by Kali Wallace
“He fucking lied,” Henke said again. “You fucking lied!”
Panya shoved herself between them, pushing Henke back. “Stop! Henke. Stop. You are not helping. Stop.” She waited until he subsided before she went on. “Malachi, how did—how could that happen?”
“I don’t know.” There was a tightness in Malachi’s voice, as though he was trying very hard not to be sick. “The security system cleared us. The loophole was real. The drones let us through, okay? They let us through. I don’t know why they would—I don’t know what happened, and I can’t—”
He broke off abruptly: there was a low rumble in the walls.
“Oh shit,” Xiomara said, her eyes wide. “Is the hull breached?”
For just a second I wondered if she was right, then the rumble changed, dropping in tone, and I recognized the sound. It was the airlock.
After an interminable wait, the repressurization sequence ended and the inner door opened. A suited figure came into the cargo bay, moving stiffly, injured or in pain.
“Zahra!” Panya caught her in an embrace. “What happened? Why weren’t you answering?”
Zahra shook her head and pointed to her helmet.
“Wait a second,” Malachi said. He turned her around, one hand cradling her shoulder gently. “Let me look at—these fucking emergency suits, they’re garbage. The receiver is—there. Can you hear us? Are you hurt?”
“No,” Zahra said, but her voice was breathy, unconvincing. “I’m—I’m fine.”
“What happened? Why isn’t Boudicca answering?”
“It’s gone,” Zahra said. “The shuttle is gone.”
“Gone?” Malachi said, his voice high.
“Those fucking drones,” Henke said.
Zahra shook her head. “I don’t know. There was an explosion— I didn’t see the drones. Boudicca would have seen them. She was watching for them. I didn’t see anything.” She paused for a breath and pressed one hand to her side. “There was an explosion.”
“A missile?” Henke said.
“SPEC doesn’t have missiles,” Malachi replied, but he sounded unsure. “Do they? Did something hit the shuttle?”
“I don’t know,” Zahra said. “It looked like—it exploded from the inside.”
“Are you sure? It came from inside the shuttle?” Panya asked.
“It’s SPEC,” said Henke. “Who else could it be? It wasn’t an accident.”
“Why would SPEC sabotage a passenger shuttle?” Malachi asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s completely fucking insane,” Baqir muttered, but quietly, and none of them noticed. They were too stunned. For all their weapons, their plans, their casual violence, for how little they had flinched when Zahra killed Salvatore and how eagerly they had threatened to do the same again and again, not one of them knew what to say to the revelation that somebody was targeting them as surely as they had targeted us.
Henke was insistent. “Who the fuck else could it be?”
“We don’t know SPEC doesn’t have missiles,” Dag said.
I knew perfectly well SPEC didn’t have functional space missiles, because I knew my aunt had spent days at a Councilors’ closed meeting arguing about future development of a space defense system earlier in the year. But I had no interest in sharing that knowledge, even if they would listen to me.
“They’re always watching us,” Panya said. Her voice, still soft and little-girl high, was now wet with tears. “You know they’re always watching. Adam warned us. I can’t believe they’re gone, I can’t believe—are you sure? Boudicca can’t be gone. She can’t be. Maybe she just can’t hear us?”
“They’re all dead?” Ariana said quietly, looking from Xiomara to me. The skullcap of her space suit had pressed her rainbow-colored hair into a fringe across her forehead. “All of them? What the fuck happened?”
It was only a passenger shuttle. It could withstand small collisions from space debris, malfunctions, human error. It was not built to survive an explosion from within.
“We have to go out to check,” Henke said.
“Too dangerous,” Dag replied. “There’s too much debris.”
“We have to—”
“Quiet,” Zahra said. “Just . . . be quiet. I need to think.”
In the brief pause that followed, Baqir touched my elbow, inclined his head toward the way out. But Dag was still blocking the door, and he was still watching us. I shook my head minutely: Wait.
Finally, Zahra said, “We can’t help them now. We have our mission. We have to make this ship safe for Homestead.”
It was Baqir who asked, “What’s Homestead?”
Five headlamps turned toward us.
“Shut the fuck up,” Henke said.
“No, it’s okay,” Zahra said. “We have nothing to hide. Homestead is a passenger vessel bringing the members of our family here to join us. There are three hundred people aboard, including many children.”
“Three hundred people is a family?” Xiomara asked.
And Ariana said, “Why would you bring them here?”
I couldn’t say anything at all. A sickly understanding knotted my stomach.
We only want to be left alone, Zahra had said, when Baqir had asked what they wanted. Not demands, not a ransom, not a list of political goals. They wanted to be left alone.
There were separatist groups and communities all over the world who, for whatever reason, did not wish to join the United Councils of Earth. Usually they retreated into the North American deserts or pieced together nomadic islands in the Pacific, forming small enclaves of their own design, with their own governments and their own rules. They wanted nothing from the Councils, they claimed, except a chance to live as they pleased. For most that was enough.
But not for all. Others looked to the sky and wondered why only Councils citizens could dream of frontiers beyond Earth.
It was a yearning I understood. I knew what it felt like to turn toward the stars because it was easier to gaze into unknowable darkness than to look at the painful wreckage of the life that surrounds you. I knew what it meant to take the knot of hopes and hurts and fears from inside and hurl it into deep space, across voids and galaxies, through dust and light. There were persistent rumors of some group or another plotting to seize a Martian habitat dome or a mining colony in the asteroid belt. My aunt always found those plots amusing; none had ever amounted to anything and, she believed, none ever would. SPEC had absolute control over space travel, and only Councils citizens were permitted aboard SPEC ships.
My aunt had never told me about any separatist group attempting to overtake a spaceship, but it did not seem likely these were the first people to have tried. Before the Collapse thousands of people had decided that Earth was no place for them, looked to the stars, and sailed into the dark. Only one of them had ever sent back any evidence of having reached its destination, the ship Mournful Evening Song, which had returned a single, lonely, unmanned probe after hundreds of years of resounding silence. But still people dreamed, and surely they dreamed outside the Councils as much as within them. House of Wisdom was a massive ship designed to be self-sustaining for an indefinite period of time. It could support hundreds of people. And it was, for all intents and purposes, abandoned.
They weren’t seizing House of Wisdom to achieve a political goal. They were seizing it because they wanted to stay, and there were three hundred people coming to join them.
I pressed my lips together and breathed steadily. I could stop them. I could contact SPEC and the other ship could be diverted. I only needed to get away.
“Zahra is right,” Dag was saying. Their discussion had gone around in circles. “We have our mission. We have to get control of the ship.”
“And to do that we need to access the computing mainframe,” Malachi pointed out. “I wish we didn’t, but I can’t
work around it. We need it to access the primary systems before we can even begin to make this place safe.”
“Where is it? How do we get there?” Zahra asked.
“Slowly,” Malachi said. “All the interior doors and interlevel access points were locked down during the medical quarantine. It could take hours.”
Sometimes, in quiet moments, I could still hear the calm computerized voice advising people to shelter in place. Await medical help. Remain calm. It had been futile from the start. The virus had spread too far and too fast before anybody even knew it was aboard.
“It doesn’t have to,” I said.
Headlamps swung to look at me.
“What?” Malachi said. “What are you talking about?”
“I can get you there faster.”
“We can’t trust him,” Panya said.
Baqir said, “Jas? What are you doing?”
“Explain,” Zahra said.
I said, “You don’t have to get through every level between here and there. You just have to get to the agricultural labs. They’re connected across the bottom three levels, and their internal security is a different system.”
“You don’t even know where we’re going,” Henke said.
“The entrance to the computer core is on Level 4,” I said. “Starboard side. I lived here for eight years.”
“How do you know you can get through that way?” Zahra asked.
Malachi answered before I could: “They were his father’s labs.”
No, I thought, with a pang of grief, they had been so much more than labs. They were my father’s pride and joy, his warm and welcoming gardens, sanctuaries of greenery and life. He had fought for every square meter of green space as House of Wisdom was being built because, he had always said, the crew will need food and air, but they will need beauty, too, and peace, and the quiet of a cool dewy dawn.
I did not want to see what had become of my father’s passion and brilliance, but it would get us closer to where I wanted to be. To where I could leave our captors behind. Radio for help and get Baqir and Xiomara and Ariana off this ship. I didn’t know Xiomara and Ariana well, only those small pieces of information exchanged during stilted cocktail parties as our fellowships began. Xiomara was a biomedical engineer working on long-term human stasis. Ariana was an artist already somewhat famous for high-profile protest art; she had introduced herself to Baqir by telling him that she sympathized so much with the plight of the North American refugees and asking if he wanted to hear about her planned exhibition for the Second Council. That was all I knew of them. Whether they would stay calm or panic, follow my lead or obey our captors, trust me or take their own risks, I had no idea. I only knew I had to get them off this ship.
“I know the way,” I insisted.
“Why would you help us?” Zahra asked.
“I’m not helping you,” I said, with absolute truth. “I just don’t want to die here.”
Zahra looked at me for a long moment, her expression hidden by the blinding beam of her headlamp. “Very well. Show us.”
* * *
• • •
The dead were everywhere.
In my nightmares I had always seen them as they were on the day of the massacre: screaming, clawing at imaginary enemies, flushed with panic, damp with sweat, chins smeared with spittle, and so much blood, all the blood hot and red, every spray and smear creating an obstacle my mother went to great lengths to avoid. When the medical staff stopped making announcements and nobody knew what to do, those who avoided infection quickly determined that blood, not air, was the most likely carrier. With people injuring themselves so savagely, so violently, there was plenty of blood.
All that blood was now dried to dark stains, nearly black in the low red light. The corpses were waxy and pale, shriveled beyond recognition. More than once I felt a shiver of unease, a wash of unreality, that I should be here, again, moving through my nightmares. More than once I closed my eyes and tried to will myself away: to Armstrong City, where we were meant to be been joining a welcoming reception for the Leung fellows; to the Takashi Lunar Telescope array, where I had twenty-six hours of time booked to gaze at the ancient, redshifted blaze of galaxies from billions of years ago; to safety, to light, to anywhere, anywhere at all, but here. The silence around us was complete.
Our passage through the cargo sublevels was slow. Malachi could open some of the doors but not others; his hacking skills, it seemed, were not infallible. At first our captors spoke a lot, arguing about their mission, their plan, the supplies they had lost on the shuttle, the three hundred people heading toward us. They seemed to believe there was a hidden SPEC ship stalking them from the darkness of space, and I could not tell if their fear was valid or delusional. They grew quieter with every corpse we encountered. I wanted to throw my arms wide and shout at them: Is this what you expected? This darkness filled with death, this massive crypt of shriveled and mummified memories, is this what you wanted? Is this the home you imagined for your children? I didn’t ask. I did not care to hear their answers.
As captives we said little. The others followed my example. Henke and Dag kept their weapons in hand, and I was not going to risk angering them. I trusted neither Dag’s calm adherence to a parody of SPEC routine nor Henke’s frustrated snarls. A man who barely reacted to the explosion of a shuttle and the death of his comrades was as bad as one whose reaction swung from delight to rage without obvious cause.
I led the group to the nearest security hatch between the cargo sublevels and Level 0. The hatch was propped open by the body of a young woman, her arms reaching toward us from the apparent ceiling. Her face was turned to the wall; I couldn’t see if I knew her. Only when Dag shouldered the hatch open did we discover that her left leg had been severed just above the knee. Another dead woman, a couple of meters away, held a large powered clamping tool, the sort used to move cargo. Her I recognized: she was the ship’s lead boatswain. Between the teeth of the clamp were the remains of the first woman’s leg.
“How could a virus do this?” Panya said, whispering hoarsely. “How could anybody do this?”
Nobody answered. After that, even our captors stopped talking.
There was another corpse in the corridor outside the entrance to the nearest of my father’s laboratories. He was surrounded by a nest of metal scraps and tools, as though he had tried to barricade himself inside a makeshift cage. He rotated slowly, slowly, caught in a gentle vortex of air. There were clumps of dried blood suspended in a spiral around him like a dancer’s ribbons. He had slashed his arms several times, great long gashes from elbow to wrist. I didn’t know him. There was scarcely room to squeeze by the cage of metal he had built around himself. I went first, Zahra right behind me, and the others followed one by one with a series of grunts and frustrated noises, and a sharp curse from Ariana when she snagged the sleeve of her space suit and had to pry it free.
“Fuck.” Ariana jerked her arm. “That was stupid.”
“Are you okay?” Xiomara asked.
“She’s fine,” Henke said. “Stop wasting time.”
“But she—”
“The suits are self-mending. Keep moving.”
“I am fine,” Ariana said quietly. “Really.”
At the end of the corridor, beyond the dead man and his cage, was a closed door.
AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH 2
CLIMATE CONTROL ZONE
There was a spray of dried blood over the sign.
My throat was dry, my mouth tacky with thirst. I touched the control panel, which was, thankfully, clear of blood. At my touch, the words MEDICAL QUARANTINE IN EFFECT appeared in bright red. I unclipped the seal on my right wrist and tugged the glove off. The air was bitterly cold. When I pressed my hand to the center of the screen, a halo of frost formed around my sweat-damp fingers. It was so much colder than a still-functional ship ought to have been. I
counted slowly to ten, then removed my hand.
“What are you doing?” Malachi said, looking over my shoulder. “It’s not prompting—what is that?”
The screen went dark. There was a pause—I was holding my breath—then the electronic lock within the door disengaged with a quiet click. I put my glove back on and closed the seal, then reached for the handle to pull the door open. Trapped air breathed outward. The agricultural levels were always kept under positive pressure to protect them from contaminants.
“How did you do that?” Malachi studied the screen by the door, still dark, before giving me a look that was half-baffled, half-accusing. “Why didn’t you open the other doors?”
“It wouldn’t work on the other doors,” I said.
“Why did it work here?”
I hated him for asking, and I hated the way he asked, as though he wanted me to confide in him. All I said was, “My dad set it up that way.”
There was no trick to it. There was only my father’s kindness, and the sad way he had smiled the third time I was caught skipping lessons to explore the maintenance tunnels that honeycombed the ship. I know it gets boring for you when your mum and I are working all the time, but it’s not safe for you to go poking around in places nobody expects a kid to be, he had said, his arm hooked over my shoulder. I had only shrugged. That was the whole point: if I spent my time sneaking around places where I was allowed to be, it wouldn’t count as sneaking. Dad had looked down at me and laughed, and he had said, How about we give you a way to explore that’s less likely to get you chewed up by a faulty filtration system?
He had only wanted to give his lonely, wandering son something to do. I had no intention of explaining that to Malachi or the others. They had no right to those memories.
I held the door and welcomed them into my father’s world. Here there were no living quarters, no workshops, no flight operations. The sprawling labyrinth of the agricultural zone had once been filled with greenery and life: food crops in long rows, nitrogen-fixing plants in carefully placed patches, flowers and fruit vines, trees and grasses, epiphytes and ferns in every orientation, all growing beneath the carefully regulated artificial sunlight.
