Long Shot

by David Mack

“I fear that will be a more difficult proposition than you think,” Kavalas said. “For the safety of the public, we built the generator facility at a remote location, approximately twenty-five degrees of latitude below our northern pole.”

  Apparently unfazed, Ilucci asked, “So? That’s not too far.”

  Kavalas’s bulbous eyes swiveled so that two faced Ilucci and the other looked at Terrell. “Before the incident, it was an hour away by turbojet. But the improbability field makes any kind of aviation too dangerous. As we speak, flights are being grounded all over the planet.”

  Taryl sounded impatient. “So let’s get back on the Sagittarius and head up there.”

  “That might be unwise,” Hesh said. “Based on our sensor readings of the distortions around the generator, it would pose just as much of a danger to our navigational systems as it would to the Austarans’ aircraft. I would also advise against using a transporter inside its area of effect. The results could prove to be . . . less than optimal.”

  “You can say that again,” Theriault interjected.

  The alien scientist exhaled a weary sigh. “The only way to reach the generator now is to drive to it—and at the moment, that’s not really any safer than flying.”

  “It’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Terrell said. “Number One, no matter what happens on the planet’s surface, do not bring the Sagittarius down from orbit. I don’t want my ship any closer to the distortion field than absolutely necessary.”

  “I’ve already taken us to a higher orbit. To stay ahead of the distortion field, we’ll need to move to maximum communications range in less than two hours. After that, we can try to deploy comm buoys to maintain communications across extended distances, but there’s no telling how the improbability field might affect them.”

  “Sounds like a plan, Number One.”

  “Sir, one more thing: If the buoys fail, and we lose contact . . . what then?”

  As always, he took refuge in gallows humor tinged with a grain of truth. “In that case, Vanessa, I hope you’ll have the courtesy to wait until Starfleet officially promotes you to captain before you throw my things out the airlock and move into my quarters. Terrell out.”

  8

  Building façades in the Anuran capital of Mitsaro flickered with hashed holographic vids, and the streetlights pulsed without pattern or rhythm. It looked to Taryl like a parody of the post-re-de-reconstructionist aesthetic that had been all the rage in Orion’s trendiest night clubs before she had turned her back on them and her homeworld nearly a decade earlier.

  The landing party trailed a pace behind Doctor Kavalas, who led them out of the building that housed his operations center, and across the paved walkway to the lot where his vehicle was parked. In the streets outside the building’s walled lot, other vehicles jerked along, an automotive epileptic seizure that seemed to have spread to all of the capital’s ground traffic.

  Kavalas shot an embarrassed look over his shoulder as he gestured toward the street. “It’s normally not like this. Most of the time, the city’s traffic is centrally coordinated.” With a small remote he dug from his pocket, he opened the doors on the same vehicle in which they had come from the Executive Complex. “Remember to fasten your safety harnesses.”

  “Whoa.” Ilucci stopped walking. “I thought you said that thing was safe.”

  “Under normal circumstances, it’s perfectly safe. But at the moment—” A metallic scrunch of impact from a collision on the street punctuated his thought. “I’d suggest we all err on the side of caution. At least until we’re past the city limits.”

  Terrell played peacemaker, nodding at Kavalas while ushering Ilucci toward the vehicle. “Of course, Doctor. That makes perfect sense. Master Chief, why don’t you take a middle seat?”

  Ilucci pointed at the front passenger seat. “I thought I’d ride”—a glare from the captain cut him off, and he shifted his finger’s aim to the backseat—“in the middle. Great idea, sir.”

  Duly chastised, Ilucci was the first to climb inside the automated transport as its engine came alive. Hesh pushed in from Ilucci’s left, while Taryl climbed in on the engineer’s right. Captain Terrell settled comfortably into the front passenger seat as Kavalas got behind the controls. The interactive panel lit up and emitted soft feedback tones as the scientist keyed in the instructions for their destination. Then a dysfunctional buzzing made Kavalas recoil.

  Perhaps sensing the landing party’s collective alarm, Terrell turned a stern look at them to preempt their questions before he asked Kavalas, “What seems to be the problem?”

  “The navigation system is having difficulty acquiring an approved route to the generator.” A few more taps on the controls continued to prove unproductive. “Between accidents and malfunctions in the guidance network, it seems we—” The colors and icons underwent an abrupt change. New symbols flashed, and a pale blue line superimposed over a map of the capital’s surface roads indicated the route that had been designated for them. “There we go. As I said, nothing to worry about.” The vehicle eased into motion, slipped out of the lot, and merged into traffic—where it came to a sudden halt, surrounded by a hundred other cars.

  It took less than a minute for the stop-and-go traffic to grate on Taryl’s patience. “Just out of curiosity, Doctor—how long is this trip going to take?”

  “Ordinarily, it would be about six hours by guided ground transport.”

  The captain nodded at the control panel. “Does the display give you an estimated time for this trip, factoring in the delays?”

  On the spot, Kavalas squirmed and briefly puffed out the translucent vocal sac around his throat. “Approximately ten and a half hours.”

  Hesh let slip a low groan of distress and a pained frown. Ilucci scowled at him. “Why didn’t you go before we left?”

  “I did not realize it would be this long a trip in confined quarters.”

  Taryl sighed. “Yeah, this trip’s gonna be a little slice of paradise. I can tell already.”

  Kavalas entered new commands into the control panel. “I will see if I can manually program a faster alternate route out of the city.”

  It took several minutes, but a few artful detours engineered by Kavalas brought the transport to a faster-­moving artery of traffic. By any reasonable standard it was still maddeningly sluggish, but it was faster than any other stretch of highway or service road in the capital. “There we go.” He sounded pleased with himself. “That cut our time from ten hours to seven.”

  A whimper from Hesh. “Could we pull off the highway, maybe just for a moment?”

  Ilucci looked ready to throttle him. “Are you serious? We’re finally moving!”

  “Gentlemen!” Terrell barked. “Don’t make me turn this automated transport around.”

  Taryl turned away from the petty drama playing out beside her and stared out the window, at the pandemonium slowly engulfing the city around them. Crowds of civilians were taking to the streets in every neighborhood the vehicle passed. Even from a distance, their angry shouts were loud and clear. From the elevated vantage of the highway, it looked to Taryl as if the capital was on the verge of erupting into mass hysteria and a mob-fueled riot.

  She reached forward, tapped the captain’s shoulder, and pointed out some of the more unruly gangs coursing through the streets below. All Terrell could do was frown and nod. Taryl understood his silent lesson all too well: Seeing a disaster aborning and being able to do something about it were two very different things. At the moment, the landing party was little more than tourists, strangers passing through one crisis on their way to a larger one.

  The transport slipped out of the wall of traffic into the outer lane, a long straightaway that cut through the center of the metropolis. Despite the empty stretch of road in front of them, their transport made only a slight increase in speed.

  Ruby flames erupted from a building besi
de the highway. The shock front from the blast boomed through their vehicle and sent it rocking on both axles. Debris pattered across the freeway, and several smoldering chunks bounced off their roof and windshield.

  Taryl leaned forward and snapped at Kavalas, “Can’t this thing go any faster?”

  “No. Even in override, the transport’s accelerator is limited by a governor circuit.”

  She looked back and frowned at their brush with incineration. “Don’t tell me—let me guess: for our safety.”

  • • •

  Life had run its course. Now gravity lured Ellisor Onda to take one last step into its embrace.

  Overhead, the stars were distant and indifferent. Far below stretched empty boulevards, a blank canvas of stone and concrete waiting to be blemished for a brief moment by the last evidence of Onda’s life. The street, far below, would no more welcome her mark upon its history than the rest of the world had done, in all the pointless decades of her existence.

  Death promised release. An end to her years of loneliness, shame, and failure.

  No, she corrected herself. Even that’s too generous. I can’t be a failure. I never even got a chance to fail. I’m just insignificant. Someone who wanted to take a chance and never made it even that far. Her lifetime of dreams had amounted to nothing more than fleeting brushes with success, followed by professional invisibility. All her life she had been brought up to think she had the potential for greatness, to be someone of consequence. To live a life that mattered.

  What a cruel joke it all seemed in retrospect. Her family hadn’t been wealthy or well connected. Only through a stroke of luck and a willingness to take on usurious loans had she been able to gamble on higher education, on a shot at the dream her life had dared her to chase. Too late had she realized it was all a trap, a beautiful lie spun to separate her and her family from whatever money they’d once had, and whatever meager earnings they ever hoped to have.

  Still I struggled on. Because I was fool enough to hope.

  The fantasy that she might turn her absurd notions into songs that could live on after she had left this life, that she could earn a living crafting music from her heart, that anyone would ever value her minor-chord delusions over those of so many other composers more gifted than she was—it had been absurd when she was young, sad now that she’d grown old.

  Now a new generation of younger, more energetic, more personable songwriters dominated the scene, and no one in the industry had time for Onda anymore. She and her work had become passé, relics of a bygone age. In the blink of an eye, her youth had fled, and she and her style of music had become obsolete. Irrelevant. Disposable.

  Friends to whom she might once have turned for support, for work, for another chance to prove her worth . . . they had all since turned their backs on her. All while her peers, and the new voices, the younger voices, crowded her out, drowned her out, hounded her out of the business.

  Still, she had hung on for as long as she could. For as long as her savings had lasted. But it hadn’t been long enough. The money was gone now and, with it, so were her options. There were no more opportunities lurking just around the next corner of her career. There were no more corners; no more turns. Just a long, straight path into oblivion.

  She had pretended not to know it was all over. That nothing she did anymore would or could make a difference. That her life had been reduced to a cost on a balance sheet. A foolish spark of optimism had lived inside her, too stubborn to die, too arrogant to admit defeat. It was a fading ember of the artist she’d once been, the broken shard of a dream that refused to see how cruelly it had been shattered, and how resolutely the world did not care.

  Then, just when Onda thought she had lied herself back into a semblance of hope, she had received the diagnosis. A deep and thoroughly metastasized cancer. Most of her vital organs had been compromised already. Time had caught up to her. The yawning black of the abyss was calling her name. Her song was over whether she wanted to fight on or not.

  If I’d accomplished something worth calling a legacy, she grieved, I could let go without regret. If I thought anyone would sing my ballads after I’d gone back to the sea, I’d depart with grace. But who’s going to remember my name a year from now? What have I done that matters even now, never mind after I’ve passed away?

  Pointless rhetorical questions, all of them. She had said her good-byes—admittedly, in her own cryptic way, but they had been farewells all the same—but no one seemed to have listened. The handful of neighbors, acquaintances, and occasional coworkers to whom she had made her final valedictions had barely noticed her, even as she had been baring her soul.

  Ever the responsible one, Onda had made sure her financial and legal affairs were in order before this evening. Her will had been made clear, and what meager assets she possessed would be distributed in a way that might do some good for those less fortunate. There were no more loved ones or kin for her to wound with her act of self-destruction. She couldn’t think of any lives that would be diminished in any meaningful way by her abrupt exit. It was time for her to let go, to bring down the curtain on her solo tragedy of errors with one last act of infinite spite.

  She stepped off the skyscraper’s ledge, her arms wide to embrace the end.

  Gravity welcomed her, its attractions unseen and irresistible.

  Free fall set Onda’s heart racing. It was the first ­moment of true freedom she had ever known.

  All the haze and dullness that had clouded her perception burned away, leaving only the perfect clarity of that moment—the inevitability of acceleration, the crisp details of the ground rushing up to meet her, the promise that a lifetime of feeling unwanted, unloved, and unneeded was finally about to end and be replaced by the sweet nullity of death and nothingness.

  Then came the wind.

  A gust unlike any Onda had ever felt swelled upward, a tide of air surging beneath her. It was powerful but gentle, unyielding but soft. She was so close to the ground that she could see the cracks in the sidewalk pavement when she came to a momentary halt in midair, suspended between the pull of gravity and the grip of the gale, a pawn in the game of fortune.

  For half a second she rose, a prisoner of the wind.

  Then the tempest dissipated, and she plummeted the last short distance to the cold, hard ground. The moment of impact brought pain and a jolt of awareness, a sudden epiphany that she had been spared by some mechanism of Providence she didn’t understand.

  Lying on her back she stared up, beyond the hundred stories past which she had fallen, to the stars that only minutes earlier she had thought cared nothing for her life or death.

  Chilled and bruised, embarrassed and unnerved, Onda had no explanation for what had just happened. All she knew for certain was that she would never be able to muster the will to make that leap again. For reasons that eluded her, a miracle had spared her broken life.

  All she could think to do now . . . was go on living.

  • • •

  After nearly two hours, the domes and spires of Anura’s capital were far behind the transport, hazy shadows at the end of a stretch of deserted highway. In front of them, the road vanished into a night without horizon, an endless sprawl of formless black under a sky peppered with stars.

  Boredom had reduced Taryl to a low monotone. “Are we there yet?”

  “Go back to sleep,” Terrell said. He snuck a quick look over his shoulder. Taryl pressed her forehead against her window and gazed blankly into the night. Across from her, Hesh had crossed his legs at the knees and folded his arms over his chest, as if he were practicing to be an Egyptian mummy in a sarcophagus. Stranded between them was Ilucci, his chin against his chest, which rose and fell in time with the soft rasps of his snoring.

  Beats hearing him complain.

  Ahead, the highway curved around a low hill. When the road straightened again, Terrell saw flashing green li
ghts ahead. The automated transport slowed nearly to a halt in a matter of seconds, pushing him forward against his safety harness and jostling awake the trio in the back.

  Ilucci mumbled through a mouthful of sleep, “What’s going on?”

  “Some kind of traffic stop.” Terrell looked at Kavalas. “You know anything about this?”

  A roll of knobby shoulders under a shiny tunic. “Not a thing, Captain.”

  The transport was guided remotely into a lay-by, behind one of three official-looking vehicles. A pair of brawny Austarans wearing red-and-white tunic uniforms and carrying batonlike weapons approached either side of the transport and leaned down to look inside.

  Kavalas lowered his window. “Good evening, Constable.”

  The peace officer’s enormous eyes bulged wide at the sight of Terrell and the others. He asked Kavalas in a nervous hush, “Are . . . are those . . . ”

  “Offworlders? Yes. The first ever known to set foot on our planet. They’re my guests.”

  Terrell waved. “Hi, there.”

  Stunned silence. Then a scramble for composure. The constable holstered his baton and pulled a thin electronic tablet from inside his tunic. “Are you Doctor Pren ­Kavalas?”

  “I am. This is my vehicle. Is something wrong?”

  “There’s been an accident,” the constable said. “A cargo ship in the channel struck one of the bridge supports. We’re still waiting for engineers to assess the damage, but we have reason to think the collision has rendered the bridge structurally unsound and unsafe for traffic.”

  The news left Kavalas perturbed. “Are you sure? We need to reach the Krokur Research Facility as soon as possible, and this is the only direct route.”

  The constable fluttered his vocal sac. “Not tonight, it isn’t. I’m sorry, Doctor, but you and”—he threw a long, uncertain look at the landing party—“your guests will have to take the detour.” He pointed perpendicular to their intended direction. “Take Riverside Highway to the Ribik Bridge. Once you cross over, you can double back on Prairie Route Twelve.”