a safety.

  Skidding to a halt, his vision pulsed as though he were in a room where the lights were flickering.

  “Don’t shoot her, Art,” said another voice. James blinked, and his vision normalized. He crept forward and peered around a tree. He saw what looked like a pile of rags on the ground, and four men in Luddeccean Green orbiting around it.

  “Command wants to interrogate her again—and to yank her port out.”

  The words “interrogate” and “yank her port out,” stood at the forefront of James’s mind. The snow and storm disappeared as his neural interface crowded his mind with images of prisoners of war in WWII, and of victims of amateur port removals—their brains and nanos spilled out in back alleys.

  He should run away from these savages. There were four of them, and only one of him.

  He wanted to run. And couldn’t.

  He remembered a mountain climbing expedition to a sunken city along the San Andreas rift on Earth—he used to tell his students that he was a historian of the Indiana Jones variety—after he explained who Indiana Jones was. On that particular trip, his companion’s safety cord had slipped from the rock face. James had caught him and helped him to safety without a second thought … and managed to pull his own shoulder out of its socket in the process.

  Was he the type of person that simply couldn’t turn away? But he wanted to turn away, and that person in the memory seemed like someone else.

  James looked down at his feet half-buried in snow, immobile despite his wishes. He looked to the pile of rags that might be Noa Sato, and then to her pursuers. He couldn’t run away—and he couldn’t just haphazardly try to intervene—he’d be captured, too. How could he rescue her and keep his own skin? He needed a distraction …

  Gazing at the snow, he recalled another winter he’d spent here as a child. He’d thrown a snowball at his father’s back, missed spectacularly, and hit a tree. His father had turned to the remains of the snowball before turning to James and lobbing a snowball back.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was what
he had. Kneeling down, James quickly made a snowball. He threw it at a tree thirty meters from his location, and hit it dead center.

  “What was that?” said one of the men. Raising his rifle, the man looked toward the sound.

  James made another snowball, and threw it at a tree a few meters from the first. His aim was unerring. He tilted his head; he’d been a terrible pitcher at cricket. Was fear improving his arm?

  “What joker is throwing snowballs?” one of the other men said.

  “Knock it off!” said another.

  “Probably Juarez. I’m going to check this out,” said another, clicking the safety of his pistol and walking into the trees.

  Swinging his rifle around without conscious thought, James found himself watching the man through the sights.

  He’d never shot a human before. James had a memory of watching some Fleet personnel boarding a shuttle back on Earth. It was right after a hostage standoff that had ended with the Fleet killing innocent civilians. James had shaken his head, turned to a colleague, and said, “Violence is never the solution, not in this day and age.”

  Now his rifle was aimed at a man. Was he ready to shoot?

  Reaching the exploded remains of a snowball, the man spun around, raising his firearm in James’s direction. James pulled the trigger. The man’s head jerked backward as the bullet hit and James felt … relief.

  One of the men by the pile of rags screamed, “Pari!”

  The same force that compelled him to find Commander Sato seemed to take hold of James. He moved from the tree he was hiding behind to another. A second man stepped into the trees. James’s rifle was still raised, his eye still in the sights, and he pulled the trigger.

  There was another soft thud, and then another rifle shot. Noa’s body belatedly responded to her brain’s order to move. Sitting up, she saw a man in Luddeccean Green crouched behind a tree. He had a heat-seeking scanner up, and he was aiming it into a swirling blur beyond him. Noa managed to climb to her feet, wavering like grass in the wind. The man in green paid no attention to her. His face was on the scanner screen as he swung it in a wide arc, trying to find the source of the rifle shots. The snow was so thick that at first the screen was a blur, but then he stopped. Over his shoulder, before Noa’s eyes, a face emerged on the screen, very close, and very familiar.