The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  The door handle turned and the door opened, which made Amit jump involuntarily. He was ashamed of his fear, but his body seemed to react without his volition. The words Pavlovian response went through his head, and he cursed them for a crutch.

  Instead of Bao or the guards, there were two women at the door. The first was pale, of medium height and build, with chin-length blonde hair and brown eyes. Beside her stood a slightly taller gaunt-looking woman, dark-skinned with closely shaved hair and an air of menace about her. He recognized them immediately. The first was Clea Staples, the captain of Gringolet, whom he had tried to shoot. The second was the woman who had spared him a few minutes later. He did not know why they were here, but he could guess.

  Amit had killed one of their crewmates, a large older man. He had intended to kill them all. Amit could only assume that they were here to kill him in turn. He didn’t know if they had fought their way past the guards, bribed them, or made a deal with Bao, but they were here now. What Amit couldn’t decide was what to do about it. A higher, nobler part of his brain told him to accept their justice. He deserved it, after all. Nestled under that was the reptilian brain, the survival-obsessed bundle of neurons that flooded his system with adrenaline and urged him to fight or run.

  Before he could decide between submission or survival, a guard appeared behind the two women and said, “Bao said twenty minutes.”

  Without taking her eyes off Amit, the blonde woman said, “I heard you the first time.”

  The guard grunted and closed the door behind them, and Amit heard the bolt scrape shut. Evidently the guard either didn’t think that Amit was a threat to the two women or didn’t care.

  Having finally settled on submission, Amit sat up on his cot and put his hands in his lap. The blonde woman crossed to within a meter and looked down at him.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked. Amit could see the tension in her jaw, and her fingers were curled into fists at her sides.

  Amit nodded. “You’re the captain of Gringolet.”

  “That’s right. My name is Clea Staples, and you killed my best friend.”

  Amit held her gaze. “I’m sorry.”

  She ignored his apology. “This is Dinah Hazra. She was a friend of his too.”

  The other woman walked forward and stopped next to her captain. Her face was expressionless, and she said nothing. The way she looked at Amit made him feel as if he were an animal under the gaze of spectators at the zoo.

  “Have they told you anything?” Staples asked. Amit looked at her blankly. “About the world. About what’s been happening.”

  Amit shook his head. He had no idea what she was talking about.

  Staples sighed. “I’ll have to keep this short, then. We don’t have much time. A month ago, you illegally boarded my ship, killed my first officer Don Templeton, shot the father of an eight-year-old girl in front of her, and generally tried to kill everyone I care about. At just about the same time, the Martian Navy made their existence known. They saved my ship and everyone on it - including you, I’m sorry to say - from three rogue warships controlled by computers.”

  The last of this was a surprise to Amit, and he did not try to hide it.

  The woman continued. “These warships were built in secret by the US government in response to a message of alien origin. In short, the message stated that our solar system is subject to their imperial rule, and that they will be coming to claim it.”

  Amit gawped.

  “I’d have a bit more sympathy for your shock if I hadn’t seen it a hundred times over the past month. You’re behind the times, so close your mouth and pay attention. The US is not particularly popular right now, and international relations are, well, tense. Very few people know you exist, and fewer still likely care.” Staples sighed deeply. Her summary of what was probably the biggest news story in human history seemed to have taken some of the anger out of her.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Amit asked. He was grateful, but he knew that these women had every reason in the world to hate him, and he could not fathom why they should be the least bit helpful to him now. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “Because this affects you far more directly than you realize. Does the name Victor mean anything to you?”

  Amit considered this for a moment. He had met a few Victors in his time, but none recently, and none that stood out. He shook his head.

  “I thought not,” Staples said. “Why did you attack us?”

  Amit shuddered involuntarily. “I… you won’t believe me.”

  Staples barked humorless laughter. “Try me.”

  Amit looked away in shame. “I was told to… by God.”

  Staples seemed neither doubtful nor surprised. Instead, she looked at the other woman, Dinah, and nodded. “We thought as much.” She squatted down, face to face with Amit, and said, “It wasn’t God who ordered you to attack us. It was an Artificial Intelligence named Victor, the first of his kind. He used you as an agent to get at us.”

  “An AI?” Amit asked, stupefied.

  “Yes, a malevolent one. See, we’re just about the only people who know he exists, and so he wants us dead. How did he contact you?”

  “He spoke to me through my implants.” Amit considered for a minute the idea that all of this might be true. Every man, he believed, who lived a life of faith felt at times as though they might be a fool. That was just part of faith, of being aware that to believe in a higher being one had to leave logic behind to some degree. This, however, made him a pawn, an easily-manipulated zealot little better than a terrorist with a bomb in hand driven by promises of eternal bliss waiting beyond. The feeling was horrible, sinking, vacant. He would have rather died than feel it, but he also had to admit that it made a certain kind of sense.

  “Cranial implants?” Staples asked.

  Amit nodded.

  “Brutus was right,” the other woman said. Amit hadn’t the foggiest idea who Brutus was, but it seemed the wrong moment to ask.

  “Victor, the same AI who manipulated you and sent you to kill us, is the one behind the warships as well. It’s a bit complicated, and I don’t really have the time for specifics now. I just wanted to look in your eyes and tell you, to your face, that your faith allowed you to be manipulated.” She stared him hard, still squatting in front of him. “You killed a good man. Don Templeton had two sons and a ship of friends who will miss him. No one will miss you.”

  Staples stood up and stepped back, and as if on cue, the other woman surged forward and pulled Amit to his feet. He was not a large man, but he was still amazed at her strength. She held him off his feet in the gentle Martian gravity. Her face was very close to his, and the emotion there was plain to read now. She hated him. She wanted him dead. Amit couldn’t blame her.

  He wrestled down the urge to call for the guards or to fight her. Instead, he closed his eyes and waited for the knife or the shot. Perhaps the woman would simply beat him to death.

  A second later he found himself thrown roughly onto the bed. He bounced lightly and looked up at the two women in confusion.

  Staples said nothing, but she shook her head. Her face was a mixture of disgust, anger, and worst of all, pity. She walked over to the door and knocked. A second later, it opened and they were gone.

  As the adrenaline left him and his shuddering subsided, Amit thought back over the conversation. She hadn’t really asked him anything, nothing that she didn’t seem to know the answer to. They hadn’t killed him, and they certainly weren’t there to give him a news update. Though he played through the previous fifteen minutes again and again in his head, Amit could not figure out why they had come.

  About an hour later, Amit began to feel sick. It started with stomach cramps, and a few minutes later he vomited up the thin gruel which had passed for his dinner. His head pounded, and his vision began to blur.

  He attempted to walk to the door to call for a guard but found that he could not walk. Instead he crawled, only knowing h
e was there when he banged his head on the metal. The blow did his headache no favors, and he struck the door weakly, clawed at it feebly, and called for help.

  A minute later, two cautious guards opened the cell door and found Amit lying in his own sick. He began to lose consciousness, but was quickly revived when one of the guards, a brutal man named Wez, struck him twice across the face. They were talking to him, but Amit felt as though he were under water. Their voices drifted down to him, but he could not make out their meaning. The two men picked him up roughly by the arms, careful not to get any vomit on themselves, and carried him out into another room.

  Amit had been brought to his cell with a bag over his head, and so he had not seen any other part of the place where he was being held. Now he was dimly aware that he was in the back portion of a shop, probably one of the seedier stores that populated the various Martian cities. There was little hope that some civilian would see him or that he would be rescued.

  Nervous and agitated voices discussed his fate, but Amit found that the pain in his stomach commanded all of his attention. He rolled on his side on the cold metal flooring and clutched at his abdomen. He thought that he was moaning, perhaps even screaming.

  “…about calling Bao?” one voice asked.

  “He’s on the Ares,” another said. “Besides, we’re not allowed to contact him directly from here.”

  “Then what?”

  “Leave him. He’ll get better.”

  “He doesn’t look like he’ll get better. He looks like he’s gonna die.”

  Amit thought that dying sounded wonderful right now.

  “Call the goddamn doctor, then. Amy’s got the number.”

  Amit didn’t think he could hold on for a doctor. He moaned and his feet pushed at the floor weakly. Every second his labored breathing seared his lungs. Every moment his stomach felt as if it were on fire. Every beat of his heart pumped throbbing, deafening, needle-sharp blood through his brain.

  This went on for eleven more minutes.

  Finally someone new appeared and knelt over him. The man wore a white lab coat. He was swarthy and handsome, and Amit thought for a comforting minute that he might be Indian. Then he spoke and his accent marked him as an Arabic speaker, likely from the Middle East. Close, but no cigar Amit thought.

  “Tell me,” the man said, “where does it hurt?”

  Amit tried to speak, but he only succeeded in gasping in pain.

  The doctor kneeling over him asked no more questions but set to work examining him. He checked Amit’s pulse, pupils, blood pressure, and took a sample of blood. The last he put into a small machine about twice the size of a deck of cards, the type that Amit had frequently seen doctors use to analyze blood.

  The doctor looked accusingly around at the guards who stood baffled and useless about him. “This man has been poisoned. I need to get him to a hospital.”

  The women, Amit thought. They came to kill me after all.

  There was a moment of silence, then Wez stepped forward. “No, no hospitals.”

  “He’ll die,” the doctor offered, somewhat nonchalantly.

  Wez shrugged. “Then he’ll die. Do you care?”

  The doctor shrugged back. “Not particularly. I just don’t see why you would bother finding and calling a doctor if you refuse to take his advice.”

  Despite the searing pain, which continued unabated, Amit looked at the doctor with pleading eyes. “Please,” he managed.

  The doctor looked down at him and smiled wanly. “I’m sorry, but men like this don’t call regular doctors. They call me. And they wouldn’t call me if I had any scruples.”

  “If he dies-” Wez began.

  “Which he will, if I don’t get him to a hospital,” the doctor interjected.

  “Yeah, I got that, Doc,” Wez said. “If he dies, you’ll take care of it?”

  “Yes,” the doctor sighed as though he were a salesman who had agreed to a bad deal. “That is one of the services I provide. It does cost extra, however.”

  “Right, right,” Wez said. “You’ll get your money. Can you shut him up?”

  The doctor looked down at Amit, and Amit looked up at him. He tried to clamp his jaw shut, to stop himself from moaning in pain, but he couldn’t. The doctor produced a syringe and an ampule.

  “This should do the trick nicely, and will speed him on his way.”

  “Please,” Amit gasped one more time. He reached out an arm. He thought again about the people in the hotel room he had turned into assassins on Titan Prime. He thought about the shooters he had put in place in Las Vegas. He thought about the man Templeton whom he had shot to death. He thought about the little girl who had acted with more divine mercy than Amit had ever known.

  The doctor pushed the arm away gently and the needle slid home. “Shhh,” he said.

  Chapter 2

  “This feels like a milk run, Captain,” Charis said over her shoulder.

  “That’s because it is,” Staples replied. The two women were the only two people in the cockpit of Gringolet. Mars was a few hours behind them, and they were under thrust at point four Gs towards Earth. Once they had cleared the Martian atmosphere and spent a busy half hour reorienting their rooms for the new “down,” Charis had set their course and they were off.

  “We used to make this run all the time,” Staples observed. She shifted in her chair. Ever since the tirade that Charis had directed at her after they left AR-559, she had been a bit more reticent to engage with the navigator. The vote reaffirming Staples as captain and the intervening month seemed to have cooled some of the tensions on the ship, but she preferred to avoid confrontation if possible. Captain elect she might be, but she couldn’t really think of herself as her crew’s employer anymore.

  “I know,” Charis sighed. “I don’t know why it seems boring now. I guess it’s just perspective.”

  “It’s only natural that-” Staples checked herself and rephrased. “I think lots of people have trouble returning to the humdrum of everyday life after being in tense situations for extended periods of time. I believe that’s part of why soldiers sign up for second and third tours. Hard to get excited about grocery shopping when you’re used to people shooting at you.”

  Charis considered a moment as she absent-mindedly poked her gloved artificial left hand with her right. “I guess that makes sense, though I’m really happy not to have anyone shooting at us.”

  “I’ll second you on that.”

  It had been a relatively quiet month. The job market had been tricky lately. The alien message that Teletrans corporation had supposedly translated for the military was now public knowledge. Despite the fact that the threat had carried no apparent indication of when the evil alien empire would be arriving on Earth, many people were acting as if it would be tomorrow. It resembled the alarm before a blizzard, only worse.

  There was a run on supplies, of course, which meant lots of transport jobs, especially closer to Sol. However, many of these were modest movements of sundries, and Gringolet couldn’t take on jobs that were too small; between food, fuel, and time, they could actually lose money on a job if they weren’t careful. There was a bevy of personal transportation jobs as well; suddenly people wanted to make things right with their estranged brother, visit their aging mother one last time, or not put off the visit to meet the new grandchild one more year. Like the light cargo hauls, these were better suited to smaller ships with fewer crewmembers and lower running costs.

  Gringolet’s size and armaments made it a much better fit for corporate charters, much like the one that had begun their troubles nearly five months earlier. The corporations had the money to fly their VIPs in style, comfort, and safety. The corporations could afford a crew and ship that would fend off pirates rather than go belly-up the moment they saw a proverbial skull and crossbones. But the corporations had been stingy lately. Many had battened down the financial hatches; now was not the time to take economic risks. The concept of an impending alien invasion had a deleter
ious effect on the stock market, and so the bold sense of adventure and optimism that had spurred several decades of growth across the system had begun to shrivel. Staples hoped it would pick up again before they went hungry.

  “I suppose we’re lucky to have it,” Charis said as she made minute adjustments to their course to maximize fuel efficiency.

  “I suppose so,” Staples agreed. The fear of the impending unknown that had gripped many of the corporations had caused a few to retreat, and so there was a general movement back towards Earth and its moon. People felt, based on no logical reason but on an impulse that Staples thought she understood, that they would be safer on Earth. It was as though by packing up their tents and going home, people could apologize for daring to leave the planet of their birth and thereby offending whatever or whoever had declared Sol space as theirs.

  “I’d feel better if we had another job lined up on Luna,” Staples added. “But maybe something will turn up.”

  “I don’t suppose,” Charis said, turning around in her chair, “there’s any way to be sure that this milk run isn’t a setup from Victor? I mean, if it seems too easy, maybe it is.”

  “Well, it doesn’t pay that well. I’d expect a trap to have better bait.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Charis objected.

  “No, it doesn’t. Victor’s more than cunning enough to avoid over-baiting a trap. We vetted the job as well as we could. It’s a small company, really a mom-and-pop organization twenty years ago that opened a new franchise on Mars. They make handmade rugs, wall hangings, that sort of thing. Guess they got nervous given the news lately, so they decided to close up shop on Mars and pull their supplies and tools back to Luna where they started. I can’t say I blame them; I don’t think too many people are buying handmade décor these days.”