Salvation Day

by Kali Wallace

  Perhaps, I thought, perhaps this was an outcome he had foreseen from the first moment he set eyes on House of Wisdom through the shuttle window. Not Adam’s cruelty, not SPEC’s powerlessness, but the span of his life cut down to hours that could be counted on one hand, and this magnificent mausoleum, these dead, the same who had been with him all along, with him still, in these final moments. I had always hated the boy in the news reports for not crying at his parents’ funerals, when I had felt like I would never be finished shedding tears of rage and grief for my father. But I had seen now what had been in that boy’s mind. I wondered if anybody had ever told him it was not his fault he survived when so many hadn’t.

  I walked along the curve of the bridge again. I glanced over my shoulder. Jas was watching the display. I asked, “It’s still working? The hydrogen?”

  He answered without turning. “In the lower levels, at least, the concentration is well above where the fail-safes should be triggered, and the automatic filtering system hasn’t switched itself back on.”

  He pointed to a display with a scrolling series of letters and numbers.

  LV 0 H2 4% O2 18% N2 76%

  LV 1 H2 5% O2 18% N2 75%

  LV 2 H2 3% O2 20% N2 77%

  “The concentrations are changing slowly now, but the recycling system is ramping up electrolysis,” he said.

  I bent to pick up the suppression weapon and tucked it into the back of my belt. “Good,” I said.

  “It’s flammable at four percent,” he went on. “We just have to hope nothing sparks early. Right now we should reach flammable concentrations on every level before—” His voice caught. “Impact.”

  He didn’t sound relieved, or proud. Only tired.

  “And this level will be last,” I said.

  I stopped behind his chair. I reached around to my back and took hold of the weapon. It wasn’t the same design as the ones Adam’s guards had used at the homestead, but it was similar enough that I understood the settings. Deter and subdue. Shock and sedation.

  He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah. By the time we open the doors, the whole ship will be ready to go up.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Good.”

  I switched the weapon to Subdue and pressed it to the back of his neck. He sucked in a short, sharp breath, and every muscle in his body tensed. I pulled the trigger. The hum was quick, soft. Jas slapped his hand to his neck and twisted around to look up at me.

  “What the fuck? What did you do?”

  But already his words were slurring, his eyes fluttering.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll finish it.”

  He slumped in the chair. I caught him before he could fall. At this acceleration even the slightest bump on the head might cause injury. My hands were shaking.

  * * *

  • • •

  I didn’t know how long the sedative would keep him out. It wasn’t hard to find the designated airlock for Level 10 evacuation, but because of the acceleration, I was sweating and breathless by the time I had dragged him that far. It was another struggle to get him into an evac suit. My thoughts were scattered, my motions hurried, and the effort of remaining upright grew harder with every passing minute.

  The evacuation suit was considerably more advanced than those we’d donned aboard the shuttle. Those had been passive suits, nothing more, designed only to keep their wearers alive until rescue. This evac suit was equipped with thrusters that noted the speed and trajectory of the ship and fired to propel itself away; the goal was to counter the motion of the ship so that the evacuated person would be quickly jettisoned to safety.

  At least, that was what was supposed to happen. I had no idea if I was doing it right. It was another item for the list of things I should have known. We had never seriously discussed evacuation, because we had never allowed ourselves to contemplate the possibility of failure. Adam had not allowed it. We had been so stupid to trust in his certainty to the point of burying our own doubts and fears.

  I positioned Jas, still unconscious, in the airlock launch frame. I closed the hatch and depressurized the airlock. I launched the evac suit. From my point of view it happened so quickly: he was there, he was outside, he was gone. The system reported a successful launch and an active rescue beacon. It would have to be enough. They would bring him back to his aunt and his friends, to his research about quasars, to his twenty-six hours of telescope time, to his future. I had never meant to take a future away from any of our hostages, least of all from the one who had already suffered so much, but it didn’t matter what I had intended. There is no nobility in regretting the violence you have done when it is too late.

  I trudged back to the bridge slowly, slowly, every step an agony.

  Alone on the bridge, I sat at the terminal to wait. The ship had already surpassed 5 g. Amita Bhattacharya’s engines were a marvel. With every second House of Wisdom swung closer to its target.

  The computer calculated time to impact as forty-two minutes. Not long enough for either ship to make a course correction wide enough to save them.

  On the radio Pangong was calling for me and for Homestead. Orbital Control was hysterical, to put it mildly. On the navigation display I could see Providence Station, its evacuation vessels, the icebreakers moving too slowly into position. They would arrive in time to salvage what they could, no sooner. My head was throbbing and my shoulders ached. I looked for the emergency beacon of the evacuation suit on the screen. It was far from the ship, already left behind.

  “. . . you hear us?”

  A new voice came over the radio, quiet, wavering, but with an urgency that caught my attention.

  “Can you hear us? Zahra?”

  I sat forward quickly, my head spinning. I knew that voice. “Anwar!”

  “Zahra!” My brother leaned toward the camera, peering at me through Orvar’s blood. He was not alone. Nadra was behind him, her eyes wide with fear, and there were seven or eight others on the bridge as well. A couple of small children, two older women, and a few young men near the door. “Zahra, the ships are going to crash, and we don’t know how to stop it. We can’t change course. We can’t change anything. Adam shot all the people who knew how to fly the ship.” There were tears in Anwar’s eyes and a catch in his throat, and I wanted more than anything to reach across space and take him in my arms. “Everybody’s scared and the guards have guns and they won’t tell us anything—”

  “Anwar, listen to me. Nadra. Listen.”

  “But we—”

  “Listen to me,” I said, pleading. “You can still get away. There are evacuation suits on Homestead. Look for the evac airlock close to the bridge. You can—”

  One of the men near the door stumbled backward with a shout of surprise, and the other lurched to catch him. The muzzle of a weapon appeared through the open doorway, then an arm, then the growl of a familiar voice telling them to move out of the way. One of the kids started crying. Nadra pulled Anwar away from the radio, and there was Adam.

  My breath caught—how deeply those instincts sink into us, quivering fear in the face of familiar rage, that skittish animalistic cower—but the sensations, rather than growing, sank away, like water vanishing into parched soil. He could not hurt me now. He looked around, wild-eyed, until he saw me on their screen. He strode over to the console and slammed his hands into the panel as he leaned down.

  “Do you think this changes anything?” he shouted, his voice thundering. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair unkempt, his face contorted with anger. There were sweat stains at his armpits and bloodstains on his sleeves. “Do you think you are accomplishing anything? You will not snatch our final victory from us.”

  “Victory?” I said. I wanted to draw upon my fear, my outrage, my horror at what he was doing, but I felt as though my heart had been set adrift in empty space, with nothing to knock against, nothing to fall into. I c
ould hear shouts in the background, cries and screams of fear, a man bellowing for others to stay on the floor. The people aboard Homestead knew what was coming, and they were afraid. “This is not victory, Adam. You promised to protect the family, but you’re killing them.”

  “We are ending our lives in defiance and strength,” he retorted. “We are finally free of the crushing boot of the oppressors. We will be remembered forever as the only people courageous enough to defy the liars and deceivers. There was never going to be a way back from this. This is where we were always going to end.”

  Behind him one of the old women—Rosalinda, a kindly grandmother to everybody in the family—was shushing the weeping children.

  “Do you even care about all the children who are going to die?” I asked.

  “We make sacrifices,” Adam spat, his pale face turning red. “Nobody has sacrificed more than I. You dare scold me about the hardships we have endured on our path to victory? They would not have to die if you had done as you were told.”

  “No,” I said, my voice drawing down as his shouts rang. “They would not have to die if you were anything more than a coward.”

  Adam scowled. “Your father was a weak slave of the Councils, and you are as weak as he was. You have always been weak. You have always cowered and groveled when a stronger person would have fought. You relished every chance I gave you to bend and kiss my feet.”

  “This is betrayal,” I said. “This is worse than failure. Nobody will remember you as anything other than a monster. They will remember you exactly as you deserve.”

  “Your cowardice has never shown more than now,” he said, his voice spiked with a disdain that would have crushed me only days ago.

  “No,” I said. He would not hear me, but I was not speaking to him. I was speaking to Nadra and Anwar, to Rosalinda and the others, to myself, if only to prove I still could, here at the end. “What you are doing is cowardice. I am only trying to keep you from hurting more people.”

  There was nothing more to say. There was no truth in Adam’s orbit except what Adam decided truth to be, and that was as fickle as the weather, snapping from brilliant sunshine to deadly flash floods in the blink of an eye or the slap of an open hand. I could see now what Malachi had seen all along: that it was not a family but a spider’s web, a trap that glistened so beautifully with morning dew, but at its center was Adam, a ravenous god in his own scrabbling creation, craving devotion, devouring praise, taking everything offered to him and giving nothing in return.

  “You don’t know anything of hurt!” Adam roared. “You don’t—”

  He broke off sharply. Nadra had launched herself at his back, and she hit him from behind with such force he doubled over with a grunt of surprise.

  She took hold of his hair and slammed his head into the terminal. Then she dragged his head up and slammed it down again, again, and there were tears on her face, her breath was hitching with sobs, and I wanted to reach for her, wanted to pull her away, but it was Anwar who pulled her away. Adam’s face was a wreckage of blood and shattered bone. Nadra let go with a gasp and shoved him to slump over the terminal.

  Nadra stared down at her hands.

  “Nadra, Anwar, listen to me,” I said. My voice was shaking, but I needed their attention. “Rosalinda. All of you. You have thirty minutes. Get yourselves into evacuation suits and get away from the ship. Take as many people as you can. Anybody who will listen.”

  “You’ll find us, won’t you?” Nadra looked up at me and forced the words through her tears. “Even if SPEC arrests us? You’ll find us?”

  “They won’t arrest you. Listen—they have proof that Dad didn’t do what they said he did. They have proof that they got it all wrong. You have to make sure they don’t hide that proof. Make sure they tell the truth. Do you understand?”

  “How?” Anwar asked.

  “Find Jaswinder Bhattacharya. Find his aunt, Councilor Bhattacharya.”

  “A Councilor?” Anwar said, incredulous. “But she’ll—”

  “They’ll listen to you. Demand a meeting. You’ll get it. You can make them tell the truth. I know you can.” I reached out, aching to touch them. “I love you. Please go. Go as fast as you can.”

  They left the bridge quickly; Rosalinda had taken Adam’s gun. When there was nobody, I ended the transmission.

  I watched until the ship reported the sudden appearance of several emergency beacons in the vicinity of Homestead, and I exhaled. I had to believe Nadra and Anwar were among them. I had to believe they would be rescued. I had to believe they would not be held responsible for my crimes.

  A red warning light began to flash on the screen: the hydrogen concentration in the lower five levels had surpassed 15 percent.

  I reached for the radio again. I used the open emergency broadcast channel. I wanted everyone to know who those emergency evac suits were carrying. I needed them to understand.

  I said what I had to say, and there were only minutes left. The stream of evac suits from Homestead had stopped. I had not counted them. There were more than a few, enough to form a bright cluster of stars on the navigation screen.

  I entered the command to spark the fires, one level at a time. It would spread quickly.

  I rose from the chair and opened the door of the bridge to let the deadly air in. Hydrogen gas has no odor, no color. It surrounded me, as invisible as desert wind twisting through a slot canyon. It felt like nothing at all. I staggered over to the officers’ ready room and slid to the floor to lean against the glass wall. The parasites were still on the other side. I could see, in the tangle of corpses on the floor, a single plait of Panya’s yellow hair.

  My vision was dimming, marred by black spots, and my head ached. I didn’t close my eyes. I wanted to keep looking at that constellation of bright stars on the screen, the proof that my sister and brother had survived, proof that there had been room for courage under the fearful oppression of Adam’s madness. Proof that even the worst of us could not crush hope so thoroughly there was no way out of the darkness.

  There was a roar of sound somewhere in the ship, like a storm rolling over distant peaks. The flash of light and heat, when it came, was as sudden and beautiful as the sun rising over the desert.

  SHIP-TO-BROADCAST EMERGENCY COMMUNICATION TRANSCRIPT (AUDIO)

  Source: HOUSE OF WISDOM, SPEC RESEARCH (INACTIVE)

  TimeDate: 02:37:29 01.26.404

  HOUSE OF WISDOM: This is . . . this is House of Wisdom. For anybody who can hear me. There are people evacuating from Homestead. I know your ships are tracking them. You need to know that those people mean you no harm. Some of them are children, and right now they need your help. Please do not blame them for what we’ve done. They only wanted a better life. They only wanted—and tell them I’m sorry. Nadra, Anwar, I’m so sorry. You deserve so much better. I want you to remember what Mama and Dad used to believe in. They used to believe in the Councils. Not the Councils as they are now, with their secret programs and closed borders and empty promises, but the Councils as they were meant to be. I remember Dad telling me about the First Council, when the people who survived the Collapse came together. The world was dying all around them, people were dying, they barely had food, they were living in a wasteland, the sky was falling, but they came together to promise each other humankind would never make the same mistakes again. They had no reason for hope, but they found it anyway. For a long time I’ve believed I would gladly condemn the Councils to the second Collapse they seem so determined to achieve. But Dad never wanted that. Dad liked to quote what Leung Ma-Lin had said: “The day we believe ourselves immune from the cruelties and atrocities of the past is the day we commit them again.” He believed that. He wanted to prove that the people who had fled before the Collapse were wrong about humanity’s fate. He would never, ever have done what he was accused of doing. Whatever his flaws, Gregory Lago believed in doing bet
ter than the past. The Councils can prove it now. SPEC can prove it. Don’t let them hide the truth. Nadra, Anwar, I love you. I love you so much. Be safe.

  I’m alone. I’m certain of it now. There’s been no response from orbit for ten days [data corruption] so quickly up there. Even faster than here. There’s nobody left except the dead. I’m going to try one last time to launch the craft remotely. I can only hope somebody receives this warning someday. They told us Earth was dying, but perhaps they were wrong. They told us we came into the darkness to save humanity from extinction, but perhaps that is somebody else’s burden to bear. Whoever you are, whatever you have done to survive, this is Mournful Evening Song, and this is our final transmission. Our mission is over.

  —FRAGMENT 7, MOURNFUL EVENING SONG VIA UC33-X

  JAS

  I woke in darkness, at the birth of the universe.

  Everything we’re made of came to be in the first moments of existence. There was the beginning, and so quickly thereafter, so brief a glimmer of time we can only conceive of it in millionths of a second, there was matter: electrons and quarks. Another glimmer and the quarks became protons and neutrons, dancing madly where only emptiness had been before. Ages passed— minutes, but when all of time is the hold of a breath, minutes are eons. Particles clumped into pairs. Time and space stretched, stretched, days, years, centuries, millennia rolling outward into the nothingness. Electrons organized themselves into flickering clouds of probability around the nuclei. The first atoms of hydrogen and helium were born. One million years, then two, time passing with no one to measure it, no memory to weigh it against, before gravity nudged those lonely atoms together into fierce burning lights to spot the darkness.

  “And that,” my mother said to me, “is where it gets interesting. Everything we are was born in the hearts of stars. Do you still think that’s boring?”

  My answer that day was a noncommittal shrug. I heard her tone as teasing and scolding. I was too young to recognize it as loving. I would not hear the love in her playful tutelage until years after she was gone. I had never thought her lessons boring, but I was afraid to admit interest to my mother, whose mind was so much faster than mine, whose well of knowledge was so much deeper. I wanted to learn things in my own time, even the lives and deaths of the stars.