Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  “What makes you think they’re hurting him? Wales asked.

  “Did you already forget that wrecking ball of a woman is onboard with him? I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s already killed him.”

  Wales suddenly remembered this, and he glanced towards Pilot Blue, who was busy flying the launch and didn’t have time for an interrogation. “Tell Ship Delta to hold off on interrogating the arrivals. We’re getting our answers out of this one.” Wales looked steadily at Stratos and continued talking, “Apparently we have proof that David isn’t the culprit.”

  As Blue relayed the message to the other launch, Stratos reluctantly gave Crane his thirty-character passcode for the intranet. Greedily, Crane accessed the system, his eyes lit up like a Christmas tree: he now had access to the charter’s confidential information. He could exorcise all of the charter’s shadows by bringing them into the light of day. All of his theories could become fact. Wales suspected that this was running through Crane’s mind, because he said sharply, “Iago, stay on task.” He turned back to Stratos and asked, “Now what do we look up?”

  “Bring up the passenger manifest for the last frigate. Access the file for Alexander,” Stratos instructed.

  Crane did as he was told and brought up the file. Usually, the files kept on passengers were light, containing little more than the person’s medical history and prior occupation. And that was why Crane was surprised to see pages and pages of information under Pere’s name. And there was a variety of information too – not only was there a dense biography on the man, but there was also correspondence between charter officials, interviews, maps, and what looked to be surveillance photography.

  As Crane glanced through the pages, Stratos continued, “What you’re seeing right now is incredibly confidential – hell, even I would get executed if the charter ever found out about this. But whatever ideas you may have about Alexander are wrong – completely wrong. Believe it or not, he’s actually a spy, sent to us by the Gibraltar Charter. Officially, the records show that he is from Dauphin, when really he is from New Bruges. He used to be a fisherman with a love for gambling. His charter used that as a trap, forcing him into corporate espionage so that he could climb down from his mountain of debt.”

  “You knew he was a spy, and still you brought him along?” Wales demanded.

  Stratos shrugged. “We had no other choice. We couldn’t expose him without revealing our source in Gibraltar’s inner political circle. Besides, we quickly found out just how gullible he was. You wouldn’t believe all of the misinformation we’ve sent his way. Just a few years ago, he found out that a continental shelf off the coast of Amazon was useless, and so he passed it along to his people. Gibraltar was contesting it at the time, but when they found out it was barren, they dropped it. What they didn’t know was that the shelf was deep with minerals. Just think about it – the Europeans from centuries ago sailed to the old Americas, hearing about cities made out of gold. And they sailed right over the largest gold reserves in the world to chase after those myths.

  “But anyway, the charter decided to add a new dimension to the game by recruiting Alexander as a quantum miner. Gibraltar has been accusing us for years of holding back on the energy we’ve been sending them, which had resulted in some blackouts that were embarrassing for them. And so we sent Alexander here, to throw Gibraltar off the trail about our mining operation. The charter sent me along with him, to keep up the act of tricking him. That was when I found out the truth, that we’ve been feeding Gibraltar these fantasies for years and they’ve believed every word of it.”

  Wales’ eyes narrowed. He turned back to Crane. “Is all of this checking out?” He asked. Crane was so lost in what he was reading on the screen that Wales repeated, louder, “Is it checking out?”

  Startled, Crane said, “Yes, yes it is.”

  “When we recruited him as a miner, we thought that all he would be doing is conducting espionage. We never would have imagined that he was capable of sabotage, especially something on this scale.” Stratos paused, and then added, “Why don’t you go ahead and ask him. Ask him how his people were able to craft a device capable of destroying a star? How did they smuggle it here without our knowing? And why would they destroy the source of all electricity back on Earth – I mean, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. That little stunt that he pulled just threw all of Earth back into the medieval times.”

  Blue suddenly spoke up, “There’s no need for us to ask the questions, because I’ve had the radio on this entire time. The other launch heard every word you just said. Isn’t that right, Dmitry?”

  Puzzle’s voice crackled over the intercom, booming throughout the launch. “Yes, ma’am, we got every word loud and clear.”

  ***

  On Ship Delta, the crew was rocked by the story of Pere being a spy. After Puzzle spoke over the radio, there were a few moments of silence onboard, as the miners tried to process what it was they had just heard. And then the silence broke like a vase.

  Canto smashed her fist into Pere’s face, drawing blood, a lot of blood. Pere coughed up red clouds that floated above his head. If it wasn’t f or the fact that he was strapped to the jump seat, he would have surely been knocked to the side by the roar of Canto’s fist. But even with his face shattered by the punch, Pere didn’t say a single word – he didn’t even cry out from the pain. Instead, he looked blankly ahead, like a statue honoring the persecuted. Sonya was ready to strike again, when Coil grabbed her by the arm.

  “Stop!” Coil warned. “Doesn’t this all sound too fantastical?”

  Sonya looked wildly at him. “What do you mean?” She demanded. “You heard what they said! They have proof!”

  “I know they have proof, but don’t you want to know why he did it? Why he just destroyed our lives? Doesn’t he owe us that much?” Coil turned to Pere and asked in a voice that bordered on pleading, “Why?”

  More than anything else, all Coil wanted in that moment was an answer. But all Pere gave him was his rich silence. After a few moments, Sonya couldn’t wait anymore and she said, “I don’t know about you, but I’d say his silence sounds pretty damning.”

  The two miners were so concentrated on Pere, they had forgotten about Nash, who was left to twist in his noose across the room. Nash was about to stretch the cable enough to breath in a whisper of air. As his breathing returned to normal, Nash found his mind through the fog and looked on as Pere surrendered to his condemnation. Nash was on the edge of tears as he silently begged the silent man to defend himself. Regardless of whether the spy story was true or not, Pere had to defend himself at least. He couldn’t surrender to the accusations so easily. Nash hadn’t spent so many years of his life trying to help humanity stand up for them to sink even lower.

  But as loud as the protests were in Nash’s mind, he didn’t say a single word. He tried several times to stand up for the accused, but every time the words died on his lips. Nash soon realized why he was struck silent – if he said anything to defend Pere then surely the others would think he was in on the conspiracy. Billions of years of evolution – which had hardwired organisms to survive by any means necessary – told Nash to stay quiet. And while Nash still had a noose fitted around his neck, he felt as if he was part of the mob that was after Pere. Nash was learning a lot about himself in that moment, and everything he learned terrified him.

  “Let’s keep him alive until we get back to the colony,” Coil suggested. “Chief Latch is going to want to hear this story from him. Once we get him to talk, even Latch will want to execute him. We’ll make a show of it then – it’ll be nice. But we can’t kill him now, not like this – it wouldn’t be right, and you know that.”

  Canto looked conflicted for a moment, before she screamed in frustration and returned back to the cabin. Coil followed behind her before he stopped abruptly in front of Nash. He looked at Nash with deep regret.

  “David, I’m so sorry – we didn’t know if you were involved in this…”

  “J
ust let me down.”

  Coil nodded and said softly, “Okay.” He unraveled the noose enough for Nash to escape it. As David rubbed the feeling back into his neck, wincing from the bruises, Coil put a hand on his shoulder and guided him back into the cabin.

  As Nash quietly took a seat and strapped himself in, he noticed that Puzzle was hunched over the radio – the radioman was so absorbed, it was as if his work was in another dimension. Nash faintly wondered what it was Puzzle could possibly be doing, if the powerful black hole was interfering with any radio message that went out further than the launches.

  What Nash didn’t know was that Puzzle was performing a miracle of science. Every launch was fitted with an adjustable dish antenna, with the dish able to open and close like petals on a flower to change the antenna’s gain or strength. Puzzle had a tablet computer perched on the table next to him, with a star map open. He squinted as he glanced over the map, trying to find something that wanted to stay hidden. Then, finally finding what he was looking for, Puzzle’s face broke out into a smile. He made some adjustments to the antenna and prepared a message to be sent out.

  As he did this, Thaden noticed what he was up to and asked, “How are you going to get a message past the black hole’s interference?”

  “It’s simple really,” Puzzle explained. He pointed his finger out the window, to some distant point. “A few light-months that way, there is a giant planet that was found a while ago…”

  “You’re talking about Nix?” Thaden interrupted.

  Puzzle nodded. “One and the same. It’s an ice giant, its albedo so high that its surface can reflect anything within the electromagnetic spectrum – that includes visible light and radio waves…”

  Coil heard this and demanded, “Are you actually going to send a message to Earth by bouncing it off another planet?”

  Puzzle frowned at him. “Well, we’ve been doing it for centuries with the Moon back home, and its surface was never cooperative. Here, we’re talking about the perfect antenna, one the size of two Jupiters. Sure, the message will be delayed by a few months, but it’ll work – trust me.”

  And with that said, Puzzle typed out the rest of the message. The message had to be short, and so all it said was that a saboteur had collapsed the star into a black hole and requesting immediate assistance. He then fired the message out of the gun of the antenna, silently praying that the plan would work. He was so focused on ensuring that the signal would bounce off Nix, though, that he had made an error. Usually communication between the charter and the colony was encrypted, so that the rival charters would be unable to eavesdrop on their frequency. But Puzzle had forgotten to set the encryption for the communication, the first time in his life that he had done so. And while the radio transmission would bounce off Nix as intended and reach Earth as intended, its message would not only be heard by the Phoenix Charter but everyone else on Earth as well.

  CHAPTER 10

  It wasn’t until they had reached the cool side of the planet Janus that they were able to hail the colony over the radio. At first, the radio operator at the dock was caught off-guard by the sudden announcement that all of the surviving launches were going to be landing shortly. It had been years since all of the launches had been docked at the same time, since they normally ran on a rotating timetables. And then the operator heard the word “surviving” and began to panic. There’s no time to explain, the pilots said tiredly over their radios, just let us dock and have the leadership waiting for us.

  Ship Upsilon was the first to dock. As Pilot Blue connected the launch against the airlock at the end of the pier, she thought she saw something in the window above her. She looked up and saw the landing lights for another launch, the ship descending from the ceiling of darkness above like ball lightning. Through the glare of the lights, she could see the ship’s identification number printed across the bottom of the hull. It was Ship Nu, and Blue’s spirits leapt. She knew that Joyce wouldn’t have come back without rescuing Ysabel and her crew first.

  As Blue and her miners walked down the pressurized hallway in the hollow of the pier, the pier behind them rotated, providing an airlock for Ship Nu to land. As Joyce landed, she let the miners leave the ship first. She left reluctantly, afraid to report her first failure as a pilot – to her; she didn’t lose Winter until the second she had to say it out loud. She thought this, not realizing that sometimes the only way to conquer a fear was to say its name.

  As Joyce left her ship and walked down the long hallway alone, Ship Delta was the next one to land. As Thaden waited for the barrel beneath them to rotate and provide an airlock to land on, the pilot called back to Canto, “We’ll be landing in less than a minute. Get ready to escort Alexander to the Sanctions.”

  “With pleasure,” Canto said. As Canto got up and made her way towards the back of the launch, Coil wondered if Pere was going to make it to the jail alive. He had seen Sonya angry before, but not murderous. It was barely a second after she had entered the cargo hold that Coil heard her scream. He frantically unbuckled himself and rushed towards the back, thinking that Sonya was playing executioner. It wasn’t until he entered the hold that he realized that her scream wasn’t out of fury but out of frustration.

  They both looked across the room at Alexander, who was a statue in his jump seat. His head was pointing upwards and his mouth was open, as if he was calling out to his god. One of his arms, which were still tied to the back of the chair, was mangled and looked to be dislocated at the shoulder. His eyes were wide and electrified – they never looked more alive as they did in death.

  “How did that happen?” Sonya asked. “How did he die?”

  Coil made his way cautiously around Pere’s body, examining it without touching it. He looked at how the dislocated arm was positioned and glanced up at Sonya. “We’re going to need Dr. Bends in here, but you know what I think?”

  “What,” Sonya said flatly.

  Coil pointed at the restrained hands. “I bet you that he tried breaking free, but he popped his arm out of its socket. And the way his arms were positioned, it looks like the bone was pressing against his lungs. He suffocated trying to escape.”

  Sonya scoffed. “So he committed suicide trying to break free? I guess that’s the only way you can escape in a world like this.”

  “Well, look at it this way,” Coil shrugged. “At least he saved us having to execute him.”

  “You mean he cheated us out of being able to execute him,” Sonya said, the emotion creeping back into her voice.

  As the others made their way into the cargo hold, they saw the suicide’s body and looked down at the ground out of respect. One by one, they entered the bell jar airlock and walked down the hallway that lead straight into the colony, until the only ones left were Nash and Coil.

  “You can go,” Coil said, waving him on. “I’ll bring the body in.”

  Nash shook his head. “No, I’ll do it.”

  “Are you sure?” Coil asked, hopeful. The last thing he wanted to do was to touch a dead body.

  “I’m sure – I need to do it.”

  And so Coil left behind Nash with the body. Nash looked at Pere’s corpse with sorrow burning in his eyes. It hurt, because he had lived Pere’s death before, years ago when he had downed the bottle of pill brandy, trying to end his own life the way an artist paints a landscape. He wanted to have a say in his end, to be able to make a death for himself the way others made a life for themselves. But the snare of veins that trapped his body wouldn’t let go, not yet anyway. As Nash freed Pere’s hands from behind the chair, he whispered, “I’m so sorry I didn’t stand up for you earlier. An innocent man like you doesn’t deserve to die like this.”

  Nash didn’t realize until he had said those words that Pere was innocent after all. Slowly, he picked up Pere’s body and walked towards the airlock, cradling the suicide in his hands. Nash’s lip trembled as he made a promise to himself – he was going to stand up for Pere. It wasn’t too late. He just needed one more piece
of proof to complete the rainy day puzzle and make everything right.

  ***

  The news of the black hole hit the colony like a virus. It spread from wall to wall in the cavern within just a few minutes, transmitted by panicked whispers. And like someone who has been cursed with the plague, the colonists knew that they did not have long to live.

  And there were symptoms, but there were as many signs as there were people in the colony. Some tried to escape by rushing the dock, attempting to steal one of the three launches that were still perched at the end of the pier. But the guards were standing at the gates to the dock, ready to drop the first person to tempt them. If they had a choice between living in anarchy and dying in order, the guards had already made their choice a long time before. One colonist tried to test the guards’ aim by pushing past them. The colonist had gotten no more than five feet before one of the guards shot him with an electric dart. The colonist’s heart stopped before he even could.

  There were some colonists who thought of escaping up the winding staircase, towards the Pelican that they knew was waiting in the crater above. They made their way towards the giant airship and began to prepare it for launch. They did this, not yet realizing that the pipes for pumping the hydrogen into the airship had broken down years before. They would find out about this in a few hours.

  And there were some who decided to live their lives the way they always wanted. Soon, a riot had broken out in one of the quarters, as people demanded to be let into the warehouse and have their share of the supplies. The door was strong but only for a few minutes – soon, the door was broken in and a stream of rioters stormed the warehouse. There was an elderly colonist who had been knocked to the floor and trampled by several of his neighbors as they ran to clear the shelves. The old man cried as he held his crushed hand, saying over and over although no one was listening, “I just wanted to know what chocolate tasted like.”