Salvation Day

by Kali Wallace

  “Please confirm your position and velocity, Pilgrim 3.”

  “Understood, Barcelona. Passenger shuttle Pilgrim 3 currently located at azimuth 75.5, polar 183.7, radius 367,000 plus 140 kilometers, static velocity 20.45 kilometers per second. We’ve got Armstrong in our sights and are about to begin deceleration.”

  There was, of course, no Moon growing ever larger outside the shuttle. We were two hundred thousand kilometers off course, in a strict no-fly zone. If SPEC was scrambling to find us, it would be a while before they looked in the right place.

  Say something, I told myself. Zahra’s gun was a soft pressure in the center of my chest, but the urge to call out for help was a bitterness at the back of my throat. Say something. Shout when the pilot is speaking. Hope Barcelona hears. But it could be hours before SPEC found us, would definitely be hours before they arrived. They would kill me, kill Baqir, kill all the others. They had gotten what they wanted from me. We would be dead before the nearest ship arrived. I could not make a sound. Fear had stitched my lips together, dried my throat, squeezed my lungs so tightly every breath was a struggle.

  “Negative, Pilgrim 3,” said Orbital Control. “Armstrong cannot confirm position. Repeat: Armstrong Port cannot confirm your position.”

  “I don’t understand, Barcelona. I’ve flown this route a hundred times. Our coordinates are accurate.”

  “Understood, Pilgrim 3, but we can’t bring you into Armstrong until they’ve got a fix on your position. There’s a lot of traffic today because of the foul-up at Valle de México. Please advance to standard holding in lunar orbital radius of fifteen thousand kilometers and stand by.”

  “Standing by, Barcelona.” Boudicca turned off the radio. She looked at me over her shoulder. “There is no help coming for you. The only way you and your friends get out of this is if you do what we say and don’t cause any trouble. Is that clear?”

  I nodded.

  “Get him out of here,” she said.

  Zahra escorted me back to the passenger cabin, where I took my seat beside Baqir. The scowling blond man, the one Zahra had called Henke, wasn’t holding a gun to Baqir’s head anymore, but he was watching the cabin carefully, taking in every motion, every sniffle of fear, every whispered word. Baqir met my eyes, twitched his lips in something that might have been, in any other circumstance, a reassuring smile. He always smiled when he was afraid. He had once said it was a survival instinct, like coyotes baring their teeth before a fight, and I had laughed. My hands shook as I tried to fasten my harness. Baqir moved, hesitated, then reached over to do it for me; his metal fingers clicked softly on the clasp.

  The shuttle’s thrusters fired, filling the cabin with a low rumble.

  Baqir cleared his throat and whispered, “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered, just as soft. The cabin was leadenly quiet. Even Professor M’Baga had stopped trying to reason with our captors. The blond woman kept her gun trained on him. “They want to get to the ship.”

  “Why?” Baqir said. “What’s there?”

  “We only want to be left alone,” Zahra said.

  Baqir jumped at the sound of her words. But she hadn’t raised her voice, nor her weapon, so he turned as far as the harness would allow to look at her.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “Stop fucking talking to them,” the big man said. His grin was gone, but there was now a calculating look in his eyes. He wanted us to disobey.

  “It does no harm to help them understand,” Zahra said. “We have nothing to hide. Our only goal is to break away from the shackles of your Councils and make a life for ourselves among the stars.”

  She sounded as though she were quoting somebody else, the shackles of your Councils, the words rolling off her tongue with the ease of a phrase she had repeated firmly and often. Zahra did not have a North American desert accent like Baqir’s, but I was certain she and her people were separatists who chose to live outside the governance of the United Councils. But that didn’t tell me who they were, or what they truly wanted, or how to stop them. People fled the Councils to be left alone—not the other way around. The North American wasteland was where they went when they didn’t want the responsibilities of citizenship, the burdens of a global society, the rules, the laws, whatever else it was they found distasteful about the Councils. They didn’t hijack shuttles to steal ships and risk bringing the whole force of SPEC down on them.

  “Are you going to kill us?” Baqir asked and, oh, how I hated him for asking that so baldly, and loved him for speaking aloud what we were all thinking.

  “If your masters do what we say, we won’t have to,” Zahra said. “We’ll let you return to them when our own people are safe. After we’ve claimed our home, nothing you or your oppressors do will concern us.”

  She spoke the word home with a reverence I could not comprehend. She wasn’t looking at Baqir or me. She was gazing out the window with an expression of understated wonder, almost joy. She looked happier, more relaxed, when her eyes rested not on her prisoners or her comrades, but on the monstrosity of a ship growing ever larger as the shuttle soared toward it. She did not fear House of Wisdom. She stared at it with something a lot like yearning.

  I had seen it from this distance before. I had been splattered with blood then, too, and shivering with cold, too short and skinny to sit comfortably in the pilot’s seat in my mother’s experimental craft. Tiger had curved slowly away from House of Wisdom at first, the autopilot moving it a safe distance before engaging the full power of the engines. During that slow retreat I had wept, crying for my father, for my mother, overwhelmed by the nightmarish horror of that day. I had been frantic as I watched the ship that had been my childhood home grow smaller and smaller.

  Then Tiger’s propulsion system had fired up. All I remembered after that was pain.

  House of Wisdom looked the same as it had before. Dark, blocky, ugly. Nobody had been this close in ten years.

  When my mother had buckled me into the pilot’s seat of her experimental ship and programmed the controls, she told me, over and over again, that I would be safe, I would be okay, she was going to get me away. I would be safe. I would be okay. She hadn’t been crying; I remembered that clearly. She had been jittery with quick, determined motions, her voice higher than usual, her breath fast. I had asked, Are you coming with me?

  My mother had only pushed hair damp with sweat and clumped with blood back from my face, kissed my forehead, and straightened the harness over the front of my pajamas. She said, I’ve got some things to do first.

  The horrors aboard House of Wisdom had been locked away for ten years. On the ship, in lost data, in sealed files, in the memories I never, ever spoke aloud.

  And I had just helped open the door.

  The ship’s velocity abruptly changed. Salvatore’s blood broke from its shimmering galaxy and splattered across my face, across Baqir’s, across the seats and the walls, over the window, dark and red and specked with bone and brain, obscuring the view.

  SPEC SECURITY—RESTRICTED ARCHIVE REF. #39364832-B

  SHIP-TO-BROADCAST COMMUNICATION TRANSCRIPT (AUDIO)

  Source: HOUSE OF WISDOM, SPEC RESEARCH

  TimeDate: 07:21:12 01.04.393

  [VERIFIED IDENTIFICATION—HOUSE OF WISDOM, SPEC RESEARCH: Captain Lilian Putnam Ngahere]

  HOUSE OF WISDOM: I don’t know if these transmissions are going through. The comm system is—it’s completely fucked. Pilar hasn’t reported back. The computer isn’t answering any requests for diagnostics and I—okay. Let me try this.

  [10 s elapse. Background noise indicates shipwide medical alarm system is active.]

  HOUSE OF WISDOM: This is Captain Lilian Ngahere of the vessel HOUSE OF WISDOM. The time is—fuck, what time is it. It’s after 0700. I haven’t had a response from Orbital Control since before 0200, but our receiver may b
e damaged. This is a warning to any and all ships responding to our distress call. There is an unidentified infectious agent afflicting the crew and residents of this vessel. Repeat: the population of this vessel has been exposed to a highly contagious and fatal infectious agent.

  [Shipwide medical alarm continues.]

  HOUSE OF WISDOM: I don’t know how many are dead. The doctors suspect it might be an aggressive viral encephalitis or hemorrhagic fever—or something like that, they were going to test for Marburg-Exo and Zeffir-1 and, another, I can’t remember, because of how it’s spreading . . . I don’t know what the tests showed. I’ve lost contact with the medical staff. I’ve lost contact with everybody.

  [Shipwide medical alarm continues.]

  HOUSE OF WISDOM: It happened so fast. Kichi Akimoto in Deep Space Archaeology was the first. We were supposed to meet today. She wanted to report on the data Gregory tried to steal from UC33-X. It’s not important anymore. She’s gone. I’ve never seen her like that. I’ve never seen anything do that to a person. She was so panicked, and then—then she wasn’t. She was so different. Conscious but unresponsive. Did Gregory do this? He told us we would regret sending him away. We would regret separating him from his work. He was so angry, but he never denied it. He said he was hiding the data because we couldn’t understand it. He’s always been arrogant about his work, but this—I should have reported his threats. I didn’t take him seriously. He’s a good scientist. I didn’t want to . . . It doesn’t matter now.

  [Shipwide medical alarm continues.]

  HOUSE OF WISDOM: I’ve tried to send the medical analysis in a data burst. I don’t know if it’s going out. If there is anybody aboard who remains unafflicted, I need your help. This is an unrestricted call for immediate emergency reporting to the bridge. Fuck, I don’t know if anybody is listening.

  [ARCHIVED BY AUTOMATED COMMUNICATION PRESERVATION SYSTEM]

  ZAHRA

  Half-illuminated, half-dark, the Earth was framed by the square mouth of the docking bay. It looked so small. Small enough that I could pinch it between my fingers, snag it on the tip of my glove, fling it away to be lost among the stars.

  “Zahra!” Dag’s voice was muffled, as though carrying over a great distance.

  Look, I would say, when this was all over, when I was holding Anwar on one side and Nadra on the other, both of them warm and relaxed and happy. We would have a room of our own, clean and bright with soft blankets and plentiful food, and I would pull them closer to me even as they rolled their eyes and tried to squirm away, and I would say: Look how far away it is. We can’t see the desert from here. The tessellated soil above our mother’s grave, the windowless punishment shed at the edge of the homestead, the wire fences snagging tumbleweed in the wind, all of it so far beyond reach it was not even a blemish on the face of the planet.

  “Zahra! What the hell are you doing?”

  Dag was not angry—he was never angry, I did not think him capable of it. He showed no temper even when he spoke of how he had been stripped of his citizenship for a minor crime, how he had been escorted to the border, how the Councils security forces had laughed as they set him loose in a spring snowstorm. If that did not anger him, then I did not believe anything could. The harshness in his voice now was impatience. We were crossing the space between Pilgrim 3 and House of Wisdom, climbing ten meters along the docking ladder from the shuttle to an airlock hatch. I had not meant to stop.

  I had let go of the ladder with one hand, and both of my feet were floating free.

  “Put your hand back on the ladder. Zahra. Are you listening to me?”

  I knew about space vertigo. I knew about perspective distortion. I knew about the vacuum madness that made people giddy and irrational the first time they stepped into unconfined space. As a child I had sat rapt at my father’s side while he told me how excited he was to go into space, how honored he was to have been chosen to work aboard House of Wisdom, but also admitting, sheepishly, that he was frightened. What would it be like, he had wondered, to live so long in a place where even the bathrooms were different, where water came in globes rather than glasses, where you could not set your spectacles on your bedside table because they would float away during the night? I had giggled at that, happy to focus on something silly rather than the dwindling days until he departed. I had loved the sound of his voice as much as I hated that he was leaving us.

  I grasped three times for the ladder before catching it, frustrated by the clumsy gloves of the emergency space suit.

  “Good,” Dag said. “Don’t let go again.”

  “Is she okay?” Malachi said. The concern in his voice made my heart squeeze. The close call with the security drones had shaken him. He was too delicate for this mission. I had known it since we chose him, although we never truly had a choice. Nobody else in the family had Malachi’s skill with computers. The Councils had been fools to reject him time and time again.

  I hadn’t meant to frighten him. I had only wanted to know what it felt like to let go. There is no up and down in space, no gravity to preference one direction over another. Dag was several rungs ahead of me, his feet over my head—then suddenly he was below me, and I was toppling headfirst toward the gray ship, disoriented by a wave of vertigo so strong it was like a physical blow.

  I gripped the ladder with both hands. Squeezed my eyes closed. Opened them again, and Dag was at the hatch.

  “Can you open it?” I asked.

  “The airlock has power,” Dag said. “Physical seal only.”

  I swallowed. My throat was dry. The suit’s medical monitor expressed mild concern about my heart rate and respiration. “Let’s go in.”

  Dag turned the wheel to disengage the hatch and pulled it open. The chamber beyond was dark but for a cluster of small blinking lights on an interior panel. Dag pulled himself inside. He moved cautiously but gracefully, aiming his helmet light in every direction. Years had passed since Dag was forced out of SPEC, but he had never lost his easy way of moving in space. Seeing that gave me a sharp pang of jealousy.

  “Clear,” he said.

  Dag moved aside to let me enter, then closed the hatch behind us. I went to the interior control panel and tapped to wake it up. I felt a moment’s confusion at the letters and numbers that filled the screen.

  LCK 0 kPa 0 O2 0 N2 120 K

  INT 83 kPa 21 O2 79 N2 263 K

  I took a breath. I had prepared for this. Dag and Boudicca and others in the family with space experience had spent months drilling the rest of us, grueling lessons and practices followed by tests in which the slightest wrong answer was punishable by a withheld meal or a public condemnation. I did not get many answers wrong. The consequences were bad, as was the disappointment in Adam’s eyes, but what I feared most was the thought that I might not be ready when the time came.

  “This interior is pressurized,” I said. “It’s cold, but it’s got air. Eighty-twenty mixture.”

  “Outer door is closed,” Dag said, and I wondered if he was going to announce every step we took, the habit so ingrained in him from his years in space that he couldn’t stop it even if he tried.

  The computer told me the same thing:

  EXT SEAL: ON

  INT SEAL: ON

  I stared at the screen, momentarily frozen. I didn’t know what to do next. I had to know. I could not be forgetting all I had studied already.

  “That’s the one,” Dag said, pointing over my shoulder to the word INGRESS.

  The shine of our headlamps cast a glare on the screen, throwing our reflections back to us. I touched the command, and the word INGRESS changed to PRESSURIZING. The chamber filled with a soft hissing sound as air tumbled to fill the vacuum. It grew louder, louder, louder—the numbers on the screen marched upward—then the hiss abruptly stopped.

  LCK 83 kPa 21 O2 79 N2 258 K

  “Airlock is pressurized,” Dag
said, making a solid fist to state the same thing in gesture. “Two hundred fifty-eight K is cold for an active ship.”

  I gritted my teeth and tried to ignore him. He was only doing what came naturally to him.

  “We’re getting another position verification request from Orbital Control,” Boudicca said over the radio. “So if you could hurry it up a little, that would be good.”

  Her impatience, her worry, they seemed so very far away. I turned the wheel on the interior door, felt it loosen and spin, and pushed inward. Some part of me had expected it to stick, to be rusted closed, but House of Wisdom had been built to last far longer than ten years in space.

  Beyond the hatch was a sea of stars.

  I blinked, turned my head, moved my light. The stars winked and turned. It was not empty space, but a cavernous chamber filled with tiny, glinting reflections. One of the stars floated close. I reached. It bumped against my glove and spun away, so I stretched farther and caught it.

  It was a shard of glass. Thinner than my finger, clear as crystal.

  All of those glinting lights, they were broken pieces of glass floating in the chamber. By opening the door, we had set them turning and glinting, a strange and beautiful dance of air currents and debris. I looked around until I spotted large panes of glass secured to one wall, the whole stack of them shattered where something heavy had struck it in the center. Throughout the cargo bay there were crates and boxes floating free, broken away from the nets and bands meant to hold them in place.

  I let go of the shard and sent it spinning back into the darkness. I tracked its motion through the room. The beam from my headlamp danced over the walls, found conduits and panels, cargo secured to the wall with webbing, and a pair of legs.

  I let out a startled yelp and released my grip on the handle, then grabbed for it when I realized I wasn’t anchored to anything. My body continued to turn, and I wrenched my shoulder trying to stop myself. I kicked at the wall to straighten my arm and caught my feet against the edge of the open hatch.