Long Shot

by David Mack

  Lahdik and the workers stared in shock at the grid of ball bearings, and then they turned in unison to look up at Tritur, who made what he considered a logical, reasonable decision.

  “Everybody go home. We’re closed until further notice.”

  • • •

  Floris Lanon had never been what anyone would call dexterous. More often than not, she was the one who could be counted upon to drop something fragile, knock over something valuable, or spill something hot into the lap of someone who never saw it coming. It often seemed to her that she had spent her whole life fumbling things, both literally and metaphorically: her possessions, her career, her marriage. Sooner or later, everything she cared about wound up broken at her feet.

  So she was more confused than anyone after her fifth consecutive perfect dart throw.

  Deafening cheers filled her neighborhood bar as her sixth dart landed dead-center, in the minuscule circle at the heart of the triskelion. She was four core shots away from a perfect game. That was a feat none of her friends or neighbors could remember ever having seen, either here in Vassago’s or anywhere outside of a professional tournament.

  Borim, the barkeep, collected cash as the other patrons placed their bets. Everyone was betting on her streak to end with her next throw. She couldn’t blame them for betting against her. Her life’s story and the law of averages both said that was where the smart money would be.

  Twelve paces away, the board was cleared for her next toss. She picked up a new dart and felt its weight. It had exquisite balance, and its tail fins boasted perfect symmetry.

  Crouched beneath a table just an arm’s reach away was her daughter, Prila. The tiny pogling giggled and pretended to cover her eyes each time Floris threw, as if the excitement were too much for her to stand. Floris knew better; her little one was nothing if not a glutton for spectacle and attention. She was in the center of this bizarre drama and loving every second of it.

  A gruff-voiced smart aleck at the bar called out, “Make me rich, Floris! Put it in the floor!” His de-motivational spiel was answered by a blend of laughter and jeers.

  Floris set her right foot beside the edge of the throwing line. The room fell silent as she fixed her eyes on the core of the triskelion. She extended her arm, the dart poised lightly in three of her fingers. A long slow intake of breath. Then she exhaled and felt her world go still.

  In a fleeting moment between two beats of her heart, she cocked her arm and threw.

  The dart sailed through a shallow arc—and struck the triskelion’s heart.

  Wild cheers and raucous cries erupted behind her. Someone yelled “Foul!” only to be told “Shut your sac, you old coot!” More cash traded hands, and Borim skimmed a few bucks off every transaction—the unspoken but commonly understood privilege of the house.

  The mood inside Vassago’s was veering toward the manic. Slaad, one of the old-timers, waggled his transport’s keychain at her. “Make another shot like that, I’ll give you my ride!”

  Borim plucked the keys from Slaad’s hand. “Bet’s a bet!” Then he pointed at Floris. “Make that shot and I’ll let you eat and drink here free for the rest of your life!”

  The room’s good vibes soured at the intrusion of a voice Floris knew all too well. “Well, well—look whose luck finally turned!”

  Floris turned away from the throwing line to face her former mate, Keelix Tran. The mere sight of him made the tan speckles on her golden skin flush dark brown.

  “What are you doing here, Keelix?”

  He sauntered forward, as arrogant as ever. “I heard the greatest sporting event of our generation was happening at Vassago’s triskelion. Never dreamed you’d be the one at the line.”

  “Happy to disappoint you. Now take your dreams and get lost.”

  Her dismissal only encouraged him. “What? So soon? I just got here! I want to get in on this.” He swiveled his eyestalks at Borim. “What’s the current line?”

  “Slaad’s ride, my menu, and about sixty thousand min.”

  Keelix feigned a swoon, then continued mocking Floris with insincere praise. “Hey, now! You really are playing for big stakes, aren’t you? I’m impressed. Really, I am.” He pointed at Slaad. “How many shots has she made so far?”

  “Seven.”

  “Three away from a perfect game?” A sadistic gleam infused Keelix’s stare. “What do you say, Floris? Want to make things really interesting?”

  “What I want is for you to go away and leave me alone.”

  “Let’s make that the bet!” He preened for the crowd. “Throw a perfect game, and you’ll never see me again. I’ll leave town. The only proof you’ll ever have of my continued existence will be the support payments I send every week for Prila.” Then he intruded on Floris’s space and dropped his voice. “But anything less than a perfect game, and I get full custody of Prila. And you disappear.” He let the terms sink in while he flashed a malevolent grin.

  “Forget it.” Floris reached for Prila’s hand. “Come on, we’re leaving.”

  Disappointed boos surrounded her, and Keelix blocked her path to the door. “What’s wrong? Not feeling lucky anymore?”

  “Some things are too precious to gamble.”

  She tried to step around him, but he obstructed her again. “You think skipping out of here will keep me from taking her? I’ve got more wealth than the sea, and I’ve hired the best legal team in the world. They’ll run circles around you and your volunteer attorney. So slink out of here. All you’re doing is prolonging the inevitable.”

  Sick fury welled up from a deep, dark place inside her. She wanted to hurt Keelix, to deal him a blow he’d never forget, to send him out of her life—and Prila’s—forever. She looked around the room at the cluster of faces both strange and familiar. “Whose comm can take vids?”

  Dozens of hands hoisted personal comms. One young patron at the bar stepped forward with his comm held in front of him. “I’ve been recording since your first throw. I’ve got it all”—he pointed at Keelix—“including his bet.”

  Slaad shouted at Keelix, “And a bet witnessed is a verbal contract!”

  Murmurs of assent traveled around the room.

  Floris poked Keelix’s chest. “I accept your wager. And these people are my witnesses.” Holding her daughter’s hand, she led her back the way they’d come, to the throwing line. “Stay behind me.” She held out her hand toward the crowd. “Someone give me a dart.”

  Borim opened a new box of darts and pressed one into Floris’s hand. She set her feet and extended her arm. She drew a breath, then let it go.

  In the silence, she made her throw.

  Dart number eight struck the heart of the triskelion.

  Joyous cheers and applause filled the bar. Borim handed her another dart.

  Anxious silence befell the crowd. Floris breathed in and extended her arm. She exhaled and waited for the moment of stillness in her center. Then she threw—

  Dead-center. Nine core shots in a row.

  One more to decide the shape of her life, and her daughter’s.

  No one spoke. The bar became so hushed that Floris wondered if the crowd was holding its collective breath. A deep breath swelled her chest, then escaped without resistance, as free and natural as the tide. She held out her arm and pictured the moment before she threw.

  At the last moment, she turned her head away from the triskelion and looked Keelix in the eye. Then she threw.

  She didn’t have to see the triskelion to know where her shot had landed. The crowd erupted, an explosion of jubilation. People who’d never met before embraced, and laughed, and croaked their vocal sacs so loudly that the walls shook.

  Keelix fumed, a lonely island of fury and resentment in a sea of exultation. He said nothing more. He just turned and walked away, out of Floris and Prila’s life, at long last.

  Pri
la hugged Floris’s leg and looked up at her, eyes wide with wonder.

  “Mama? What happened?”

  “A miracle, darling. A miracle.”

  • • •

  The impromptu strategy meeting in the Sagittarius’s mess hall was proving less productive than Theriault had hoped when she had convened it five minutes earlier. Sorak and Threx flanked the large display on the inner bulkhead, while Dastin lingered in front of it.

  Dastin pointed at an orbital image of the storms ravaging the planet’s surface—with one notable area of exception. “This gap in the distortion field is just begging us to take a shot. It’s an unmanned facility. Why don’t we just blast it from orbit? That ought to shut it down.”

  “It would do more than that,” Threx said. “The collateral damage from detonating a dark energy siphon might be enough to crack this planet in half. And I mean that literally.”

  A sage nod from Sorak. “I concur. At the very least, such an uncontrolled release of dark energy onto the planet’s surface would pose an elevated risk of burning off its atmosphere.”

  Theriault held up a hand to preempt Dastin’s rebuttal. “I’m all for shutting down the machine, but not if it means breaking the planet or frying it like an egg. We need something more surgical and less violent.” She wished she could just pluck it off the surface—and that gave her an idea. “What about the tractor beam? If we put all the warp power into it, could we pull the active core of the generator out of the building and into orbit?”

  Threx shook his head. “No way. The interference that thing’s kicking up would make a tractor-beam lock all but impossible. Even if you got hold of it, odds are you’d drop it before you got halfway back to orbit.”

  “Hang on,” Dastin said. “Once we pull it free, won’t it go inert?”

  “Nope. The Austarans’ report says its reaction is self-sustaining. The only way to shut it down is to destroy it. And before you ask, the transporters won’t help. They can’t get enough of a lock on that thing to dematerialize it.” To Theriault he added, “This is a hands-on job, sir.”

  She crossed her arms. “Too bad we’re stuck in orbit. Any other ideas?”

  Threx scratched his black bramble of a beard. “This might be crazy, but . . . if the pulses from the generator are causing the problems, what if we generate an inverted form of those waves? You know—like a noise-canceling frequency.”

  Sorak lifted one eyebrow. “An intriguing notion.” He switched the image on the display to show the wave forms from the generator. “However, I see several obstacles to implementing such a plan. The first is that we have no hardware on the ship capable of generating such wave forms. Second, the specific frequencies and harmonics of the wave fronts affecting the planet continue to change as they propagate. We would need to cancel out not just one of them but all of them. Third, even if we devised a means of producing such waves in the multitude of required harmonics, our warp core can’t produce enough raw power to compete with the output of a dedicated, planet-based generator whose own capacity doubles several times per hour.”

  “This is insane.” Theriault rested her head in her hands for a moment to collect her wits. “There has to be some way to turn this thing off or cripple it without killing the planet.”

  Threx regarded the data on the screen with dismay. “Not from orbit, there isn’t.”

  Frustration impelled Theriault to get up and pace. “Okay, then let’s change the game. If we can’t save the planet, is there some way to save the people? Evac them, maybe?”

  Dastin looked at her as if she were crazy. “To where? This is the only M-class planet in the system.” He switched the display to a star map of the surrounding sector. “The last planet we surveyed is their closest option. But in the time it would take us to make one round-trip, this planet’s likely to implode. And I might be wrong about this, but I don’t think eight billion Austarans are gonna fit in our cargo hold.”

  “Equally unfortunate,” Sorak added, “this far from the Federation, it would be months before Starfleet could muster a fleet of sufficient capacity to evacuate the Austarans.”

  “So we can’t fix the problem,” Theriault said, “and we can’t evacuate the people.” She grimaced in frustration. “Damn it! Is there anything we can do?”

  Threx shrugged. “Hang back and hope nothing else goes wrong?”

  “Yeah, right,” Theriault said. “As if we’ve ever been that lucky.”

  10

  The news filtering up from the planet’s surface wasn’t good, but from the vantage of the crew of Space Station Xenopus, it never was. It always seemed as if some tiny breakaway faction wanted to shatter Anura’s fragile global peace, or some shortsighted legislator with an axe to grind was threatening to sequester the operating budget for the space station, leaving its eight-person crew in the unenviable position of trying to figure out how they would get home if no one on the ground was willing or able to pay to recover their escape pods from the open ocean.

  All the same, the news over the past several hours had gone from being garden-variety bad to downright strange, with a smattering of the ominous. There had been reports of bizarre phenomena all over the planet’s surface—some disastrous, others miraculous. Confounded by the sudden flood of weird tidings from her homeworld below, Engineer Kassinas Nasutas put the news out of her mind and focused on her day’s assigned maintenance schedule.

  She floated through the station’s zero-gravity interior, taking care as always to make certain her duty uniform had no free-floating straps or other wayward pieces that might snag in the hatchways or foul the delicate workings of exposed circuit boards. Her webbed hands found purchase at a corner, enabling her to arrest her forward momentum, reorient herself, and push off into another spoke of the wheel-shaped orbital complex. It all felt so natural now that she had been in orbit for more than a hundred days. Her first week in low orbit, on the other hand—she shuddered to remember the nauseated, disorientated mess she had been.

  Her eyes swiveled independently of each other, enabling her to inspect open panels on either side of Spoke Three while she floated ringward, away from the hub. Everything appeared to be in order—no warning lights flashed, nothing had gone dark. It was a welcome change from the typical grocery list of minor malfunctions that cluttered her days.

  Her headset’s comm link spat a staticky squelch, followed by the voice of her supervisor, Doctor Pylus, the station’s senior engineer. “Kass? Are you at the ring yet?”

  Nasutas propelled and guided herself with one hand while she used the other to tap open a reply channel. “On my way, Doctor. I’m in Spoke Three now.”

  “Did you bet on the number of no-score rounds in today’s playoff?”

  “I did.” With both hands free, she picked up her pace toward the outer ring of the station. “Why? Is there a final number?”

  “Not yet, but they’ve just started the seventeenth round. Still scoreless.”

  Startled, she almost missed the next rung along the bulkhead. Pressing forward, she tried to purge the surprise from her voice. “Seventeen? Has that ever happened before?”

  “Never in the history of the sport. A lot of people just lost a lot of money.”

  “I get the feeling I’m one of them, Doctor.” Nasutas controlled her movements with the grace of experience. She swung around the end of the narrow spoke passage into the exterior ring of the station. View ports at regular intervals along its outer bulkhead looked out on the breathtaking splendor of Anura from orbit. The graceful arc of its northern hemisphere bent across the field of view, its blaze of reflected light almost too intense for Nasutas to appreciate. “Doc, I’m at the outer ring. What am I looking for?”

  “The stress gauge at junction thirty-five sixteen. I’ve been getting warning lights off that section all day. If it’s the real thing, we need to get it reinforced on the double. If it’s a short in the system
, I want it turned off so I can try to sleep through the night for a change.”

  “A full night’s sleep? Who do you think you are, the commander?”

  “An old engineer can dream, my dear. Now find the stress gauge, if you please.”

  Nasutas floated through the spacious cavity of the outer ring, her sharp eyes searching for the hull stress gauge Doctor Pylus wanted her to find. She spotted it and gave herself a gentle nudge off the opposite bulkhead so that she arrived before it with the grace of a feather alighting on fresh-fallen snow. “I’m at the gauge. Checking it now.”

  It took only a minute to key in the commands to launch a diagnostic program. The gauge’s display spewed out a string of machine-language symbols that Nasutas had learned to recognize. In a matter of seconds, she parsed the computerized gauge’s complaint. “Doc? You might get your beauty sleep tonight, after all. Diagnostic shows a fault in the secondary electrical system. I’m tracking the source now.” A few more commands isolated the error’s origin. “There it is. Bad relay inside Airlock One. I’m on it.”

  “Good work, Kass. Do you need Nelonnuk’s help?”

  “No, it’s just a short, I can handle it.” She returned the stress gauge to standby mode and pushed herself back into motion toward the nearby airlock. As per standard procedure, both of the airlock’s doors were sealed. Nasutas entered her authorization code to pressurize the airlock and unlock the inner door. A faint hydraulic hiss grew louder as air flooded the airlock. Then metallic thunks reverberated through the bulkhead plates on either side of the circular hatch as its bolts retracted. Nasutas lifted its manual latch and pulled the door open toward her.

  She tapped her headset to make sure her comm channel with Doctor Pylus was still open. “I’m heading inside Airlock One to repair the electrical fault.”

  “Acknowledged.” A scratch of background noise revealed itself to be the faint echo of cheering and applause. “Another scoreless round. That makes eighteen.”