Earthfall

by Joshua Guess

  I shrugged again. “If you give me the Home Run, chances are I’ll get killed anyway.”

  There was a low murmur at this, the peanut gallery of captains and scientists looking uncomfortable.

  “You sound remarkably comfortable with the thought,” Kitur said softly.

  “That’s the right word,” I replied. “Comfortable. Not okay with the idea of dying, because I don’t have a death wish. I’m comfortable with it. My entire life has been learning to cope with any of a thousand things that could kill me. I couldn’t be a pilot without being able to live with the concept.”

  Kitur relaxed in her chair somewhat at this, though I doubted she had any real fear I was suicidal. “I’m surprised you would go so far to protect Mr. Rubey, though I suppose I shouldn’t be considering how close you Blues are.”

  “It’s not just that,” I said. “You asked what the Home Run means to me. You also asked if agreed with Garrett when he said we’re just toys.” I let my gaze move across the table, stopping on each of them just long enough to make eye contact. “I should say that the Home Run is about me doing my duty, that I want to do it because I’m loyal to the UEE. And that’s true, just not to whole of it. People have this habit of boiling their motivations and explaining themselves in truisms and easy sound bites. I’m loyal to our people, but I also can’t escape the knowledge that I was made by them to do a job. No matter how well we’re treated or the freedoms we have, a small and irrational part of every Blue will feel the way Garrett does. Doesn’t matter that we agreed to it because it isn’t about logic.

  “I recognize it for what it is, though. It’s the same sort of envy almost everyone feels for something they can’t have. It doesn’t eat at me or drive me. And while my duty is important and does drive my normal routine, neither it nor my love for our people are what makes me want to do the Home Run so badly.”

  Eli Catos, the head of Research, cocked his head. “Why, then?”

  I suppressed the small wave of embarrassment that rose up in me. It was a truth I’d only ever admitted to Jordan.

  “I’m the best pilot you have,” I said without hubris. “I want to do this because gathering information is the only way we can ever hope to retake Earth. I was born on Ceres, but ever since the first time I saw a picture of it I’ve wanted nothing more fiercely than to stand on that ground and look up at that blue sky.”

  Four

  A generous way to describe the next few weeks would be to call them hellish. While I never put much stock in the idea that being a Blue was all that bad, even I had to admit it had few obvious upsides. One of those was the fact that my entire purpose in existing was to be a really, really good pilot. Which meant the number of people trying to tell me how to do my job was small.

  At least until I got the green light for the Home Run. Then, computer in my head and a lifetime of training or not, I was taken to school. Literally.

  It helped that as I sat in boring training sims and classrooms, my brain and NIC working together to memorize a huge volume of new information, that I thought of the experience in terms of what it would allow me to do. The Home Run was the most enviable experience a pilot could have. We traveled to lots of star systems and surveyed a lot of planets and assorted space rocks. But this was Earth. This was a chance to see where it all started.

  The other thing that got me through those miserable fourteen days was my imagination, which worked triple time to pretend the experience was something like a training montage from a 1980s movie.

  Yes, here I am living on a converted dwarf planet twenty light years from the cradle of my species and centuries removed, and I know all about the decade of cinema that brought us such classics as Top Gun and Iron Eagle. While I like those movies well enough, I actually prefer teen flicks like The Breakfast Club or Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

  When Ceres was being designed, the people in charge of the project didn’t want us getting bored. After all, it was bound to be a few decades before any colony was at the point where the more complex forms of entertainment were feasible in terms of time or resources.

  So they sent along a digital archive about the size of a car, heavily shielded, and containing every movie, song, book, and game the human race had created up until that point. It wasn’t just psychology pushing the architects to do so, but a practical desire to ensure human art didn’t become extinct in the universe.

  We lost so much when the library at Alexandria burned. The Holocaust destroyed countless works gathered and tended to with loving care over the centuries. The great famines, plagues, and disasters which began at the end of the twenty-first century didn’t destroy in the same way. There was no purge anyone could point to on a chart and smugly declare that this or that moment was when things went pear-shaped.

  The starving deaths of hundreds of millions of people, the tidal wave of suicides as sickness forced people to choose between slow and lingering deaths or a relatively dignified quick exit, these things were nearly the death of human creativity. Our species fell into a dark age, one deeper and less obvious for the existence of technology.

  What all the tragedy raining on the human race led to was an almost complete cessation of creative works. With some exceptions, art is about finding the beauty in the world. Sometimes it’s a dark beauty, but it’s usually there. Faced with hunger, illness, and mass death on every side, no one much felt like writing wacky sitcoms.

  The nearly century-long pause in mass creation of entertainment created a surge of renewed interest and respect in the old movies and books that predated those hard times.

  Which is why I know how to thread the needle of orbital mechanics the way some people can put on a pair of pants without thinking about it, while at the same time possessing an encyclopedic knowledge of every superhero the Incredible Hulk ever had a fight with.

  Not that I didn’t pay attention, however boring those classes were. No, sir. I wanted to see the world where my fictional heroes and favorite bands had come from. I wanted it more than anything. Much like a child raised with an absentee father, my deepest hope was to see the face of my creator.

  First I had to learn how to not crash my ship. Which happened in my sims with depressing regularity. I hadn’t failed a flight sim since I was five.

  “You didn’t even make it out of the hangar that time, Mars,” Jordan said cheerfully as he jotted down notes on my performance. “I’m not entirely sure what happened there.”

  I grunted and frowned, more to hide my embarrassment than anything else. “I was daydreaming and accidentally hit the release for the satellite packages.”

  Jordan, who had been playing the part of coach and instructor, couldn’t hold back his laughter. “So you bumped the release for five hundred cubesats before your engines were even warmed up? That’s adorable.”

  “I’ll show you adorable,” I muttered. “Besides, I’m not used to having physical controls in my flight pod. Usually Jax takes care of the interfacing.”

  Jordan shook his head. “Relying on your NIC is fine, but the whole reason you’re doing this training is because the modifications to your usual control scheme need some getting used to. Jax is an awesome tool, Mars, but no amount of extra processing power in your head will save you from distracting yourself.”

  Which wasn’t strictly true; I could give Jax safeguard commands to stop me from doing anything stupid, and Jordan knew it. Part of why the kid was my friend and not just my aide was because Jordan knew I wouldn’t give Jax any such instructions. Jordan knew that no matter how much I might grumble or complain, I would give up flying before getting so mentally lazy that I used a computer to not to make easily avoidable mistakes.

  If I couldn’t focus myself and keep my head in the game of my own accord, I had no business flying. Fortunately, my mistakes so far didn’t seem to shake the confidence my superiors placed in me.

  “Let’s break for a bit,” Jordan said. I deferred to him, because I trusted his judgment when it came to my mental state, and b
ecause I was hungry.

  Unfortunately, lunch wasn’t in the cards for me. Rather than ply me with food, Jordan made me follow him to the Ceres scout launch bay where my ship would normally have been waiting. It wasn’t there, of course, as it was being refitted with satellite packages, having all of its systems carefully checked and tuned up, and getting a few mission-specific upgrades.

  Jordan walked over to the deck chief and spoke with him in hushed tones. A few seconds later the chief nodded and worked the management console. I watched with mild confusion as the doors to the floor elevator split and a standard Columbia-class scout substrate was lifted into the hangar.

  The substrate was technically a ship capable of flying, though it only barely qualified. The class of ship was named after homing pigeons—a deliberate joke because scientists are huge nerds with an ingrained optimism you can’t kill with nuclear strikes—and like almost everything the UEE created it was designed to be modular.

  Gone were the old days where every piece of a spacecraft had to be designed and built by teams of experts to do exactly one thing and one thing only. The substrate in front of me was the stock model we kept in storage deeper inside Ceres, one of hundreds produced by the automated factories seeded on asteroids and planetesimals throughout the space we controlled. It was a simple tapered cylinder about twelve meters long, containing circularly symmetrical systems. Which in simple terms meant that if you looked at the ship from the back, you could divide the circle of it into three equal wedges starting with a line straight down from the dorsal ridge.

  Each wedge contained engines, power, life support, and other systems in equal measure. Though they worked together, each was enough to run the ship if needed. Designing them this way allowed for the addition of modular parts, tools, and weapons to the exterior as needed.

  The thing in front of me was as vanilla as a Columbia substrate came. Or at least it was until Jordan began doing something to the pilot’s pod.

  I tried to sneak a look and see what he was doing, but the younger man scowled at me and waved me away. “You’ll see in a minute. Be patient.” He then leaned back into the pod and continued tinkering.

  “You know, it’s really unfair that they put you in charge of me,” I noted aloud. “You’re my assistant. My aide. I’m literally the boss of you.”

  “I’m not technically in charge,” Jordan said, his voice muffled and slightly strained from inside the pod. “They’re just using me as your training coordinator because I know how you work better than anyone else.”

  I snorted. “And if you tell them I’m giving you shit in your reports, then I get in trouble. I know how it works, man.”

  Jordan laughed, the sound echoing hollowly around the substrate’s empty pod. “Oh, please. You think they don’t know you give me shit already? They’re just worried you’re going to psych yourself into fucking up. That’s why they need me. I know how to make sure the great Mars Cori gets his head in the game.”

  Jordan popped back up, wiping his hands on the legs of his papery jumpsuit. “Okay, get in there and take her out. I’ll relay orders once you’re away from local traffic.”

  I frowned. “You can’t just launch a ship like that, Jordan.”

  Jordan smiled. “Sure I can. I have operational authority to devise on-the-fly training tools for you, including surprise drills. This falls well within that authority. Now get in.”

  I shrugged and moved toward the locker where I kept my flight suit. It wasn’t like there was much chance my launch would be a problem. Along with the bad old days of highly specialized craft, flight control and astrogation duties were no longer solely in the hands of human beings. The traffic around Ceres was managed and safeguarded by networked programs able to better handle changes.

  “No, you won’t need your flight suit,” Jordan said, stopping me short. “You’re going to hop in this thing in your civvies, and fly it without any of the props you normally use.”

  I frowned, then walked over to look into the pod. I rarely saw the inside of them for long before they were filled with the smart gel my body was suspended in when I flew. This one wasn’t the smooth oval I was used to. Jordan had added several spires of metal, pointy enough to make pushing into them a less than fun experience but probably not enough to hurt me.

  Jordan caught my eye. “You’re going to take this unmodified tub out into the black, and you’re going to fly it until you can do any maneuver I call out to you without so much as giving yourself a scratch.”

  I sighed loudly to let Jordan know what I thought of having our roles reversed—while mentally planning my revenge, which would be sweet—but honestly? I was happy at that moment in time. Jordan proved how right my superiors were to give him latitude in my training. He had known without a shred of doubt that my brain would learn a lesson with real consequences far better than any simulator could manage.

  I climbed in the pod.

  I was ready to go.

  Five

  The morning of the Home Run, I was metaphorically shitting myself. Literally doing so was impossible thanks to the cocktail of medicines I’d ingested to prevent that specific physical process. I was going to be stuck inside my ship for three days, after all. Pinnacles of modern technology our scout craft might be, they weren’t really meant for this sort of solo mission.

  Jordan appeared in my quarters an hour earlier than his schedule required. He helped me in the usual ways, remembering the little things I would forget and then regret later if left to my own devices. He reminded me to dry thoroughly after my shower so the thin coat of powder that would go between my skin and flight suit wouldn’t clump. He ran last-minute external diagnostics on Jax, making sure my NIC was running perfectly.

  Mostly he just talked to me as I tried to mentally wear the mountain of nerves sitting in my belly down to something I could live with.

  “Look at it this way,” he said as he handed my flight suit over. “You’ve done longer recon missions. The only difference this time is you’ll be using a Halo instead of a carrier ship. If anything, it should be easier.”

  A few minutes later, after the intelligent fibers within my suit had adjusted themselves to fit me snugly but without binding, Jordan put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Mars, you’re gonna be fine,” he said. It was the kind of generic encouragement people have been giving in one form or another for as long as we’ve had language, so ingrained in us it’s almost genetic.

  Because it was Jordan, I believed him. There wasn’t any logic to it, since I knew Jordan had no way of knowing what lie ahead, but I believed him anyway. Because the kid had a faith in me that only had a little to do with my piloting skills, and my brain just couldn’t handle not living up to that faith.

  Which had the nice side effect of calming me down a lot. Good thing, too, since we were closing in on my departure time.

  There would be two launches, technically speaking. My modified ship would be released from its bay on the Ronin with me in it, and I would take it the dozen or so kilometers into Ceres orbit where the Halo waited to take me the rest of the way.

  Jordan and I took the Ballistic again, which had become old hat for both of us during my crash course over the previous weeks. There wasn’t any ceremony or other hoopla. Olivia Kitur was there to see me off, along with several scientists and engineers unable to stop themselves from performing last-minute diagnostics.

  “Mister Cori,” Kitur said, extending her hand as I approached. “I wanted to come down and wish you luck personally.”

  I shook her hand, feeling the strength of that grip even through my semi-armored gloves. “Thank you,” I said, genuinely grateful. “I won’t let you down, ma’am.”

  Kitur smiled at me, an expression with layers I didn’t quite understand. “I know you won’t, Mars. I believe you’ll do the job admirably.” There was something unsaid there, but I didn’t know the woman well enough to be able to figure out what it was. Nor did I have the time.

  “We’ve got you
r heavy survival rig ready, sir,” one of the techs said.

  “If you’ll excuse me?” I asked, nodding toward the tech.

  “Of course,” Kitur said. “Don’t let me put you behind schedule.”

  I let the technician lock the pieces of the survival gear onto my flight suit, sensing the connections Jax managed as the links between the processors in the gear and the circuitry in my suit popped into existence. I let the automated process happen around me while trying not to move, even though the snaking supports and latches occasionally hit ticklish spots. The exoskeleton pinged Jax, asking the NIC for permission to complete integration.

  With a mental effort, I told Jax to get on with it.

  The helmet closed over my head, the jaw of it coming together as the top lowered over my face like a clam shell. They locked together with beautiful precision, and the sound of the air being released through the top was lost almost immediately in the soft gurgle of liquid replacing it.

  This was the worst part for me. I rarely flew in circumstances that required me to breathe oxygen-enriched liquid, but the Home Run was a big deal. It meant taking no chances. Steeling myself mentally against the millions of years of evolution screaming from the base of my skull that I was about to drown, I took a deep breath.

  Fuck me.

  Ugh, that sucked. But after a few seconds the discomfort passed. Properly oxygenated lungs didn’t give a crap where the O2 came from, and my panic settled down to mild unease quickly.

  Unable to speak, I sent a mental ping to Jax, flipping the NIC over from ghost mode to fully active. When on base I almost always left him on silent, perpetually running in the background but not able to speak to me unless it was an emergency. A lot of pilots did this for a host of reasons, but mine was unique to my situation so far as I knew.

  Jax, my Neural Interface Computer, had a personality. That wasn’t strange—all NICs did, because their soft artificial intelligence grew up inside a developing brain and used it as both template and building material—but Jax specifically was able to get on my nerves more easily than any human I’d ever met. And not just because he was physically attached to them.