Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  When Nash finished his story, he could tell that Stratos had a hard time believing the story too, as if he had opened a novel to find a handful of pages torn out. But if Stratos suspected that there was more to the story, he didn’t ask about it. And this warmed Nash because he needed to see a friend in the mirror of Stratos’ eyes. No matter how their lives started, and how long they spent lost in their labyrinths, they met each other aboard a frigate in the middle of space, and Nash thought there had to be a reason for this. He thought this, not realizing that sometimes things just happen for no reason at all. But Nash saw a miracle where others saw a coincidence, and he built his faith on that shaky foundation.

  ***

  Nash tried to sleep, but it was hard. Even though it had been weeks since he woke from his cryogenic coma, he was still struggling to even close his eyes. Part of him wondered if this was from fear, since the cryogenic well with its hydrogen sulfide had almost killed him. Another part of him wondered if it was from the exhaustion that comes from sleeping. After all, he had been asleep for about two years, enough rest to get him through the next decade of his life.

  Whatever the reason, Nash found himself turning in his sleeping bag, which was pinned to the wall of the cabin. In the saltwater of space, where everything floats, it didn’t make a difference how he slept. He hungered for gravity in his life – he was tired of being a bird damned to never landing on the ground.

  And since he couldn’t sleep, he had to keep his paranoid thoughts company like a good friend. Back on Earth, the scientists had dug a neural drive into the base of Nash’s skull, an operation as quick and painless as a bee sting. He could still remember being blinded by tears and screaming at them during the procedure, wondering why they couldn’t do it after he had slipped into the coma. The operation had been such agony, that he was only now beginning to appreciate the invention. The neural drive connected wirelessly with the ship’s computer, and it became his teacher during the voyage, pumping his brain with knowledge until he became soaked with genius.

  Nash had been told that every miner had gone through the procedure, because it was shown to be the most effective way to learn the art of quantum mining. The work was so complicated, the risks so disastrous, that the charter couldn’t take any chances. And so every miner spent his voyage to the colony being fed information, so that by the time they arrived, they would know what needed to be done.

  But Nash had been woken up before the memories could set, and already they were whispering away. Nash could almost feel the sand of those lessons slipping between his desperate fingers. He knew that he was fighting the army of inevitable, that by the time he sat down with the other quantum miners, he would be useless to them. It was as if he was waking up from a poem of a dream, and he was writing down the lyrics as quickly as he was forgetting them.

  And then he wondered if he could even blame his early awakening. It wouldn’t have been the first time he had failed at something. Everything that he had ever held – whether it was his wife or a pen to sign a business contract or the doorknob to his home – had soured and died. Sometimes, he couldn’t help but think that he was destined to be a leper of cancer, leaving behind pools of sick in his footsteps.

  Just then, Nash heard a breeze of voices. Curious, he glanced around the cabin to find the spring of talk. Pere was drifting in his sleeping bag anchored to the wall – Nash couldn’t tell through the dark if he was asleep. And that was when he saw that Stratos’ sleeping bag was limp, and Nash realized that his friend had vanished. Nash wriggled out of his sleeping bag and floated across the cabin, shivering as he glided. It took him a few moments to understand why the cabin was so cold – the frigate had shut down its engines.

  At first, Nash felt the familiar fear that he was going to die aboard the frigate. However, as he swam through the air, he saw that the door into the ship’s cockpit was slightly open, allowing a blade of light to slip into the cabin. As he pushed the door open, he found himself in a cockpit brimming with controls and lights. It was his first time in the brain of the ship, as the room was normally kept locked. Nash spotted Stratos seated at the controls, almost silhouetted against the circus of electric lights. Somehow sensing Nash behind him, Stratos turned and nodded. “You’re up – just in time, too.”

  “Why, what’s going on?” Nash asked. “Why did we stop?”

  Stratos pointed out the window and Nash looked. What he saw dropped his jaw like fine china. There was a planet up ahead, so massive that it spilled across the whole canvas of the glass. The planet sparkled with a silver richer than gold, and Nash was so mesmerized he didn’t see that the planet was actually two planets. Countless years before, the two planets Apollo and Diana had slammed into one another, and their magnetism was unbreakable. The Apollo side that faced its home star was madness boiling, while the Diana side that faced away was forever freezing. And still, in spite of being torn between two hells, Nash knew that a colony thrived somewhere deep in the arrhythmic heart of the planet.

  With a mock flourish, Stratos announced, “Welcome to the colony.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The frigate breathed over the planet for almost an hour before the first of the launches arrived. Small darts that flew on bursts of starlight just like the frigate, the launches were more than just speedy transports for personnel. They were also built for hauling cargo, as tiny as they were. Nash watched, fascinated, through the frigate’s cameras as large tubes were ejected from the ship’s cargo hold. They had spent quite some time earlier in the cargo hold, loading every shelf of goods into the yawning tubes with a miniature crane. There were seven tubes altogether, and they were torpedoed from the ship as easily as an oil slick.

  As each tube floated off into the black of space, two launches danced around it and magnetically latched onto either side of the tube. Nash looked on as the fused launches rocketed back down to the planet, with their cargo between them. Nash couldn’t see it from where they orbited, but the launches would then lower the tubes down the tunnel, the throat of Janus. It was a slow fall from the surface down to where the colony was planted, in the pit of the planet’s stomach. From there, the tube was lowered onto a conveyor belt that ran below the dock, hauling the tons of goods past the barriers and into the colony itself.

  The whole process was art, ready to be splashed with jets of blood. Each launch had a fuel reserve of only thirty minutes – after that, the ship would run out of starlight and plummet down the hole as easily as dropping a wish into a well. And so the pilots had to be perfect, in ways that no one had ever thought before. The pilots were legends, with their stories walked and lived back on an Earth that they hadn’t seen in years.

  And so, as one of the launches docked against the frigate, Nash was relieved that he was floating. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to stand in front of a champion: strong and looking them in the eye, or weak and looking at their feet. It was at that second that he realized something – he hadn’t stood up in over two years, and he wondered if he could even stand at all anymore.

  A door slid open behind them, and Nash turned to find a gorgeous woman with ice cream skin and long hair dipped deep in sepia colors. She had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, the bob swaying lazily above her like a buoy in the harbor. The look on her face was hard, though, like a marble statue that feels cold in the mornings.

  While Nash had no idea who the woman was exactly, Stratos made his way across the cockpit and shook her hand. “Captain Joyce, I assume?”

  “You assume correct…”

  “Auditor Stratos,” he prompted.

  “Of course. If you and your men are ready, I’ll escort you to the colony.”

  The men nodded and followed Joyce through the cabin. As Nash looked over his shoulder and saw Pere floating just behind him, he realized that this was the first time he had ever seen the silent man not laying down. As they made their way down the long hallway towards the docked launch, Joyce asked, “I thought you were bringing three men with you, Auditor
Stratos.”

  “I was, until life happened.”

  Joyce nodded solemnly. “Life does happen. Where’s the body?”

  “It’s in one of the cargo tubes.”

  “We’ll arrange a funeral. It’ll be nice,” Joyce said, as if she had said it before.

  As Joyce and her passengers squeezed through the hatch and into the launch, Nash suddenly felt clumsy. Everywhere he turned, there was a crate. He swore as his knee connected with the edge of one, and his blood ignited. As he rubbed the feeling back into his leg, Joyce said, almost comically late, “Watch out for the crates.”

  “You run a tight ship here, Captain Joyce,” Nash said, trying to make a joke. Either Joyce didn’t catch the joke or didn’t care, because she continued to strap herself into her chair without looking back. Nash followed suit, feeling as alone as someone whose joke falls through the floor.

  The glide from the frigate to the planet was a short one, taking no more than a few minutes. As the planet bloomed in the window, Nash could feel himself leave his own body and that ship of solitary confinement. Most works of art could only be appreciated from a distance – like a painting, which should be viewed from a few feet away. Any closer, and the painting is little more than flakes of paint, crackling into honeycombs.

  But the closer they got to the planet Janus, the more stunning it became. The planet was two-faced: the Apollo hemisphere that faced the sun burned like a candle, while the Diana hemisphere looked into the abyss, its face glazed like coal. If only Nash had known his Roman mythology, he would have understood why the explorers years before had named the planet Janus, after the two-headed god of beginnings and endings. And while the Apollo side had its atmosphere burned away long ago, the Diana side was just cool enough for a fragile atmosphere to form.

  And against that atmosphere, like a projector screen, movies of auroras were playing out. While the planet looked dead from the outside, its core of liquid hydrogen was spinning fast enough to induce a magnetic field. As the countless charged particles blanketed the planet, the solar wind from Carina rained against the magnetic field, with the auroras being the ripples. Nash had once seen an aurora back on Earth, but it was wispy and fleeting. Here, the lights were sharp, like sparks jumping off a cliff of flint. The launch dove through one tapestry of color so strong, it was like the shake of cherry branches in the spring wind.

  As they flew through the paints, Joyce reached up with one hand and flicked a switch on the overhead console. A stretched, mechanical warbling filled the cabin, as if it was a choir of engines singing. But as Joyce tuned the knobs on the overhead, the fog of sound cleared and a sweet chirping filled the air. It took Nash a few moments to realize that he was hearing birds – it had been so long since he had heard their calls.

  Realizing that she owed the debt of an explanation, Joyce said, “When an aurora plays over the radio, it sounds like songbirds from my childhood. It helps me remember.”

  Nash felt a twist in his stomach, because it made him remember too. He may have left the world when it was looking like Greek ruins, but it was still beautiful like Greek ruins. His exile to the colony as a worker was a punishment worse than death. At least in death he would have been buried in the soft dirt. Here, if he died, he would be covered with stones. This made him think of Vita, and how the poor man was going to have a funeral that he didn’t deserve, being buried under a pile of rock by people who didn’t even know him. Nash was so tormented by the thought, the birdcalls of the auroras dimmed away for him, almost as if the song realized that he wasn’t listening. Perhaps this was for the best – after all, the eerie symphony sounded like the siren song from antiquity, beckoning the sailors to where the jagged rocks sat in the water, the point of no return. But the launch was still flying into the rock, whether or not Nash was listening.

  As the ship entered one of the planet’s many hydrogen veins, Nash felt a sudden spasm of cold claustrophobia. The tunnel was a tight fit for the ship, but the pilot didn’t seem to notice. If anything, Joyce accelerated, dodging the jutting rocks and sudden twists like art. The soft amber light in the cabin suddenly switched to a soft strawberry red. Joyce said in her calm voice, “We’re operating on our reserve right now, since we aren’t exposed to direct starlight.”

  “Have you ever been close to losing your reserve power?” Nash asked, immediately wishing he hadn’t posed the question.

  Joyce laughed for the first time since they had met. “You’re going to have to grow some faith, sir. I’m not going to be burying us today.”

  “Burying us…?” Nash asked.

  Stratos turned in his seat. “They bury their dead at the bottom of the pit.”

  “Oh – I guess I still have a lot to learn.”

  What Stratos didn’t mention was that they threw their trash into the pit as well. But in one of his rare moments of humanity, Stratos figured that Nash wouldn’t appreciate hearing that, and so he kept silent for his new friend.

  Joyce swiped her hands across the water panels on the control panel. At her touch, the launch began to slow down, while simultaneously pitching up from vertical to horizontal. Nash and the other two passengers inhaled sharply as the g-forces punched them in the stomach. But if Joyce had felt the same maneuver, she didn’t show it. Instead, she announced into the radio, “Dock, Ship Nu is descending and requesting clearance.”

  “Clearance granted, Captain Joyce – it’s all yours,” a voice crackled over the radio.

  Nash was so busy exhaling the sickness out of his veins that he didn’t notice the ship was hovering at a standstill. But after a few moments, he looked out through the window and saw that they were frozen in the air, dangling on wires that weren’t there. Nash looked forward and saw the dock just ahead, sticking out of the rocky wall like an impaled spear. Joyce twisted her right hand in one water panel and swiped backwards with her left hand in the other panel. The ship responded in kind, turning around and gliding backwards towards the dock. Guiding herself just by a lone camera on the back of the launch, Joyce was able to set the ship down on the dock without a bump.

  Joyce turned back to the passengers. “We’re going to have to go through the cargo bay door,” she apologized. “Usually, crew walks through the hollow inside of the dock, but they’re repairing an air leak. Hope you gentlemen don’t mind being treated like cargo.”

  As Joyce shut down the engine and unstrapped herself from her seat, Nash noticed that she didn’t float away. They had flown so deep into the planet, the gravity was almost identical to what it was on the surface of Earth. Nash unbuckled himself and felt the thrill of being weighted down. After floating for years, the touch of gravity was a surreal miracle. As the pilot and her passengers made their way through the cabin, it was obvious who needed practice with walking. Nash tripped and fell to the floor hard, skinning the palms of his hands. As he stood up, using a chair for balance, Joyce said, “It takes a while to get used to.”

  Still, Nash felt embarrassed as he followed the others through the cargo hold and down the opened ramp. As they stepped onto the dock, Nash looked behind him, not understanding what it was he saw. The entrance into the pit was closed with a massive door of water. Through the shimmering water, Nash could see the lip of the dock, with the launch resting on it, the image distorted by the millions of drops. Entranced, Nash reached out as if to touch it. Joyce noticed and barked, “Please don’t touch the artwork.”

  “But how…?”

  “It’s a wonder, isn’t it? Our waterworks specialist and our lead scientist thought it up. They paired water molecules with neodymium, which is highly magnetic. From there, it was a simple matter of lining the opening with magnets to keep the water in place.”

  “What’s the point of it?”

  “It not only keeps oxygen from escaping the colony, but it neutralizes any hydrogen that flows up the pit. Best-case scenario, hydrogen that gets into the colony corrodes our metal. Worst-case scenario, the whole colony can go up in flames. At least that’s how ou
r scientist explained it – sometimes, I think he invents things just because he can. Now, let me introduce you to some of your co-workers.”

  “Where are they?” Nash asked, still staring at the water door with wonder.

  “Right here,” a gruff voice said, causing Nash to jump a bit. Nash turned and saw a trio of broken men standing nearby. They were leaning against the fresh crates, just delivered from the frigate. There was a narrow man with a beard of fire leaning against one of the crates. Sitting on top of another crate was a young man with metallic eyes and hair that was oak and capsized. And standing in front of them was the man with the gruff voice, with a polished head and a sorcerer’s goatee.

  “Ah, the new recruits,” the polished man said, stepping forward. “It’s nice to meet you gentlemen – finally. My name is Wales Rego, Wales for short.”

  Wales offered his hand to greet each of the arrivals. Nash had another stumble for the day. He put out his left hand, mismatched for Wales’ right. Embarrassed, Nash began to retract his hand when Wales, his eyes crackling with understanding, extended his left hand and pumped Nash’s palm. “Finally, I shake hands with a left-handed man! I haven’t met a southpaw since I was back on Earth.”

  “There are no left-handed people here?” Nash asked, surprised.

  Wales chuckled. “No, so I hope you don’t have to use a pair of scissors while you’re here.” Wales looked back at the two miners standing by the crates. “Now, come on over and meet your new friends!”

  The two miners walked over hesitatingly, as if pulled by some leash that Wales had on them. As they sullenly shook hands, Wales introduced them. “Gentlemen, meet Alaois Dart and Brutus Coil.”