Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  That was because, as Canto settled back in her chair, her brain still furious, she needed to redirect her fury. And so she thought about the star, and how it had betrayed them by not only jumping to its death but also dragging them down with it. But it didn’t make sense – the star was as good as a god to the colony, and a god only died when the people stopped believing in it. And the colonists had never betrayed Carina – if anything, they had entrusted it with everything they held dear, until the star had become the colony’s warm heart.

  And that was when an impossible thought sprouted in the rich dirt of her mind. She was startled by the thought – for the second time that day, she wasn’t sure how to process something – and all she could do was watch as the thought quickly grew up. She had to confirm her suspicions somehow, and that was when she unstrapped herself from her chair and floated across the cabin.

  Thaden, who heard Canto unbuckling her harness, turned and warned, “Stay in your seat.”

  Canto ignored Thaden and anchored herself to a monitor on the wall. She tapped on the screen and it immediately illuminated, revealing the operating system for the mining operations. Harbor and the launches all spoke with one another through the system, and while the black hole would have disrupted the communications, the system should still have been preserved through a backup. And she found the last backup of the system to have been just a few minutes before Carina’s collapse. Canto tapped through the menus impatiently – as she did this, Coil was looking at her curiously, not sure what to say.

  After a few seconds, Canto found what she was looking for: the surveillance footage from the quantum drills. She ransacked the database until she found the video clip that she was looking for. She started the video and watched, her hands gripping tightly to the monitor. His curiosity having finally gotten the better of him, Coil unbuckled himself as well and hovered in the air behind Sonya. Together, they watched the moment from earlier in the day, when Nash had fumbled at the controls, causing the new drill to overheat and blast heat from its forward exhaust.

  The moment that the particles were ejected, Coil could have sworn that he saw something else shoot out of the drill, something that was dark but still shined. “What was that?” He wondered out loud.

  Sonya rewound the clip and paused it. She zoomed in on the drill, and they saw that it was something resembling an artillery shell made of glass. At first, they thought that the glass was black. But then Canto zoomed in closer, and they could see something resembling a liquid inside of canister, sloshing about. Canto started playing the clip again, and they watched in silence as the shell darted towards the star, propelled by the explosive exhaust. They looked on until the shell disappeared into the star, and Coil thought that was the end of it.

  But Canto fast-forwarded the video, her nervous hands leaving behind sweat on the touchscreen. As she did this, a horror movie played out on the screen. The region of the star where the bullet had hit immediately blotched. As it darkened, cracks began to appear, like asphalt crumbling in the summer. And whatever the sickness was, it was contagious, as it quickly spread across the face of the star like leprosy. In minutes, the star was black and crackled, ready to collapse. Somehow, whatever was shot into Carina froze the oven at the core of the star – without the heat pushing out, the gravity at the surface pushed in, causing the star to shrink into a black hole.

  As Sonya stopped the video, a stunned Coil asked, “Did we just see what I think we saw?”

  “I don’t think we were supposed to see that,” Canto said, fury surfacing in her voice. She turned slowly towards Nash, who was still sleeping in his chair, unaware of what was about to happen.

  ***

  Nash was woken up by a hand latched around his throat.

  He was ripped out of his seat and thrown against the wall behind him. As Nash bounced off the wall, he cradled his throat in his hands, gagging from being choked. Canto was floating over him like the angel of wrath, with fury stoked in her eyes. Nash had never seen anger like this until the moment he looked up at her.

  “What…?” Nash gasped, his throat still raw.

  “You destroyed the star!” Canto screamed, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him. “And you thought you could get away with it too! But we have the proof, and we’re going to bury you with it!”

  With that said, Canto dragged Nash through the cabin towards the cargo hold at the back. As she did this, she ignored Thaden’s demands for order. Nash struggled to break free, but Canto’s grip was surprisingly strong. Once in the hold, Canto pressed Nash against the wall, her hand like a bear trap closing on his throat again. As Nash squirmed, Canto took a spool of cable – used by the miners on their spacewalks as a tether – and spun it around Nash’s neck. As Canto wrapped the other end of the cable over a pipe running overhead, Nash realized that she was actually trying to hang him.

  A few seconds later, Coil entered the hold as well, dragging along Pere. It was apparent that they weren’t going to trust any of the miners who had arrived on the last frigate – Nash could only wonder what they were doing to Stratos at that moment.

  While Canto seemed to be enjoying herself, Coil only played along half-heartedly, with a look of regret painted on his face. Alexander, who as usual was so quiet that Nash had forgotten he was even onboard the launch, did not resist the limp grasp that Coil had on his collar. Coil pressed Pere down into one of the jump seats and tied Pere’s hands to the back of the chair.

  When Coil turned and saw that Sonya was trying to strangle Nash, he said sharply, “Stop it!”

  Canto turned and glared at him. “You saw what he did!”

  “I did, but how can he explain himself if you keep choking him?” Coil asked. Even through the blinding headache induced by the lack of air, Nash saw what his new friend was trying to do. Coil was stalling for time, trying to find some way to keep Nash alive. At least, that’s what Nash was hoping for.

  Whatever Coil’s intentions were, Sonya seemed to agree. She scowled and loosened the cable’s jaws from Nash’s throat. Nash coughed violently, suddenly drowning on the rush of air into his dry lungs. “How could I have destroyed the star?” He asked.

  /”You used the drill to fire something into the star,” Coil said. “We saw it on the surveillance footage. Whatever you shot into the star, it made it collapse.”

  After years spent trying to help the world get back up on its feet only to fall himself, to set people free only to become enslaved himself, to have the miners accuse him of being a monster was the final straw. Nash lunged forward, wanting to share his pain with the miners. But Canto was expecting this, and she yanked back hard on the cable. The vice around Nash’s neck immediately squeezed, and Nash was pulled back, gasping for air. Nash struggled to free himself from the noose, but Canto cracked him so hard in the stomach that Nash thought that he was falling apart.

  As Nash squirmed in mid-air from the pain, like a butterfly pinned to a display while still alive, Canto looked like an executioner unmasked. She snapped, “If that’s your defense, then you’re a terrible lawyer. What’s the point of even having a trial? I say we get straight to the point.”

  Canto wrapped the cord around her arm, prepared to give one mighty heave that would pull Nash up to the pipe and strangle him against the ceiling. She asked, “Any last requests?”

  “No,” Nash said stiffly. If humanity was willing to forget about him, then he was willing to forget about humanity.

  Before Canto pulled back on the cable, Puzzle’s voice sprang from the cabin.

  “Sonya!” The radioman shouted. “Don’t kill him! You won’t believe what I’m hearing from the other ship!”

  INTERMISSION C

  2199 AD

  As Nash waded in the river of steel, he wondered what he had done to deserve his little hell. Almost a hundred feet above, the city of Dauphin had lived on, forgetting that he had ever existed, as easily as a person forgets about their marrow. And Nash was living deep in the bones of the city, his world now the a
bandoned subway lines that once ferried souls to work.

  Once, those subway lines ran like busy veins beneath the skin of New York City. But when the floods came in the 21st century and the people fled, the only thing that waited on the banks of the subway stops was silence. The tunnels turned into caves, and the rush of water washed away the sins of graffiti. Even when the flood waters receded years later, the tunnels stayed as temples to solitude.

  But then Storia rose to power and dove into the tunnels. He bought up the ribbons of subway lines that fluttered from Old Manhattan out to Old Queens. It was east of the city where Storia had his ports, funneling goods and bads into Dauphin. Within just a few years of purchasing the tunnels, Storia had maglevs – bullet trains that floated on tracks of magnets – hauling freight from the ports to the markets in the city. The maglev system’s record time was completing the 11-mile run in just over two minutes.

  But even the trains of tomorrow have trouble staying on-time. As the train curved around a bend in the tunnel one morning, a warning squawked in the locomotive. The train glided to a stop as the jaws of the tunnel were closed ahead. It was a cave-in, the second one that week. The conductor gave an order over the intercom and the worker ants streamed out of the train, with shovels and drills in hand.

  And that was where Nash found himself, walking along the sole steel rail towards the collapse. There were over two dozen others just like him, all broken toys, and not one of them said a single word as they walked. Perhaps they didn’t want the walls to echo their words back to them – they didn’t want to hear the shrunken voices that they had become.

  As Nash walked, he felt something sprinkle on his head. It had been almost a year since he had been sent into the tunnels, where he could never feel the baptism of rain again. For a mad moment, he thought that it was actually raining deep beneath the earth. But it was actually a shower of dirt, knocked loose by the rippling train behind them.

  As Nash looked up at the earthen ceiling, he realized for the first time that he was buried deeper than graves. If he had died when he had a chance to, he would have been closer to the city and what he loved than where he stood now. After everything in the past few years – after all of his businesses failed, after Zara had left him, after her father had enslaved him to pay off his debts – this was the first time that Nash had sincerely wished that he was dead.

  While Nash tried to keep up with the group of slaves, his thoughts weighed him down and the ground between him and the others stretched. Nash just noticed and was about to catch up when he noticed something out of the edge of his eye: the dark mouth of a tunnel heading in a southerly direction. Most people would have looked into the eye of the tunnel and invented their dooms. But where some saw death, Nash saw life. The bird inside of him wanted to flee down the tunnel, never looking back on the shipwreck of his life. He didn’t even care if the tunnel was a parade into the wastelands of the south.

  But there was a reason why he and the other slaves were not chained. There was no need to, not when each of them had a tracking device implanted deep inside of their body. Nash could run, but he would be lucky to be free for hours, even minutes. No matter where he went, how far he ran, he was still enslaved. For him, the entire world was a prison. And still Nash walked towards the tunnel mouth, drawn like a moth towards its dark light. He wasn’t sure what answer he was trying to find, but he knew that it was there.

  In just a few moments, he tripped over his answer. He hit the ground hard, swearing as his knee crunched against steel – he had bad knees all his life, and that fall certainly didn’t cure them. He heard the music of a glass bottle rolling across the ground behind him. Nash turned and saw something odd in the pale light of the maglev. It wasn’t until he got closer that he realized what he was looking at. There were two corpses sprawled across the floor, each body drowned in a pond of rags and blankets. They looked as if they had been dead for at least a few years – the flesh was rotting off their faces like wax off candles. Even a hard life had not prepared him for that moment, and he felt the urge to vomit and so he did.

  As Nash kneeled on the ground, supporting himself with his shaking arms, he noticed a strange glint, like a rainbow that didn’t belong in the wormholes. He saw that it was the bottle that had rolled when he fell, the light from the train echoing off it. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Nash reached out with his other hand and picked up the bottle.

  The light was dim and the label was worn, but Nash realized that he was holding a bottle of pill brandy. The brandy was a notorious drink, a twist of raspberries and pears with a rich sprinkling of expired painkillers. It was a sight commonly seen outside of the cities, where the people had neither the access nor the credit to hospitals. Instead, they visited a local doctor, who poured them a glass of pill brandy before an operation with rusty tools. It was moonshine anesthesia, something that didn’t belong in the future. But the brandy was popular not only because it saved lives but it took them as well. Someone looking to commit suicide often did so with a few swigs of the drink. When compared to other means, it was a quick and painless way to go.

  Once, when he was younger, he found a book that had survived the world breaking apart decades before. In it, he read about the dreams that people once had – of having a family and owning a business and doing good for the world. He thought that society had expected this of him, but it appeared that he had expected too much of society. And so he had tried so hard to live up to that dusty dream, only to find that it had long since soured into a nightmare. And he figured that, if no one else cared, than neither should he.

  Nash pulled the cork out of the bottle and sniffed the fumes. The brandy’s smell was overwhelming, burning his eyes until they watered. He wasn’t sure if this meant the brandy was good or if it had gone bad. In another lifetime, this would have mattered deeply. But to Nash, inside of that second, this didn’t matter. He put the bottle to his lips and flicked it up, guzzling it until the glass was dry. He launched a raspy cough – it had been many years since he had drank alcohol. The coughing was so loud, Nash was afraid at first that he would be spotted. But the other slaves were so busy shoveling away the tunnel collapse, they didn’t notice.

  As Nash turned his back on the light and walked into the dark of the tunnel, he could feel the brandy already working. His legs were slippery underneath him, and he felt as if he was walking on ice. But here the ice was warm, as the brandy crackled in the fireplace of his soul. He was burning himself down, but he didn’t care. The same man who wanted to be remembered just a few years before now just wanted to be forgotten.

  CHAPTER 9

  2201 AD

  When Sonya and Coil had learned the truth about the star’s collapse, they had radioed the other launch just before they had captured Nash and Pere. Armed with this knowledge, the crew on Ship Upsilon had bound Stratos as well, but with deep regret. If they were to get out of this alive, they would surely die for holding a charter official against his will. But Canto said that the recent arrivals to the colony had the answers – they just needed some encouragement to talk.

  And that was how, with his wrists bound to the arms of his chair, Stratos found himself looking into the firing squad of miners around him. There was Wales, who was looking at him shrewdly, trying to find some crack between the charter official’s hide of lies. There was Iago Crane, who looked vindicated because all of the conspiracy theories he had about the charter seemed to be coming true. And there was Edmund Liber, the madman who was smiling and rocking back and forth in a nearby chair.

  “So you really think I had something to do with that black hole?” Stratos asked skeptically. “And what makes you think that?”

  “We don’t,” Wales admitted. “But the crew on the other launch says they have proof that David Nash was the one responsible. They have footage of him shooting a device into the star using the drill. Until we get to the bottom of this, we have to assume that you all are in on this together. I can’t see someone pulling this off
alone, not something this big.”

  Stratos laughed. “You think that David had something to do with this? For crying out loud, the second he was handed the reins, he almost blew up the drill. You really think he’s competent enough to collapse a star?”

  “You know, it’s funny that you should mention that,” Wales said slowly, “considering that you were the one who suggested he operate the drill. As a matter of fact, you insisted on it. And it’s convenient that the new breed of drill has a forward exhaust port, designed to drain out a laser of energy if the drill were to overheat.”

  Stratos shook his head. “You honestly think that I had something to do with that? If you’re so clever, tell me, what was my motive? Because I don’t know – all I know is that I love the charter for what it’s given me over the years. The charter took me off the streets when I was young, and they showed me what life should be like. I owe the charter my life. You think I would return the favor by destroying their largest source of income? The charter won’t admit to it, of course, but they’d be nothing without this colony. It’s like how a master is a slave to their slave. Believe me when I say I don’t have the answers, and I can tell you that Nash doesn’t either. But there is someone who does, and well, he doesn’t talk much.”

  Wales paused. “You’re talking about the new recruit, Alexander?”

  Stratos nodded. “I am.” He then gestured with his head towards the computer monitor mounted on the nearby wall. “Here, let me show you…”

  Wales wagged his finger. “No, we’ll have Iago log into the charter intranet for you. Iago?”

  Crane floated over to the monitor and booted up the system. When it came to the login screen, he looked back to Stratos expectantly. Stratos sighed and said, “I’ll give you my passcode on one condition: that you savages don’t hurt David. He’s stupid, but he’s not guilty.”