Salvation Day

by Kali Wallace

  Twenty minutes. Four hundred and seventy-seven bodies, and not all would be as easy to access and move as this one had been. And even if we could destroy every single body before SPEC arrived, we could not cleanse the blood from every surface. It was impossible. We could not make the ship safe. The parasite would find a way. The outbreak would begin anew on the Moon, or Earth, or Providence, wherever it found itself again in favorable conditions.

  Rather than stopping the thought where it began, I let myself imagine it. A SPEC agent forgetting, for one single moment, the danger. The parasite hiding inside him until it could overtake him and his team. A ship of infected SPEC crew landing at Armstrong City or docking at one of the orbital stations. The wounded, the ill, the dead and mourned, they would be carried on stretchers or sealed in biohazard bags, and they would be taken away to hospitals or morgues. They would be passed into the hands of loving doctors and curious scientists like my mother had once been. And the silver worms would slither from host to host, unseen. The parasites would replicate themselves, create children upon children to whip through countless bodies, scratching and squiggling and itching their way through doctors, nurses, mourners, politicians, and researchers, writhing beneath the skin. The infected would not know, at first, what fate awaited them. Their discomfort would turn to panic, their panic to violence. Surely the parasite’s capacity for replication was not endless—it needed material, it needed energy—but it might find all of that, somehow, as it spread. It would pass from patient to doctor, doctor to family, family to the rest of the world. Within weeks, days, a pandemic of blood and screams and helpless fear would overcome all attempts to halt it.

  One by one the cities of Earth would fall silent. They would become crypts, dusty with the remains of the forgotten dead, who would number so many their names could not be counted even if anybody remained to count them. Wind would echo through the canyons of tall buildings, through windows edged with teeth of glass, through fences of shivering wire and walls of crumbling brick, and when it broke free of the cities the mournful wind would race over deserts now empty of barefooted boys limping toward lights that glowed like a promise on the horizon. And the world, the Earth that had endured thousands of years of civilizations rising and falling, whose people had driven it to the edge of destruction and clawed their way back, would be nothing more than a curiosity for some alien explorers to find in a thousand years, ten thousand, more, when the night sky was a graveyard of satellites slowly, slowly, slowly crashing into the atmosphere.

  “I don’t hate Earth,” I said.

  Jas was still watching the screen, searching for any sign the parasite had withstood the fire. “What?”

  “I don’t hate Earth,” I said, and that time it sounded less like a question. “What you said earlier. You’re wrong about that. That’s not why I came here.”

  “Then why did you?” Jas said.

  “For my father. I told you. To prove he wasn’t a killer. And for the twins. I thought they could have a better life here. Life in the deserts isn’t easy, and it’s even harder to find a way out. Coming here, following Adam, that was our way.”

  Finally he turned from the screen to meet my eyes. “But you weren’t born there. Your parents were Councils citizens.”

  I swallowed; my throat was dry and sore. “Do you know my mother was a doctor? She was a wonderful doctor. All she ever wanted to do was help people, to make them well. She hated that the Councils would refuse citizenship to people who needed help. She hated that just being unlucky enough to be born in a poisoned wasteland could be a death sentence, if your family didn’t get moved through the application process fast enough. She hated that people are always being told to just get in line, follow the rules, wait your turn, as though that would make their children well and bring their loved ones back. She saw how cruel that was. Helping people is all she ever did.”

  And that was what she had done, even after we went to the desert. The homestead was a quicksand trap for the lost and ailing. The children always needed their scrapes bandaged and their bruises kissed. The work never ceased. And every night, every single night, while the rest of us looked upward and dreamed, my mother soothed the ill, tended the wounded, comforted the dying. I had not understood it before, how rooted she was on the ground, but I remembered how sad her smile had been when those who had been to space and yearned to return told their stories, embellishing what the darkness had to offer, spinning its dangers into beauty. My mother never shared her own stories. She only worked while Dag was telling eager young daredevils about his slingshot around Venus, while Orvar was remembering the first time he had sailed so far that Earth was nothing but a speck in the distance, while Boudicca was speaking quietly about the exhilaration of racing above Mars, so close to the surface there was an ever-present danger of clipping a mountaintop.

  The rewards, Boudicca had said, outweigh the dangers, in the end.

  I had an idea.

  * * *

  • • •

  When we returned to the bridge, I asked, “Do you know about the crash of the Breton?”

  “The one that crashed on Mars?” Jas returned to the navigation console and pulled himself into one of the chairs. He tapped the radio on again to hear what Orbital Control was saying. “I remember learning about it in school. Why?”

  “Boudicca—the pilot on the shuttle. The woman with the red hair.” It hurt to say her name and remember the confident rasp of her voice as she told her own truths around the fire at the center of the homestead. “When Breton crashed, she was the pilot of the first ship to respond to the distress signal. She told me that when they got to the crash site and inside the wreck, they couldn’t even find the crew. The bodies. SPEC told the families the conditions were too dangerous to retrieve the bodies, but really they were so badly burned most of them were just—dust. Debris.”

  “We didn’t learn that in school,” Jas said. “But it makes sense. It was a horrible accident.”

  And, prior to House of Wisdom, it was the single greatest loss of human life in space since the Collapse. Afterward, SPEC and the Councils had declared never again, never again would space travel be so dangerous, never again would so many perish. But, Boudicca had told me, they only changed what public outcry clamored for them to change, and when she tried to demand more, when she spoke up about what failures had led to the disaster, they had shunted her aside again and again, assigning her to routes a trainee could have flown, passing her over for higher positions and better ships, censuring her every time she spoke up. SPEC had made its point: they did not want her anymore. And without SPEC, without access to space, Boudicca had no reason to remain loyal to the Councils that had treated her so poorly.

  All because of a single horrifying crash. Because she had wanted to keep it from happening again. Because she wanted those whose carelessness had lost lives to admit what they had done.

  “She said there was—was it something wrong with the atmosphere filtration system?” I asked, trying to recall the details. “It made the crew sick, so they didn’t notice the air was getting toxic, and they lost control? And it was some flammable gas?”

  “I think so.” Jas rubbed his hands over his face and inhaled sharply, as though trying to wake himself up. “I remember it now. They thought it was sabotage at first, because as far as anybody could tell there were never any alarms or warnings. The atmospheric control system was supposed to have an automatic limit for high levels of—I think it was carbon monoxide buildup. That’s what incapacitated the crew. It wasn’t sabotage after all. There was a glitch in the computers that had shut down the warning system and not restarted it.”

  “They asphyxiated before the fire started?” I asked.

  “Probably. I don’t think SPEC ever found out exactly what caused the fire. With high enough carbon monoxide concentrations, it wouldn’t take much of a spark. They assumed it was in the cargo. There were construction supplies on b
oard. Tools, fuel, that sort of thing.”

  “The point is, it burned everything, right? Can we do something like that?”

  “They redesigned the carbon monoxide scrubbing system after the Breton,” Jas said. “There’s a fail-safe that restarts the active scrubbing no matter how it’s shut down, plus the passive backups.”

  “So we use something else. Some other flammable gas.”

  “Maybe,” he said. He called up an image on the screen: it was a schematic of the ship. He began flicking through the levels one by one, looking over them quickly. “There are multiple recyclers on every level. Not just for the living areas, but for the laboratories, for the medical bays, for the machine shops, for all of Dad’s horticultural rooms. The system is designed so that every section can take care of itself in the emergency of a larger system failure.”

  “Okay,” I said, following but not yet understanding.

  “Their primary by-products of organic recycling are methane and ammonia, but they aren’t kept as methane and ammonia for very long, because what the ship needs for power and propulsion is hydrogen. Hydrogen burns in air at low concentrations. And it burns hot.”

  My heart began to beat faster. “There must be safety mechanisms.”

  “There would be, normally,” Jas said. “But my mother and the captain had to disable them. There wouldn’t have been any other way to get the fire suppression system to swamp the entire ship while there were still people in every section.”

  “Will it be enough?” I asked.

  Even as I spoke, I was thinking through the steps in my mind. Replace the breathable air with hydrogen in all of the ship’s open spaces. Level by level. Chamber by chamber. For years I had been studying everything we could find about House of Wisdom, its schematics and systems, filling my head with knowledge in hopes that one day I would be able to spill it out, information flowing from my fingertips when we took control of the ship. I had never considered that all I had learned to make House of Wisdom shine would instead be used to turn it into an inferno.

  Jas said nothing, so I answered my own question. “It will be enough. It has to be.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Much of what needed to be done could be done from the bridge or nearby systems command centers. Access this system, turn off that system. Malachi had removed all of the command restrictions. The medical monitor was able to tell us where nearly everybody aboard the ship had died, as well as where their bodies had ended up, and from that data we could identify every space that needed to be incinerated. Specks of light danced on the map before me. We opened doors and valves: the task was easy, once we knew how. We counted the dead by pairs, by threes, by scores. Four hundred and seventy-seven. We could not miss anybody.

  I was focused on the task of closing the doors to protect the engine levels; there were no bodies farther aft than cargo. The radio transmissions from Orbital Control and Pangong had been a steady hum in the background of our work, welcome voices interrupting the ship’s oppressive silence. The word Homestead caught my attention.

  “Confirm course correction,” a voice said.

  Another voice rattled off a series of numbers and added, “Course correction confirmed. Homestead remains on course for Providence Station.”

  “They send out any more open broadcasts?”

  A laugh. “Not yet.”

  “Keep an eye on them. At least they’re headed where they said they’d go.”

  There was a quivering fear deep in my gut, tight and sickly and cold as ice.

  “I need to try them again,” I said. Jas gestured absently toward the radio, so I moved over a chair and opened the channel. “Homestead, this is House of Wisdom. This is Zahra. Please talk to me.”

  This time, the answer was immediate.

  Adam appeared on the screen, scowling through streaks of muddy red. They had moved Orvar’s body, but his blood remained splattered over the camera lens. Adam’s expression twisted with surprise when he saw me.

  “What do you want?”

  “I need to talk to you about—”

  Adam laughed. He actually laughed. Sitting in Orvar’s bloodstained chair, his hands on the controls Orvar ought to be manning, pieces of Orvar’s scalp and skull on the terminal before him, and he was laughing.

  “You have nothing to say that I care to hear. I have more important things to do.”

  “Adam, please, listen—”

  “Zahra, my child. You will be dead soon, or wish you were.” His smile was thin. “If you live to be buried in a Councils prison, that will be better than you deserve for choosing to side with them. I only wish I could be there to see it.”

  That cold knot of dread tightened in my stomach. “What do you mean?”

  “We are free,” Adam said. “We are free. Do you understand? Can your small, scared animal mind comprehend that?”

  I could scarcely breathe. “You’re heading for Providence.”

  “We have our freedom. They tried to keep us from space, to keep us shackled to the ground, and we defied them. The whole world will remember us for it.”

  “You told them you’re going to surrender. We heard the confirmation from Orbital Control.”

  Adam laughed again. I had never heard a more frightening sound. “The liars and deceivers will burn in their final moments.”

  “Adam, you can’t, you can’t—”

  “I will be thinking of your betrayal until the end.”

  He ended the transmission. The navigation chart replaced his face on the display.

  My heart was pounding. I began to tremble all over. I had hoped he would deny it. I had wanted to be wrong, to hear proof he could not be so cruel. I needed somebody aboard Homestead to listen. Somebody who could fly the ship to safety. Convince them to change their course and their minds. Convince them that what Adam planned was madness.

  “What are they going to do?” Jas said.

  His voice might have been coming from light-years away. I called for Homestead again. Again. I had to try. Again. There was no answer. The bloodstained bridge would be empty. Adam would be walking among the family. I knew his way: how he strolled, hands extended, smile soft, when he wanted to draw us all into a web around him. He would be reassuring them about the choice he had taken from their hands, and they would believe it was their own decision. He would be expounding upon how glorious their deaths would be, and they would be too frightened, or too overwhelmed, to disagree. I tried again. My voice cracked midway through the hail.

  “Zahra,” Jas said softly, “what are they going to do?”

  “They . . .”

  That scratch of breath, it was both my voice and not my voice. They will never let us be free, Adam would say, and the family would hear proof in SPEC’s warnings. I know them better than they know themselves, he would say, and the chill of that knowledge would quell any dissent. It is the only way, he would say, and all would feel his despair. How very hopeless our hopes had been.

  I said, “They’re going to crash Homestead into Providence Station.”

  Jas opened his mouth, closed it. He looked toward the navigation display at the front of the bridge. He looked back to me.

  “There are twenty thousand people living there,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “And three hundred on Homestead. Families. Children. My brother and sister. But Adam doesn’t care. He won’t change course.”

  “Are you—are you certain? Did you know that all along?”

  My fear shattered into dismay. He had to believe me. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to stop Adam, and I needed help. I had so little proof. Ten ruthless years. The firing of Homestead’s engines. Adam’s smile behind a smear of blood.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. Suspicions were not the same as knowing, worries not the same as proof. I had wanted so desperately to be wr
ong. “And yes. I am certain.”

  He stared at me for a moment longer, then reached in front of me to access the radio. “Fuck. Fuck. Okay. Pangong, this is House of Wisdom.”

  Captain Chavannes answered at once. “Mr. Bhattacharya, we have been hailing you for nearly an hour! Why are you still aboard House of Wisdom? We are tracking the vessel Brahmin—” Then she blinked, and her gaze shifted. “You also said the hostile individuals had been neutralized. What’s going on? Do you have demands to make, Ms. Dove Lago?”

  I had not been called by that name since I had left my Councils secondary school ten years ago. It belonged to somebody else, a naive girl long vanished.

  “She’s not making demands,” Jas said, impatience sharpening his words. “She’s trying to warn you. Homestead isn’t going to surrender. They intend to crash into Providence Station.”

  Captain Chavannes was skeptical. “They have indicated to us they intend a full and peaceful surrender,” she said.

  “Don’t believe them. It’s not slowing down, is it? They changed course but they aren’t decelerating. Look at their trajectory. Is it right for docking? Shouldn’t they be decelerating by now? It’s still accelerating.”

  “We are tracking the ship’s course,” Chavannes said. “There is still time for—”

  Jas rubbed his hands over his face in frustration. “And if they don’t? They’re going to crash into Providence Station.”

  Captain Chavannes’s expression was pinched and unhappy. “Mr. Bhattacharya, as of right now—”

  “I want to talk to my aunt again.”

  “What led you to this conclusion?”

  “Let me talk to my aunt.”

  “Your aunt is currently unavailable. Her ship is—”

  “She’s not fucking unavailable. Let me talk to her.”

  “Mr. Bhattacharya, calm down. We know you are alarmed, but what you need to do is avoid any further rash decisions. You have already endangered your friends, and we are doing all we can to ensure Homestead’s safe surrender. You need to—”