by Kali Wallace
“Vinod, what are you doing with that knife?” Ariana said. There was no inflection in her tone, nor the least emotion. “Go back to your room. Jas. Go back to your room. Jas.”
Nausea roiled through me, and with it a black wave of rage. She had no right to speak my mother’s words.
There was another rattle from inside the quarters. My father’s arm was reaching through the gap, stiff and bent at an awkward angle, the shoulder shoving ineffectually against the door, but reaching still, like a puppet jerking on tangled strings. Xiomara made a small noise in her throat. Baqir’s grip on my wrist tightened. I looked back at Ariana.
The light from Xiomara’s headlamp was still fixed on Ariana’s face, which was paled by the thin layer of frost over her light brown skin. Ariana grimaced—but it wasn’t a grimace, her expression wasn’t changing at all. There was a ripple in her skin, a line of frost melting across her left cheek, a subtle undulation moving toward her temple.
Just before Ariana turned and fled into the darkness, leaving us without a sound, with barely a glance, the ripple vanished into her hairline. Something narrow and fast was moving beneath her skin.
UCE SECURITY COMMISSION—RESTRICTED ARCHIVE REF. #R3459322-C32
CONFIDENTIAL WITNESS STATEMENT TRANSCRIPT (AUDIO)
Source: SPECIAL INVESTIGATIVE COMMISSION FOR THE HOUSE OF WISDOM INCIDENT
TimeDate: 09:00:00 01.22.393
[VERIFIED IDENTIFICATION—SPECIAL INVESTIGATIVE COMMISSION: See transcript section c03.2]
LEAD COUNCILOR: Please state your name and position for the record.
WITNESS: Alfonso Dietrich, security officer first class for the Unified North American Transportation Commission.
LEAD COUNCILOR: Do you affirm that during the course of this testimony you shall speak the whole truth as you know it and offer no intentionally misleading statements to the Special Investigative Commission?
WITNESS: Yes, I do.
LEAD COUNCILOR: Then we will begin. Please tell us about the events on Platform 2 of Fremont Station in East Presidio Bay on the night of January 17.
WITNESS: My shift began at 1700 on that day, and I began a foot patrol of Fremont Station at approximately 1745.
SECOND COUNCILOR: Did you undertake your patrol alone?
WITNESS: Yes, although I remained in radio contact with fellow officers. Heightened security protocols require thirty-minute check-in intervals.
SECOND COUNCILOR: Were you armed with a firearm or a suppression weapon?
WITNESS: No, of course not.
SECOND COUNCILOR: Not even under heightened security protocols?
WITNESS: I know you think we must all be in fear for our lives that close to the border, but it’s not like that. Presidio Bay is a safe place. Our purpose is to help people, not scare them.
THIRD COUNCILOR: We understand. Please continue, Officer Dietrich.
WITNESS: At approximately 1930, a woman approached me at the entrance to Platform 2 to report a man in need of assistance. She thought he might be a refugee newly granted citizenship. She was concerned that he needed medical attention, as he appeared unwell to her.
SECOND COUNCILOR: Did you summon your fellow officers for help?
WITNESS: What? No, of course not. The witness reported a man in need of aid. I went to render aid. The platform was mostly empty, and it was easy to locate the man. He was alone.
LEAD COUNCILOR: Did you recognize him?
WITNESS: Not at first. He was wearing a hooded jacket, as it was raining heavily that night. He was hunched over, holding his head in his hands. He did not appear to be armed and had no parcels or bags with him. I approached and asked if he needed help.
SECOND COUNCILOR: Now did you recognize him?
WITNESS: Yes. That is the point at which I made a positive identification of Gregory Lago. I didn’t address him by name, but I don’t think he was surprised to be recognized. I asked him again if he needed assistance, and he said, “It will be too late. I did everything wrong. I did it all wrong.”
THIRD COUNCILOR: I beg your pardon, Officer Dietrich, but are you sure about that? Dr. Lago stated to you that it will be too late? Not that it was already too late?
WITNESS: Yes. I am sure of it. I asked him what he meant, and he said, “I thought they wouldn’t understand.” I told him we could find somebody who understood. I told him his wife and his kids wanted him to come home. I shouldn’t have said that.
LEAD COUNCILOR: Why not? Isn’t that standard de-escalation protocol?
WITNESS: It is, but when I mentioned his family, Dr. Lago jumped to his feet. He was visibly distressed. He said, “It’s too late. I’ve already failed them. I was so arrogant. I’ve failed everybody. Tell them I’m sorry.” Then he ran for the tracks.
LEAD COUNCILOR: In your opinion, was his goal to flee or self-terminate?
WITNESS: The latter, Councilor. He knew the train was coming. He waited until just the right moment to jump.
ZAHRA
Level 5. A dead family huddled by the sealed hatch of an evacuation airlock, father and mother and infant child, without any sign of infection or injury.
Level 6. A man whose face had been torn to shreds, and the broken piece of metal he’d used still clutched in his mummified fingers. It was the rung of a ladder; he had wrenched it from the wall to rip his own flesh away.
We had left Henke’s corpse behind. My suit was stained with his blood: a spray across the faceplate of my helmet, long streaks across my arms and chest. Dag and Panya were convinced Ariana’s hysteria had been a ruse to give the others a chance to escape. Malachi offered no opinion.
I was not so sure. I did not think Bhattacharya had been feigning the fear in his voice when he said she was infected. I did not think she had been pretending panic. And, most of all, I did not think dismissing infection as a possibility would serve us. We had to be careful. Every prickle, every itch on my skin sent a spike of fear through me.
We were heading toward the ship’s bridge. It was, Malachi said, the only way to get control of the ship, to break through the command override that had locked all the systems. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We had planned for years, detailing every aspect of the mission, considering every possibility. It wasn’t fair. There was so much we hadn’t known.
Level 7. Two men dead in a gallery of windows looking out to the stars. One’s face was a mass of bruises and lacerations. He had been beaten to a pulp by the other man, whose hand still gripped his hair in a frozen fist. Dried blood and bits of bone and brain were splattered over the windows, the seating, the control panels, the abstract sculpture affixed to the center of the room.
Henke. Bao. Nico. Boudicca. I had failed them. The shuttle was gone. The hostages were gone. We had no control over this ship, Homestead was unprotected, SPEC was coming, and somewhere in the darkness was a girl with Henke’s gun. Maybe she was a SPEC agent. Maybe she had been lucky. Maybe she was infected by a rage-inducing virus. Whatever the case, I had failed. There was a sickly acid churn in my stomach. Fairness was for children and fools. I was not a child anymore, and I should have known better than to let the hostages make me a fool. I would not make that mistake twice.
Level 8, and I heard my mother’s voice.
I stopped with one hand on the wall. The beams of the headlamps behind me cast my shadow as a long, distorted thing, stretching into darkness.
Look here, my mother had said, tracing her finger along the image of House of Wisdom on our kitchen wallscreen. She had been speaking normally, but in my memories she whispered as softly as the turn of autumn leaves, This is where Daddy is going to be for a while. He’ll be doing important work.
“Zahra?” Malachi said. “What is it?”
I started moving again, pulling myself hand over hand along the broad corridor, following the
signs toward the next interlevel hatch. We had spoken little since leaving the computing core. We could not turn off the radios, lest the hostages make a mistake and reveal their position to us, but neither did we want to provide any information to them, should they be listening. There wasn’t much to say anyway. We needed to get to the bridge on Level 10, and we needed to do it quickly. I felt a weak sort of relief that our plan offered little room for argument.
The corridors of Level 8 were broad and straight. There were no living quarters here, no recreation spaces, no gardens. Beyond those well-spaced doors were research laboratories, each labeled by a small, neat sign.
PLANETARY NAVIGATION. ORBITAL COMPUTATION. MINERAL RESOURCE ASSESSMENT.
As a child I had imagined passing through this corridor a thousand times, when I had wanted to join my father for the adventure of living in space. Later, after he was gone, and my mother as well, I had once again walked this corridor in my mind, planning what I would say to Nadra and Anwar about the father they scarcely remembered and the mother they had only known after she was crushed by grief.
MICROGRAVITY COMBUSTION. CELESTIAL MECHANICS. EXPLORATORY ROBOTICS.
We had no time to spare, but we were right here.
DEEP SPACE ARCHAEOLOGY.
I grabbed a handle on the wall.
We were right here.
“Zahra?” Panya said. “Is something wrong?”
“We don’t have time for this,” Malachi said, reading the sign over my shoulder.
I was losing him. I had known it since we left the computing core. Dag remained as silent and stalwart as ever, and the soft concern in Panya’s voice never wavered, but Malachi’s fear had been sharpening with every level, and with it was an anger I did not recognize. Malachi did not carry rage in his heart like so many in the family. Even when he had been newly arrived at the homestead, his feet blistered and lips cracked from his long, lonely wander through the desert, his spirit dulled by the repeated humiliations inflicted upon him by the Councils citizenship process that promised so much and delivered so little, even then he had been smiling, grateful for a respite, open with his thanks. The smiles, the gratitude, the openness, it was all gone now. House of Wisdom had crushed it out of him.
“This is where the outbreak started,” I said. “Open the door.”
Malachi did not move to obey. “Why? Adam said—”
“Adam isn’t here,” I said. “Open the door.”
Behind the faceplate Malachi’s expression was unreadable.
“Everything we know about the virus has proved to be a lie,” I said, speaking as calmly as I could. “I am tired of the lies. We have to find out what we can. If there’s nothing here, we won’t stay. Panya and Dag will go ahead and find the route to the next level.”
“Of course we will,” Panya said. “It won’t take long.”
She nodded at Dag, and they continued down the corridor.
“Open the door,” I said for the third time.
Finally, Malachi obeyed. I watched the stiff line of his shoulders as he worked to bypass the medical quarantine, and I tried to find words to reassure him, to bring him back to hope, although I had none to spare.
I said nothing. The door opened. Malachi moved to the side to let me through.
The dark room beyond slowly filled with low red light, casting our dim reflections back at us from a wall of windows. Facing the windows was a long row of workstations. There were no bodies.
I turned my headlamp off to see the room beyond the glass. A second later, Malachi did the same.
The chamber was a large cube, and in the center of that cube, mounted on three sturdy metal supports, was UC33-X.
The name Unidentified Craft 33-X had been bestowed upon the probe when the space telescope at Phobos spotted it soaring gently toward Earth in year 385 of the Reconstruction Era. It had arrived at the edge of the solar system with no warning. There had been panic when SPEC scientists realized it had come from deep space. Panic, but also wonder. Some people were relieved, others disappointed, when scientists confirmed the probe had been constructed by human hands aboard an ancient ship called Mournful Evening Song. I remembered sitting in a circle in my grade school classroom as the teacher read to us a child-friendly story about the Pre-Collapse generation ships. How brave those ancient humans had been, how noble, to flee an ailing planet for the stars, and how exciting it was to receive this message from their journey. Both the teacher and the picture book had conveniently left out the uglier truths: that the generation ships had been for only the privileged and elite, that none of those ships had ever come back, that it was widely believed they had all failed within a couple of decades of launching.
My father had been thrilled by the arrival of UC33-X. To him, it was a gift. He had devoted his life to studying Pre-Collapse space travel, picking through ruins of shipyards, skeletons of dead satellites, fragments of records, echoes of transmissions, all the different ways an archaeologist peering across a catastrophic divide in human history might learn about what had passed. He idolized the founders of the Councils who had survived the Collapse, and to him UC33-X was proof that at least some of the humans who had fled Earth had not only survived, but they had also cared enough about the world they had left behind to send part of themselves back as a message. My father had come to House of Wisdom to recover and decipher that message, corrupted as it was by centuries in the harsh environment of space, and learn what he could about the people who had sent it.
SPEC claimed my father had been concealing data and results from his fellow scientists. They said he had grown selfish with the prospect of making a grand discovery and sabotaged the research of others to keep the glory for himself. They said that when he was caught and dismissed from the ship, he was so furious he massacred the ship’s entire population in revenge—a plot he must have held in reserve for months or years, perhaps since his long-ago research on Pre-Collapse biological weapons, just waiting for the right target. They said he had always been unstable. They apologized for not realizing it sooner.
They did not care that my father loved humanity so much he spent his life searching for proof of its survival in deep space. They did not care that he loved the Councils, too, because he saw them as proof that humanity could do better than it had before. That humankind could drive itself and the Earth to the brink of destruction, look upon the ruins of their violence, and choose to rebuild a wiser, kinder world had always been, to him, a source of pride and reason for optimism. The Councils, with their accusations, cared nothing for the truth about who Gregory Lago was.
Certainty about my father’s innocence had carried me for ten years, driving me even when all else seemed hopeless. But now, faced with the dim red lights casting ghosts on a wall of glass, I needed more. Somebody had released the virus aboard House of Wisdom, and they started in this laboratory.
“I want to see their logs from right before they got sick,” I said.
Malachi was moving toward the workstations before I finished speaking. I pulled myself up to the glass wall for a better look into the laboratory.
UC33-X was seven meters long from nose to tail, cylindrical in shape except for a blunted cone at the nose and slight flare at the tail, with very few protrusions or instrumentation on the outside. The solar sails that had carried it so swiftly through space had been removed, leaving the probe naked and slender. The scientists had been dissecting it. There were panels open on the side, its instrumentation revealed, its inner guts of wire and metal visible. A workbench and its stool were positioned next to an exposed section on the top of the probe; a strap of tools tethered to the workbench floated like a vine adorned with spikes.
They had brought UC33-X aboard House of Wisdom about eight months before the outbreak, after years of tracking its progress from the outer edge of the solar system toward the sun. During those eight months, as the ship returned to Earth, my father and
the other archaeologists had studied, cataloged, measured, and assessed every aspect of the probe, analyzing its materials and integrity, never allowing themselves to rush, never giving in to the urge to crack it open too soon and risk damaging what it contained. They had only breached its hull a month or two before the outbreak. My father had been so excited, grinning widely in the recorded message he sent to us, so happy with the progress he and his colleagues were making.
“I can open the interior door,” Malachi said.
He was watching me, his gaze fixed on where my hands rested on the glass. I pushed away quickly, embarrassed to have been caught gaping.
“Do it,” I said.
There was a soft mechanical click and the door eased open. I pushed toward the probe, but I misjudged my angle and had to bump into it to stop. I felt a wild pang of guilt—it was too precious to jostle; my father would be aghast. The probe’s hull was slick; my gloves slipped over the surface. I crept along centimeter by centimeter, pulling myself toward the workstation and tools.
Only when I reached the terminal did I notice the bodies.
One was adrift on the other side of UC33-X. She wore a plain jumpsuit with the House of Wisdom patch. Her hair, white and long, floated around her head. She had crossed her arms over her chest, and she lay in the air parallel to the probe. Her feet were bare, as were her hands. She might have been sleeping peacefully, if it weren’t for the mummified dryness of her skin. The desiccation and white hair gave her the look of a very old woman. There was no name on her jumpsuit, but I recognized her. Dr. Mariska Summers, another archaeologist. She had been my father’s friend since they were students together. There were no visible wounds, no obvious weapons. She bore no signs of violence.
Not so the second corpse. That one, a man, had been strapped to the opposite wall with a cargo tie. The valve of a gas canister had been jammed into his mouth. His face was parched and burnt. His lips, stretched around the canister valve, were blackened and cracked.
