The Second Fall

by G J Ogden

  Maria opened her mouth to respond, but nothing came out.

  “Don’t worry, I’m okay with this, I really am.” Ethan lifted his head slightly and straightened up in his seat. “I hate these kinds of talks, but you’re right; we do need to clear the air.”

  The last comment was unintentionally symbolic, considering the smog building up on the horizon by the city. Now that they had begun talking, Ethan found that it wasn’t as awkward or embarrassing as he had expected it to be. In fact, it felt good to get things out into the open. He’d imagined having this conversation for a long time, and often role-played it in his mind, while out on patrol or sitting under the old tree outside the settlement, but he never imagined he would actually have it for real, or in such an unusual and extreme setting.

  “The truth is that I struggled with how I felt for a long time,” he continued. “Not just about you, but about everything that happened five years ago.”

  “You seem to have come through it well, though,” said Maria, grateful that Ethan was opening up. “You haven’t become cynical; you still want to help people. It’s an attribute that’s sorely lacking among the UEC and GPS.”

  “Well, someone very wise once told me to never lose hope,” said Ethan, remembering his first encounter with the old hermit, “and I haven’t, I still hope that the future will be better than today, and yesterday. Though I suppose it also taught me to be more realistic in my expectations.”

  “Not chasing angels any more then?” said Maria, one eyebrow slightly raised.

  Ethan laughed and then looked at Maria properly for the first time. “No, that search ended when I saw you disappear out of sight into the blackness of space.”

  This caught Maria off guard, and she broke eye contact, bowing her head slightly.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ethan, “Like I said, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what happened. I mean, we’d only just met each other, and then with everything that happened it was just so intense.” Then he hesitated, finding it suddenly very difficult to articulate what he was feeling in a way that could make sense to Maria, and the next part was the hardest to explain.

  “Go on…” said Maria, desperate to hear what Ethan had to say, yet also slightly fearful of it.

  “I know I said I loved you, and I think in that instant I really did, Sal. But over time, I’ve come to understand that I was more in love with the idea of you than with you.” As soon as he’d said these words out loud, instead of inside his own head, Ethan felt like someone had lifted a boulder off his chest. “Does that makes any sense?”

  “Wow, I didn’t expect this!” said Maria, laughing.

  “Didn’t expect what?”

  “Honesty!”

  Ethan now laughed. The tension had been building up to such a degree that he had to either laugh or cry, and laughing was more his style.

  Maria smiled and shook her head in disbelief. She too had role-played this encounter in her mind many times and none of her possible scenarios had even slightly resembled this one.

  “Think about it, Sal,” said Ethan. “I’d spent my entire life looking up at the sky at the lights; these mystical guardian angels from our folklore, hoping to find answers. Then you appeared, literally a light falling out of the sky, and you showed me this whole other world.” Ethan had rushed through these words, forcing him to pause and draw a long breath, which he then let out slowly before continuing. “Suddenly I wasn’t just some guy from an insignificant settlement on a mostly dead planet. I was... important.”

  “You have given this some thought, haven’t you?” said Maria, folding her arms again. “ Go on...”

  “And, well, it was exciting. You were pretty exciting, Sal!” Ethan blushed slightly. Then his expression changed to one of fake seriousness. “You were also a liar too, of course, let’s not forget that.”

  “No, I was pretty sure you wouldn’t forget that part,” said Maria, lips curling slightly.

  “So, anyway, you can relax.” Ethan leant back into his seat as he said this. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy to see you and to know you’re not dead. And what you’ve done; what you are doing... it matters, Sal. I guess you could say I’m proud of you,” Maria winced a little, “but, I’m not still madly in love with you, okay?”

  “I must be losing my allure,” said Maria, straight faced. “I was hoping you might still be a little bit in love with me.”

  “You’re not funny,” said Ethan, staring out of his side window again, “and you’re also still not holding that control stick thing…”

  “You haven’t asked me if I still love you,” said Maria, softly.

  Ethan felt a knot tighten in his gut. He hadn’t even considered this; he’d assumed Maria was dead, after all. His eyes whipped back to meet Maria’s again. “What? I mean… do you?” he stuttered.

  “Just kidding!” said Maria. The curl of her lip had turned into a wicked grin.

  Ethan shook his head and looked away again. “Seriously, you’re the worst!”

  “I have missed you, though,” said Maria, honestly. Then it struck her just how much she had missed the charismatic young ranger. Though she had not told him, and Ethan had not asked, Maria too had meant what she said in the heat of the moment, five years ago, but at the time she had believed she’d soon be dead. Everything had moved so quickly after her capture and return that there was barely any time to think about Ethan during the weeks and months immediately after she’d sent him away. But in quieter moments she often reflected on it, and wondered what was real and what was imagined or driven by the intensity of their circumstances. Ethan’s explanation made more sense to her than anything she had come up with on her own, but somehow she couldn’t help feeling a little disheartened by what he’d said. Maria looked back ahead, grabbed the control column and disengaged the autopilot.

  “This is for the best, anyway,” continued Maria, moving the steering column to take them across a smoother area of ground. “Long-distance relationships never work.”

  Ethan looked over at her, wearing a confused frown.

  “Long-distance relationship?” said Maria, hoping that repeating the words would somehow make Ethan understand, but his blank expression indicated otherwise. Maria shrugged, “I guess it’s what you might call ‘pre-Fall humor’.”

  “Well, at least we know they didn’t all die of laughter...” said Ethan, and then after a brief pause they both burst out laughing, so much so that Maria accidentally steered the transport over a patch of bracken, making the vehicle rock from side to side. Ethan grabbed hold of the door handle and pressed himself back into his seat by jamming his legs into the foot-well.

  “On second thoughts, perhaps it’d be better if this thing drove itself,” said Ethan, only half-joking.

  Maria wrestled the crawler back on course and they continued on for a minute in silence, during which time Ethan’s thoughts strayed back to his time on the UEC station, with Diana. He remembered her courage and bravery, and then he again remembered how he could have helped her return to the planet, but had instead argued that she would simply bring the war along with her. Now she was dead, and the guilt stabbed at him once more. He still believed his decision had been the correct one, but he also couldn’t help but wonder if Diana would still be alive if he had made a different choice that day.

  “I’m really sorry about Diana,” he said.

  There was a pause before Maria answered; for her, it was still too raw. She gripped the control column tightly so that the metal pinched her skin. “Thanks. I know she would have been happy that I found you again, though.”

  “I still can’t believe you managed to convince Archer to give up the war,” Ethan went on. “I can’t imagine how you must be feeling to have come so close and have it torn away.”

  Maria took her eyes off the ground ahead for a second and smiled at Ethan. Since arriving back planetside, no-one had considered how she felt. To the other planetsiders, she was just an unwelcome relic of the past that ha
d brought nothing but trouble, but Ethan saw things differently; he saw her differently too. Now that Maria actually came to think about her feelings, she realized how much she had been bottling up inside; she hadn’t only lost Raina and Diana, but she’d lost her home, and everything she’d fought and sacrificed for over the last five years was gone. Once again the sudden surge of emotions almost overwhelmed her, and she bit down hard on the inside of her lip and focused on the pain. There would be time enough for grieving when Kurren was dead. She distracted herself further by trying to think of a way to respond to Ethan, without having to draw up memories from the increasingly dark corners of her mind.

  “I didn’t set out to convince Archer of anything, actually,” she said, finally, forcing herself to talk in a more high-spirited tone. “When I was traded in return for Diana’s safety, I expected to be court-martialed and jailed. Or worse.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I was in a cell, waiting to be brought in front of Archer and a group of other senior officers and government ministers to give my account of what they had called ‘The Planetsider Incident’. Archer turned up outside the cell, alone, and sent the guards away.”

  Ethan’s eyes widened. “That must have been a little scary.”

  “Yes, I really thought he’d come to kill me,” said Maria, plainly. “Honestly, I thought that was it. But, instead, he pulled up a chair and sat in front of the cell. You know how he always had that irritating smile?”

  Ethan nodded, he could never forget it.

  “Well, it wasn’t there. He actually looked quite solemn, like a totally different man. It was so strange.”

  “What did he want?” said Ethan, now utterly engrossed.

  “He wanted to understand why I did it,” said Maria. “I was one of the UEC’s star officers…”

  “Even if you do say so yourself!” interrupted Ethan with a wink.

  Maria scowled. “As I was saying…” she said, and Ethan held up his hands as a gesture of appeasement. “He also knew me well; how I’d lost my parents and grown up hating GPS. And he obviously knew I volunteered to risk my life to go planetside, looking for you, losing Kurren – Chris – in the process, and then almost getting killed myself.”

  Ethan waited for Maria to continue, but her last sentence tailed off into nothing. “And so?” he said.

  “And so what?” said Maria.

  “So why did you do it, of course?” said Ethan, as if it should have been obvious.

  “You know why. You were there.”

  Ethan frowned, clearly not comprehending.

  “Diana is what happened. You, is what happened.” Maria now sounded as agitated as Ethan had been. To her it was obvious.

  “Diana had the warship; if she had used it in anger, the UEC couldn’t have stopped it, and she knew that. She could have used it to destroy the UEC base, but she didn’t. It ran contrary to everything I had believed. It opened my eyes. Also, I hated myself for deceiving you and for what I made you an accomplice to. You know the rest.”

  “And you told Archer all this?” said Ethan.

  “Yes, and in no uncertain terms too,” said Maria, grinning. “You see, I thought I was going to be executed no matter what I did or said, so I didn’t care. I was just so angry, I laid into him, putting everything out there. I called him out for lying to me about not having had contact with Diana before; told him he was wrong about GPS, and that he was a coward and a killer, hiding behind a fake smile and the lie that we were acting in self-preservation.”

  “I would have liked to have seen that!” said Ethan, feeding off Maria’s energy.

  “He hit back equally hard,” Maria went on. “It was shocking. I’d never seen him lose his cool; that man was never any warmer than an ice cube. But I told him to believe whatever he wanted, and that he could kill me for all I cared, but that everything I said was true.”

  Ethan took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He pictured their argument in his mind, letting it play out as Maria had described, and if his mental reconstruction was even half-way close to the reality, it would have been an extraordinary scene to witness.

  “Archer then stormed out, saying he’d have me executed immediately,” said Maria. “But the next morning, I was still alive. And later that day, Archer came back. This went on for several days.”

  “Maybe he had a living, beating heart after all,” said Ethan.

  “Actually, I don’t think Archer was ever acting out of hatred,” Maria replied. “He was just so fundamentally convinced that GPS would never give up the fight, and that the only way it could end was us or them, that learning he was wrong shook him to the core.”

  “So he let you go?” said Ethan.

  “He had me released to his personal charge, explaining to the others that it was for further interrogation, but, essentially, yes. Over time we established a rapport, based on hope and honesty, instead of fear and old prejudices, and that’s how it all began.”

  Ethan’s head was spinning. It was an incredible story, and far more exciting – and unbelievable – than anything he could have concocted in his own mind.

  “What about Major Kurren, as he was then?” asked Ethan, trying to relate what Maria had said back to the present.

  “He was furious, like I told you. Archer had him marginalized, taking away most of his power, but James Kurren was a popular figure in the Corp, so he kept him on staff. A sort of ‘keep your enemies close’ idea.”

  “Not the best idea he ever had,” said Ethan.

  “No…” Maria let out a heavy sigh. “But, I’m as much to blame. I underestimated him; I thought he was a blunt instrument, who had been rendered harmless. I had no idea he was capable of organizing a coup and so I wasn’t watching, and neither was Archer. And look at what it has cost.”

  “It’s easy to blame yourself, Sal,” said Ethan, thinking about his own feelings of guilt, “but the only one to blame here is Kurren. We both need to remember that.”

  Maria did not answer. Nothing Ethan said would make her stop blaming herself, and sympathy was the last thing she wanted or deserved. Fortunately, they were interrupted by a console in the central column of the dashboard bleeping at them urgently, in a way that reminded Ethan of the mobile PVSM devices that the UEC often had strapped to their arms.

  Maria leaned forward to check the display panel, while steering with one hand and periodically glancing up to avoid crashing into anything.

  “I thought this thing could drive itself?” asked Ethan, gripping the door handle tightly as the crawler started the snake from one side to the other.

  “I prefer to be in control,” said Maria, continuing to navigate one-handed.

  “Can you be in control with both hands, please?!” shouted Ethan, as they narrowly missed a tree.

  Summer laughed. “Relax, planetsider! I can pilot space fighters with my eyes closed; I think I can handle a little surface crawler.”

  “There aren’t any trees in space so how about keeping your eyes open?!” Ethan’s voice was becoming increasingly agitated and high-pitched.

  Maria pressed herself back into the seat and thrust her foot on the brakes, causing the crawler to stop almost instantly as the four tracked wheels bit into the dirt. If Ethan had not been holding on so tightly, the force resulting from the rapid deceleration might have propelled him out of the cabin completely.

  Maria leaned forward and studied the information on the display, while Ethan braced himself against the metal frame, gripping it so tightly that his knuckles were milk white.

  “The probe has picked someone up; it could be our man, so I’m sending it down for a closer look,” said Maria. Then she noticed Ethan’s spider-like sprawl in the next seat and raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t make it past the first week of flight training,” she added, smiling.

  Ethan relaxed his vice-like hold on the crawler and shook his hands to help the blood to circulate again. “With moves like that, I’m amazed you did.”

  Maria rolle
d her eyes, and then the console bleeped again.

  “What is it now?” said Ethan, who was beginning to regret agreeing to this journey.

  “It’s a radiation warning.” Maria glanced at Ethan and could see that his good mood had suddenly vanished.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “It’s fine, I just need to med up.”

  Ethan watched Maria take a box out of a compartment next to the steering column, pop it open and remove an injector. But instead of immediately pressing it to her neck, she rested it on her lap, and removed two small probes, which she attached to the skin on her arm with self-adhesive pads. Ethan had forgotten that, unlike Aster, Maria wasn’t wearing a PVSM, and his concern grew.

  Maria remained focused on the small metal casing, which had a simple version of the PVSM’s vital signs monitor built into the inside lid. It flashed up a graphical readout with some numbers, which Maria studied closely, before removing the probes and packing them away again. She adjusted a setting on the injector, closed her eyes and then pressed it to her neck. The muscles in her face twitched as the injector hissed and delivered the vital anti-radiation meds into Maria’s bloodstream.

  Ethan couldn’t help but notice that this time the ‘hiss’ seemed to last longer than he remembered, though he couldn’t be sure. “Tell me the truth, Sal,” he said, feeling his heart-rate start to climb, “are you in danger out here? More danger than usual?”

  “I’m okay, Ethan, don’t worry,” said Maria, though in truth she couldn’t be certain of the effects of prolonged exposure to the higher levels of radiation that were present since the space station fragment had crashed into the city. “The levels around here are high, but I’ve stepped up the meds to compensate.”

  “How much more of that stuff do you have?” Ethan asked.

  Maria placed the injector pack in her trouser pocket and looked at Ethan. She considered telling him a lie, but there had already been enough lies between them, so she replied honestly. “A few more days. Perhaps a week if I’m careful, and stay out of these higher-toxicity areas.”