by Kali Wallace
“Don’t worry about what’s out there,” I said to him. “Boudicca will handle it.”
Malachi glanced toward Bhattacharya. “You know they can hear us. All the suits are on the same frequency.”
“It doesn’t matter. Are you ready?”
“Always.” Malachi smiled, a bit shakily, and he said, “But I could use some help.”
For a fleeting moment I saw the boy who had walked out of the desert six years ago, in the purple twilight of a cold winter day. I had been patrolling the edge of the homestead, stomping through the cacti and scrub bushes beyond the wire fence that marked our territory. Thrice in the past fortnight we were awoken in the middle of the night by gunfire and taunting shouts from the desert; Adam had commanded a twenty-four-hour patrol to spot any Councils agents before they got close enough to harm us. Low clouds had blanketed the land, threatening snow. A quiet cough behind me made me spin around, my heart thumping, my gun raised. As the stranger drew nearer I saw that his feet were bare, his clothes little more than rags, his hair long and tangled. He carried nothing. He was no older than my seventeen years and so thin a strong wind could knock him over. When he coughed his entire body quaked.
“I saw the lights,” he said, and he spoke with the musical accent of the desert, the one I had been teaching myself to adopt. “Is there a camp near?”
“This is a homestead,” I said sternly. “You’re trespassing.”
He had smiled—bold but warm, a smile that burned through the cold, a smile stronger than my doubts—and he said, “I could really use some help.”
I could have killed him that evening in the desert, and nobody would have ever known. I could have turned him away and never thought of him again. That was what the Councils had done, rejecting his application for citizenship so many times he had lost hope. I had invited him into the homestead instead, and only later had I learned what he could do, what he could offer, how he would help us reach our dream. I needed that bold, smiling boy now, not the wavering, doubtful man he had grown to be.
“You cannot fail us,” I said.
Malachi’s smile faded. I had said the wrong thing.
“Dag will help you,” I added quickly. “You’ll figure it out.”
Dag nodded silently. Together they crossed the chamber toward the control panel by the interior door.
I turned to the prisoner. “Against the wall.”
Henke shoved Bhattacharya up to the wall with a hard smack in the center of his chest. Henke was grinning, his teeth a white curve behind the faceplate of his helmet. Either he had overcome his doubts about our change in plans, or a chance to manhandle the captives was enough to lighten his mood.
“You’ve been lying,” I said to Bhattacharya. I didn’t raise my weapon; it was threat enough that I was holding it. The widening of Bhattacharya’s eyes, that was the flash of fear I wanted to see. “You’ve been lying all along. The next word out of your mouth is going to be the truth, or I will kill you.”
I pointed with my gun to the corpse above the airlock door.
“That was no virus,” I said. “What the fuck happened here?”
Bhattacharya and Henke looked, and Henke cursed in surprise. With three headlamps shining on it, the corpse looked smaller, pathetic somehow. No longer a person. A piece of debris.
“Answer her.” Henke pressed the muzzle of the gun into Bhattacharya’s neck. I had not told him to do that, had not particularly wanted him to, but Henke was a weapon as much as the gun in his hand. It was effective enough.
Bhattacharya cleared his throat. He was still looking at the corpse. “Can you see who she is? She looks—I think I know her.”
“Her suit says Chin,” I said.
“Oh,” he said softly. “She used to babysit me.”
Henke snorted a laugh.
“I don’t care who she was,” I said. “That is not what Zeffir-1 does to people. Was there an attack? Did SPEC Security send a team to subdue the outbreak?”
Bhattacharya started to answer, but stopped abruptly as a red light began to glow around the inner airlock door. A moment later another came on beside it, and another, slowly filling the cargo bay. The light was low, more murky than illuminating, barely enough to cast a dingy red glow over everything. A soft hum rose from somewhere in the walls.
“Low-power dormancy lighting,” Malachi explained, although nobody had asked. “It’ll have to do until we can get the regular lights on. The environmental controls are still functional, so the power sources are still intact, but I can’t access the full system from here.” Then he added, quieter, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”
Now was not the time to scold him, not when he was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. I turned back to Bhattacharya. He had not moved, but he was looking at me now, not the corpse.
“That woman didn’t die from the virus,” I said.
“Yes, she did.”
“No. Someone attacked her.” I paused. “Or she injured herself. That’s not a virus.”
“Yes, it is. What happened to her is what happened to all of them. Exactly that.” There was a weariness in Bhattacharya’s voice that made him seem so much older than his twenty-two years. “SPEC decided it had to be a modified version of Zeffir-1 because that’s what doctors here came up with before they died. With how quickly it acted, how it spread, it was their best guess. But what it did to Dr. Chin—that’s what it did to everybody.”
I looked at Chin’s corpse again. Her shriveled hands were caked with blood where the glass shards had sliced into her flesh.
“Explain,” I said. “What, exactly, did it do?”
Bhattacharya took a breath. “When they got infected, it was like . . . one minute they were fine, and the next they were out of control. They were hallucinating, having delusions. Seeing things that weren’t there. SPEC kept the symptoms classified because they had no idea where Dr. Lago got it. They never found out what kind of laboratory was modifying ancient viruses to do . . . that.”
My father’s name on his lips was like an electric shock. I did not let myself react.
He was speaking softly, but there was a roughness to his voice that sounded, to me, like the onward edge of tears. “They didn’t know who they were. They attacked each other. They attacked themselves. They used any weapon they could. It didn’t make people sick. It made them insane. Suicidal and violently insane.”
There was a long silence after he finished speaking.
“What kind of pathogen could do that?” Malachi asked. “That’s not anything I’ve ever heard of.”
“Me neither,” Boudicca put in. “Not even a rumor.”
“Fuck, that must’ve been something to see,” Henke said.
Bhattacharya leaned away from him, and I felt the same flash of revulsion. I pushed the feeling aside. I could not be distracted.
“And the vaccine?” I said.
He moved one arm, half a shrug. “It was a precaution in case Lago had planned another attack. SPEC thought it would work, but it’s not like they could ever test it with the modified virus. They didn’t have a sample.”
I needed him to stop saying my father’s name. My hand hurt from gripping my weapon so hard, from the folds of the glove creasing painfully against my fingers. We should have known SPEC and the Councils would be so cavalier with human lives.
“This doesn’t change anything,” I said, the anxious twist in my gut making my words sharp. “We have the ability to purify the air system and test for viral contaminants. We keep our suits on until we can secure parts of the ship. Panya, are more passengers ready?”
“I’ve got three more waiting,” Panya said.
“Bring them over. Nico, Bao, find the bioaerosol testers when you get the next group ready.”
Henke left me guarding Bhattacharya to return to the airlock and help Panya with the hostages
. I kept my eye on Bhattacharya but turned my attention to what Malachi and Dag were saying.
“We need to find the mainframe,” Malachi said. “From there we’ll be able to use the skeleton key.”
“Try it again,” Dag said.
“I have tried it again. The systems are isolated. There’s a security function in place that can’t be deactivated from here. Some kind of override.”
“So you can’t open the door?”
Malachi made a frustrated noise. “I can open this door, and I can open the next door, and probably all of them, but I have to do it one at a time. That’s why I need access to the mainframe. From there I can reset the entire system—including the air scrubbers and medical quarantine.”
Bhattacharya tilted his head but said nothing. His expression was hard to read behind the faceplate. I wanted to ask him what he remembered of my father. I had not thought I would get the chance, but perhaps later—I could not worry about that now. I felt the pressure of all we did not know as a ticking clock at the back of my mind. All around us shards of glass tinkled and clinked in the disturbed air.
The airlock cycled again as Henke brought Panya and the hostages inside. The first through the door was Bhattacharya’s friend with the prosthetic arm, who immediately went to his side. They were joined by the two women who had been sitting in the front row.
I left Henke and Panya to watch the prisoners and went into the airlock to wait for the next group. I wanted to look down at Earth one more time. I wanted to feel how very far away we were.
When I opened the outer door, the ladder was above, then below, my mind switching the orientation. I gripped a handhold inside the airlock as vertigo washed over me. I would have to get used to it. I would get used to it. Adam was fond of saying that humans made a choice to be adaptable or not, and all the failed space missions of the past, especially the generation ships that had sailed into the darkness and fallen silent one by one, they had faltered because they chose to cling to the false comfort of Earth’s weighty prison. I was not going to make that mistake. I would adapt. I would make space my home.
Ten meters away the airlock on the shuttle opened, revealing two suited figures in a square of light. One raised an arm to wave, and Nico’s voice came over the radio. “Sending the next group across now.”
“Did you find the bioaerosol testers?”
“Yeah, but we had to dig for them. I’ve got the first cargo rack loaded,” Nico said. “You first. Get out there. Make sure you hold on tight.”
“Oh, no.” A woman’s voice, barely more than a whisper. “I can’t.”
“You don’t get a choice. Move.”
“I can’t,” the woman moaned. “I can’t. I can’t. There’s so much—it’s too much.”
“Is that Lilia?” asked another woman.
“Sounds like it. Lilia?” That was Bhattacharya’s friend, speaking over the radio from inside. “Lilia, it’s okay. Just look at the ladder. Focus on the ladder.”
“This is so stupid,” Nico said. “I’m going to fucking drag you over there.”
“Send a cargo rack across first,” I said, annoyed with the woman’s cowardice and Nico’s stubbornness. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Fine, fine. Get the fuck out of my way and don’t—fuck!”
Across the ten meters of space, I saw space-suit-clad legs kicking outward from the airlock door, a flurry of motion, shadows blocking light, a confusion of limbs.
The woman was crying, “No, no, no!”
And Nico was raging, “Let go of me, let go, or I will fucking shoot,” and over the radio somebody else was shouting at him to not shoot, it sounded like Dag or Henke or both, and Boudicca was demanding to know what the fuck was going on, and for a moment the light from the airlock was blocked, then it reappeared, the woman screamed, then—
It was a quiet sound over the radio, no more than a snap. One, then another. The screaming gave way to whimpering, then silence.
“The fuck did you do?” Boudicca asked.
“She wouldn’t—”
Light flashed in the shuttle airlock, and Nico’s explanation was lost in a concussion of noise. Somebody screamed, but it sounded so very far away, muffled by the agonizing roar.
Flames exploded from the shuttle airlock, engulfing Nico and the woman in blinding white light. For only a second, through the painful dancing spots in my vision, I saw two figures wrapped in fire spinning away from the shuttle, snagging on the twisted end of the ladder, thrashing wildly, frantically, the material of their space suits melting away, the clinging fire and charred skin beneath—
The shuttle exploded.
It tore itself apart from the inside. Light burned through seams in the metal and punched through the windows of the passenger cabin. The force of the explosion shoved it away from the airlock, crashing into the opposite side of the docking area and tumbling wildly, burning as it tore into the space beyond House of Wisdom. Boudicca was shouting over the radio, hers the only voice I could discern in the chaos—then something hurtled across from the shuttle, a flash, a shard, debris—I wasn’t fast enough to react, to dodge to the side—it struck me forcefully, shoving me back into the airlock. My entire body felt the pain of impact.
Over the radio there was a wet, gasping gurgle.
A high wheeze.
And silence.
The third field area is the most promising. Densely forested, although the hilltops and clearings have a symmetry to them that does not seem entirely natural. I’m thinking of basalt columns, writ large. You can bet the first thing I do when I get my boots on the ground is find out what’s under those hills. I don’t know how I’ll endure these last seven months to landfall. I don’t know how any of us will. We want to stand on the ground. We want to feel the sun on our faces. We want to hear the hum of insects, or whatever ecological analogue this planet has, all around us. We want to breathe air that hasn’t been breathed a thousand times before. Seven months. We’re counting down.
—FRAGMENT 2, MOURNFUL EVENING SONG VIA UC33-X
JAS
There was no sound. The suit radios had squealed and crackled, noises so loud they felt like needles in the ears, then a deafening pop—then nothing. Nothing. Only silence.
The red lights in the cargo bay flickered off, on, off again. I saw our captors moving frantically toward the airlock door, gesturing to each other, mouths moving behind their helmets.
Then, as quickly as it had gone, the sound was back, and everybody was shouting.
“You said you shut it down!”
“I did, I did! The system signaled—”
“Zahra!”
“Try them again! You have to try them again.”
“Oh no, oh no, oh no . . .”
For one wildly disorienting moment I heard the sound of monsoon rain on a metal roof—it was debris striking the hull of the ship. I kicked away from the wall, dragging Baqir with me, waving frantically for Ariana and Xiomara to follow. If the force of the explosion pushed the shuttle into the ship, we wanted to be as far from the hull breach as possible.
Through the turning, glinting glass, I aimed toward the other side of the cargo bay. I dragged Baqir by his arm, with Ariana and Xiomara hand in hand right behind us. Our captors were still shouting.
“You didn’t fucking shut it down! You fucking lied, you have no fucking idea—”
“They can’t be gone. They can’t be gone.”
“Zahra!”
The man called Dag hadn’t moved away from the control panel beside the interior door. He wasn’t shouting with the others, and his grim silence as he tracked our motion across the bay was unsettling. There was no way we could get past him.
I bumped against the wall a couple of meters from the door, catching a handle to stop myself from bouncing away. Baqir grabbed the same handle, his hand just above mine, and together
we caught Ariana and Xiomara. Ariana was crying. The inside of her helmet was dotted with moisture, her breath hitching noisily over the radio. Another rattle of debris struck the hull.
“Boudicca, can you hear us? Do you copy?”
“Please say you can hear us. You can hear us, can’t you?”
“Zahra?” That was Malachi, the copilot and hacker. He was on the verge of hysterics. “Zahra, what happened? Tell me you’re all right!”
“Quiet.” Dag spoke at a normal volume at first, but raised his voice to be heard. “Quiet! All of you. Be quiet.”
For a few seconds all I could hear were the impacts on the hull.
“Boudicca, do you copy? Nico, do you copy? Bao? Pilgrim 3, please respond.”
No answer.
“Pilgrim 3, respond.”
Nothing.
“Zahra, do you copy?”
“Please,” Panya said. “Zahra, honey, please answer us.”
“It was those fucking drones.” That was the red-faced man they called Henke, the one who moments ago had been guarding us with a gun and a grin. “They came for us. They fucking came for us!”
Henke spun around quickly and shoved one of the others into a wall so hard the thunk of the helmet carried over the radio. I couldn’t tell who it was through the confusion of slashing headlamps and whirling glass, but I could see that Henke had the muzzle of his gun pressed to the front of the other person’s helmet.
“You were supposed to stop them,” Henke said. “You didn’t stop them.”
“Henke, don’t!” Panya cried. “He said he shut it down!”
“Pilgrim 3, do you copy?”
As long as they were shouting at each other, they weren’t paying attention to us. If Dag moved from the door, if I could open the door, we could get away. I knew this ship. It had been ten years, but I sure as fuck knew it better than they did. There were holes in their knowledge, and I could use them. I could find a radio. Contact SPEC. Keep Baqir and the others safe. Hide until rescue came. I couldn’t do anything for the people aboard the shuttle. Another piece of debris struck the hull, metal on metal, a horrible sound. We only needed a chance.
