Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  But they had other answers to their problem. Officer Roux had the idea of starting a rumor and spreading it thickly over the colony. And that was what the guards did, telling the other colonists that Latch had Armfelt’s murderer in her grasp. But Latch had let the murderer go, after the monster told his side of the story and Latch felt sorry for him. Within just a few days, the entire colony had become infected by the story. They accepted the blatant lie as being a truth, because the Latch they knew was too kind and forgiving.

  What little respect the colony had before for its security chief plummeted as a result. When the good people spoke her name, the word was sour and disgusting. When the bad people spoke her name, the word was reverent and hushed. The criminals knew that if they were caught, they had an ally in Chief Latch, who was soft and could be molded by their pleas for mercy. It was not long after that one of the colony’s oldest citizens – a respectable and respectful man – had been found robbed and stabbed to death behind the Connections. The Golden Age was over, and the colonists were now in the cold fever of their Iron Age.

  ***

  The night Armfelt died began just like any other night for him. He clambered up the ladder to his cliffhanger home, exhausted from a long shift at the Sanctions. Once he reached the ledge and entered his apartment, he retracted the ladder and locked the thick door behind him. His years of service had bred the paranoia in him to be strong.

  He walked through his cliffhanger and opened up the cabinet in his bathroom. He pulled out a box and unlatched it, revealing his secret store of cigars. He took out his knife and cut the cigar, humming a vague tune as he did so. Armfelt closed up his humidor and carefully stored it back in the cabinet. That was when he noticed that there was a trickle of water tumbling out of the faucet. He thought that was odd – he thought he turned off the faucet before he left for work. He shrugged to himself in the mirror and twisted the faucet knob, killing the water. He then pulled his lighter out and flicked it on.

  A short distance away, Latch was standing on the roof of the Sanctions. Her hands strangling the railing, Latch looked out across the colony, at the little window into Armfelt’s cliffhanger. The light that had seeped from the window had been soft and amber since she had watched Armfelt step inside. The moment was coming soon when light would end.

  And then it came: there was a sunburst that exploded in the cliffhanger. The light shot out of the apartment window like a beam of sunshine through the clouds. The flash died away barely two seconds later, replaced by a deep, dark glow. Latch stood in silence for almost ten minutes, watching the fire beyond that tiny window like observing hell through a telescope. The apartment was made of stone, and the fire would soon starve to death, but not before burning away all of the evidence – just as Latch had hoped.

  Just earlier that day, she had entered the Waterworks, the tiny building tucked to the side that was responsible for recycling the air and water for the colony. She informed the sole specialist there, Paz Foxfire, that she was there to conduct a surprise audit of the facility. Foxfire, like everyone else, was allergic to an audit, but he could never see himself saying no to Latch. Per regulation, Foxfire had to stand outside while Latch took a self-guided tour of the Waterworks, her checklist in hand.

  But as soon as she closed the door and she was all alone, Latch dropped the act. She walked over to the computer, and she opened up the program that handled the creation and distribution of water to the colony. The Waterworks had the remarkable talent of mixing together the planet’s natural stores of hydrogen and oxygen, pressurizing the fusion of elements until they formed drops of water. With just the press of a few buttons, Latch redistributed the mixture so that the facility was now pumping straight hydrogen into the pipe that ran to Armfelt’s cliffhanger. She entered a command so that the distribution would terminate in exactly four hours, at which time the system would return to normal.

  After the audit, Latch walked over to Armfelt’s home. Knowing that the security chief was at the Sanctions, Latch was left free to pull down the ladder and climb up to the cliffhanger. At the ledge, she swiped her universal magnetic card against the front door to unlock it. The lock clicked and she entered the home without a second’s delay – being second-in-command of the guard force had its privileges. She went into the bathroom and turned on the faucet. No water came out, which was a good sign. The hydrogen was now leaking into the house, forming a hovering cloud that couldn’t be seen or smelled or tasted.

  Latch left the house, taking care not to leave any evidence behind that she was there. And that was it – that was all she needed to do to commit the perfect murder. Because she knew that when Armfelt would light his nightly cigarette in the bathroom, it would ignite the hydrogen cloud that hovered just a few inches above his head. More than likely, he would be dead instantly, inhaling a sword of fire as the hydrogen erupted.

  As Latch stood on the roof of the Sanctions and watched the fire die down at Armfelt’s apartment, she suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of famine. It took a few moments for her to realize that she wasn’t hungry but empty. She had been planning the murder for so long, that she thought that she would be relieved when it finally worked.

  But her satisfaction was over even quicker than the fire. She then wondered if Armfelt had felt the same gnawing at his stomach whenever he had ordered criminals be executed for their crimes. She then wondered if she was any better than Armfelt ever was. Before, she could map out where his bad ended and her good began – but now she wasn’t so sure.

  Ara

  2199 AD

  Life a leaf diving between the branches, the launch descended the wormhole deep into the planet Janus. But no leaf could fall straight like a rock, and no leaf could brake its fall like the launch could. As the dock below surfaced from the high tide of the darkness, the launch began to slow until it was hovering just over the lip of the pier. There was no sound as the launch clicked into place with one of the airlocks with its powerful magnetic ring.

  The passengers onboard the launch exited through the airlock, clambering down a ladder into the hollow of the pier. Down the hall, they could see the heavy steel doors that stood guard over the colony. As their footsteps plodded down the hall, the miners yawned, their ears popping from the change in air pressure.

  As the miners opened the door and entered the colony, they could hear the rush of ocean. And while the noise was actually the crowds of workers walking between their shifts, like the ocean they too did not wait. It was a shrug of a homecoming that the miners had come to expect over the years. Some of the older miners could remember a time when their arrival back at the colony was met with cheers. After all, the quantum drills were the shine of humanity. Now, though, the parade of launches was met with an empty dock. If it wasn’t for the snap of their boots against the metal floor of the dock, the miners would have forgotten that they had existed.

  As they trudged along the lonely sidewalk into the colony, the distant crowds still sounded like the sea breaking against the shores. But there was also a note hidden in that symphony that sounded out-of-place. It wasn’t until they turned the bend in the sidewalk that they found that note. It was there, silhouetted against the glow of the canal, that they found one of their own, Trenton Pascal. With hair as slippery and dark as grease, the strands dirtying the shoulders of his uniform, Pascal looked like a man who didn’t care anymore. He had a beard he hadn’t bothered to shave in over a week, and his eyes had sunken into the quicksand of sleepless nights. Which was why the miners were surprised to see him so alive, jolting them with an outstretched trigger finger, his eyes mad. Against the soft oceans of the crowds, Pascal’s shouts were blasts of water through the trumpets of seashells. The miners were caught off-guard by the surrealism of it all.

  “Just because we share a father…” Pascal jabbed his thumb at the colony behind him “…doesn’t make us brothers!”

  The miners halted in front of Pascal, making sure to keep their distance. There was something escaped in his
eyes that shook their souls. At the same time, though, there was the human instinct to cage the wild.

  One of the miners, the wise and old Rego, asked, “What are you on about, Trenton?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about! You all think you’re going to drag me into this little union of yours? I’ve heard you all talk about it – you worship it in whispers like it’s already more powerful than the charter.” Pascal laughed bitterly. “But it’s like you said, Wales, the union shines through its numbers. Well, you’re not dragging me down to brighten it up!”

  The fact that no one else had come out to protest with Pascal said a lot. None of the colonists had even stopped to watch the conversation escalate. It was burning obvious that none of the colonists cared about the union, or the miners for that matter. If anything, though, the fact that Pascal was alone only fed him even more bravery.

  Dart, the timid miner, had been standing behind the wall of his fellow miners during the exchange. Finally, he peered through the cracks between the shoulders and asked, “What did we ever do to you?”

  “What?” Pascal was a bear trap, causing Dart to shrink back with a yelp.

  Sonya Canto wasn’t afraid, though. She had the smooth curves of carpentry but her words were scratchy and pointed. “I think what our little Dart was trying to say, was why even bother stopping us? You can’t stop us from forming a union. And yet, here you are, acting like a damn fool, when there are a million other ways you can waste your time and suck up our oxygen.” She scoffed. “All you’re doing is messing up a sunny spring day.”

  She waved her hand at the dim cave around them – the colony was burrowed deeper than sunshine could ever pierce. They had no idea what season it was back on Earth. On Janus, where the planet’s rotation was shallow, there was only one season and it didn’t deserve a name.

  Rego shook his head. “Don’t go asking him questions now.”

  Canto turned on Rego. “And why’s that?”

  “The more answers you squeeze out of Trenton here, the more we’re only going to question ourselves. It’s not healthy. Wait until the union can take a hit like that.”

  Canto’s face looked calm, but her right fist was shaking. She had knocked the blood out of more than one man before, and she wanted nothing more than to knead Pascal’s face. There was something strange going on, and she wanted her answers in the only way she knew how. But Rego made sense to her, and so she loosened her fist – Canto didn’t dare turn away, though.

  But where Canto held back, Turtle Bach rushed forward. A little man with a silvered beard and curly oak hair, Bach’s impish smile still shined through the explosion of hair. While everyone else in the group hated Pascal for his betrayal, Bach was amused. And so he played against Pascal in what he thought was just a game.

  Stepping in between the warring armies, Bach turned his back on Pascal and faced his brothers and sister. He bunched his right hand into a fist and slammed it into his left palm repeatedly, as if gaveling them into silence. He raised his arms and said with the voice of mock authority, “I am now calling another session of the miner’s union into order! After reviewing the minutes of our last meeting, I feel that we are not going far enough in our demands. Asking for a few more rations during the holidays is child’s play! Wanting a few more breaks during the workday is petty! Wanting a say in how we work is trivial! No, we have to be bold! I say we ask for eternal life! Virtual food so that we can eat without getting fat! Boats so that we can kayak in the canals! Who’s with me?”

  In spite of the tempers brewing, and how annoying they often found Bach, the other miners couldn’t help but laugh. Pascal, though, didn’t even crack a smile – he was still a statue of resentment, his eyes still a frozen wilderness. Suddenly, he found the words he had been looking for. “Everything you could have ever wanted, the charter’s already provided!” Pascal sputtered. “Anything more is greed!”

  Bach turned to face Pascal. Bach inhaled his laughter and asked, “So what is it exactly that the charter gave you, Trenton? Just months ago, you were for this little union of ours. I want to know: whatever it was the charter offered you, what was so tempting about it to make you turn hypocrite?”

  ***

  2198 AD

  As Pascal sat down at his control pad at Harbor for the first time, he found himself looking into the future and but thinking of the past. He remembered from his childhood back on Earth, how he had found an elderly piano in the ruins of an apartment building. The piano was as broken and beautiful as the world was to him.

  The control pad looked the same but different, like a pair of identical strangers. The wide screen in front of him was designed like sheet music, with the field of staff lines waiting for the seed of notes to be planted. Pascal was wearing his magnetized gloves, and his hands were hovering over the water panel.

  His job was to type out instructions in the iron water, which would then be illustrated on the screen in front of him. The pitch of the note he wrote translated into the rotation of the levels aboard one of the quantum drills. The lower the pitch, the slower the level rotated, and the fewer electrons the drill inhaled. This was a useful and very necessary technique during high solar activity – otherwise, the drill would burn out from absorbing too much plasma at once. Likewise, when the star Carina calmed down, Pascal had to spin the level faster, in order to speed up the drill and force more energy out of the star. The solar forecasts they received from the buoys could only predict the activity a half-hour in advance. And so Pascal and all of the miners were forever composing songs, striking balances with their pickaxes, all to craft masterpieces no one could ever hear.

  The screen was dim – his shift would not begin for a few more seconds. This was the moment he should have been prepared for. Ever since he had left Earth a few years before, Pascal had been learning everything possible about the quantum drills, all while sleeping in his cryogenic chamber. The neural implants stuck to his head pumped his brain with lessons about his work. But even with all of that schooling, Pascal was terrified. What if he were to fumble? How much chaos could he create with one misplaced note on the screen? All it took was one note that was an octave too high, and one of the quantum drills could spin apart into pieces.

  The screen suddenly brightened in front of him – it was time. He held his breath and dipped his fingers into the water panels. As he typed, he wasn’t sure if his hands were slick from the water or from a nervous sweat. The notes began popping up on the screen in front of him, almost as if he were leaving behind a trail of footprints as he walked through the song of his work. It took him almost twenty seconds to realize that he hadn’t breathed since he began his shift. He gasped for air.

  In spite of the fact that everything appeared fine on the screen, Pascal was still worrying. There was the chance that he was missing something, and he couldn’t afford that. In just minutes, the work he had composed would be fed into the quantum drill, and it would follow those instructions to the note for the next thirty minutes. He couldn’t bear the thought of the drill spinning out-of-control for that long. He had to make sure that he was right.

  And so Pascal turned to the miner who was sitting next to him and asked, “Hi, could I trouble you for a moment?”

  Sonya Canto stopped typing into the water panel and sighed. She turned and asked, “What do you want?”

  “Oh – I’m sorry. I just wanted to make sure I was doing this right.”

  “Well, tell me this: is this the part where I’m supposed to care?” Canto asked. Before Pascal had a chance to respond, Canto answered her own question. “No, no it’s not.”

  She looked away from the stunned Pascal and returned to her work. After a few seconds, though, she suddenly slammed one of her gloved hands into the panel, causing the water to splash out and onto the floor. She snapped, “You made me lose my focus! What makes you think that you’re more important than my focus?”

  Pascal withered like paper in the face of Canto’s fire. He tried to form words,
trying to apologize, but he wasn’t sure what it was he needed to apologize for. The fact that he wasn’t fighting back only made Canto angrier when it should have calmed her. She stood up, her chair tipping over, and stomped towards Pascal. She grabbed him by the collar and uprooted him from his chair. Canto pulled back her right arm, like the string on a bow, and Pascal closed his eyes, waiting for the pain.

  But nothing ever came. He opened his eyes to see that a man had grabbed Canto by the arm, tripping her momentum. Pascal’s savior was a lean man, with the beginnings of a beard and wavy, dark hair, like rivers at the bottom of the ocean. Pascal hadn’t met the man before, but there was something in his silence that spoke power. All the man did was simply nod at Canto, who loosened her grip on Pascal and walked back to her chair.

  The man motioned Pascal towards the door out into the hallway and said simply, “Follow me.”

  With his knees shaking, Pascal did as commanded. As the two men walked towards the door, the man turned back and said, “Dart, you finished early. You’re going to pick up where Pascal left off.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  As they left the bridge, Pascal realized that it was too quiet. He glanced back and immediately regretted doing so. Every miner seated in the bridge was looking at him, their eyes crackling silently. He wondered who else, besides his mysterious protector, would have bothered rescuing him from Canto.

  They walked a ways down the hallway before the man stopped Pascal. Pascal turned, expecting the man to punish him somehow for causing the scene, although he was the victim. Instead, the man just grinned. “The first time I meet someone, it’s never good either. Here’s to hoping this introduction is a good one though. I’m Craig Tumbler – I’m a floor manager here.”