The Clouded Sky

by Megan Crewe

  The roaring falls away as we break out the other side of the clouds, over a vista of gray-brown plains and mountains. Nothing below us looks remotely alive. Win said the atmosphere was poisoned, that everything down here died after the technological disaster he compared to the impact of every nuclear plant on Earth melting down, times a hundred. Thousands of years ago it happened, and their planet is still a wasteland.

  “We’re inside the time field now,” Odgan says. “You’re ready to jump?”

  I nod. I suspect after my whirlwind trip around Earth with Win, I’ve probably gone through more jumps than any non-Traveler has in their entire life. But this procedure is so complex that Odgan will handle the entire thing. I just have to make sure nothing else goes wrong.

  I brace myself as he enters a series of commands on his dash. The pod lurches, up and then down, the world outside blurring. I’m satisfied to discover I’m only slightly queasy when we jolt to a stop.

  “We land here?” I ask.

  “No, farther out. One of the islands. Isis recommended we enter at the opposite end of the time field because of the closer monitoring around the kolzo areas.”

  Right. I let the pod drop toward the planet’s surface as Odgan turns us on a curving course to the right. Some of the flat brown stuff below that I thought was plains is actually ocean, I realize as we descend low enough to make out the froth on the waves. Even the water has taken on that lifeless tone, except where it reflects the purple and scarlet of the roiling clouds, which admit only thin streams of sunlight overhead.

  Constructs of various shapes—some boxy, some like stunted pyramids, some dented spheres—dot the land and the edge of the ocean at seemingly random intervals. The authorized mining operations we’ll be copying, I assume.

  “Prepare for surface contact,” Odgan says. I toggle the pressure and adjust the weight values automatically. Then a flicker beyond the display catches my eye.

  “Is that another pod?” I say quickly, pointing out a speck by the distant mountains. Odgan’s head jerks around. He mumbles a curse and reaches for his controls. We’re jumping again before I have time to prepare. The breath jolts out of me, and then we’re in the same place, but the speck is gone.

  “You’ve got good eyes,” Odgan says, exhaling. “It’s likely they hadn’t seen us yet. And if they had, they wouldn’t necessarily realize we weren’t supposed to be here.”

  “If they did?” I ask.

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” he says grimly.

  The unexpected company has left me jittery. I scan the horizon periodically as we descend the last several meters, but there’s nothing to see now but the dull gray-brown landscape. We settle with a thump on a relatively smooth stretch of rocky ground.

  Odgan clambers out of his seat to the hatch behind us. “It’ll take me a little while,” he says. “Keep watching, and call if you see anything concerning.”

  I sink into the seat, letting my hands rest on my lap. My skin feels clammy inside my clothes. But we’re almost halfway through.

  “Isis?” I say, and in the silence I remember that I can’t reach her from here, this slice of past time we’ve jumped back to. Maybe before Isis was even born. Who knows what’s happening in the station over our heads right now? Not that we could reach it—the time field doesn’t extend that far. We’d be yanked back to our present the second we breeched the edge.

  Something rattles against the outside of the pod. I startle when a figure moves in front of the screen for the instant before I recognize Odgan’s face through his clear helmet, which sits like a filmy bubble on a space suit much slimmer than the Earthling version. He’s pushing a glinting cylinder as tall as he is ahead of him, toward the water.

  The land he trudges across is so . . . dead. Dull mud-colored ocean spitting against chunks of pocked gray rock. Pools of dun soil so dry that puffs of it are constantly whirling into the air with the breeze. Even the Earth deserts I’ve seen footage of looked more vibrant than this place. There’s not the smallest sign of life, plant or animal. It’s just vacant. So vacant it’s hard to even picture trees dappling those far-off mountains, flowers sprouting along the shore, fish darting through that water. When I try, the stark landscape always breaks through. I itch to get out of here. Away from this vast devastation that seems ready to swallow us whole.

  Odgan scrambles back into the pod several minutes later. He takes his helmet off, the rest of the space suit trickling dust that’s gathered in the crevices. “All right,” he says. “Let’s give it time to work.”

  We lift off the ground for another jump. My stomach flips, and it’s over. The landscape around us looks exactly the same, other than the dirt being spread differently over the rocks. When we’ve landed, Odgan hauls himself out again and heads for the device he set up. I’m studying the skies when his voice leaps out of my communicator.

  “Skylar, I think I’m going to need your help . . . The recovery process is a bit more complicated than the setup.”

  “I— Okay,” I say, my mouth going dry. “What do I need to do?”

  “There’s another protective suit in the back,” he says. “Here, I’ll come help you into it. We just need to be quick.”

  I squeeze into the back compartment as the circular inner seal crackles apart and Odgan steps in. He’s favoring his left leg.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “One of the components came apart too quickly, whipped out and caught my ankle,” he says. “It’s nothing serious. I just can’t manage the whole thing like this. Here.”

  He hands me a bundle from the corner, and shows me where to secure the opening of the space suit when I slide the flexible helmet over my head. The layers of fabric weigh on my limbs. We ease out through the dual doorways and I set my feet cautiously on the dusty ground.

  Even the patches that look like smooth dirt conceal hard knobs of rock. I sway as we make our way to the water’s edge. A hint of the frigid air outside pierces even the dense material of the suit. The breeze sprays dirt at us, the flecks hissing against my helmet.

  “We need to twist this top part so it’ll release,” Odgan says through the communicator, gesturing when we’ve reached the cylinder. “Then we can turn on the air cushion and pull it back to the pod.”

  He wobbles as he reaches for it, only able to grasp it with one hand while keeping his balance on his uninjured leg. Pushing myself up on my toes, I grab the other side, and together we tug at it. It takes five solid heaves before the knobs turn and the cylinder tips toward us.

  Odgan fiddles with the panel on the side, and a cover opens near the bottom of the device. He scoops up a couple scattered pieces of tech that had fallen on the ground, one that looks like a large silver dreidel and another that’s doing a great impression of a brick, and slides them in. Then he taps another command, and the cover closes, dust clouding beneath the cylinder as it edges a few inches into the air. I drag it with Odgan back to the pod.

  “The kolzo is in there?” I ask, my voice tinny inside the helmet.

  “More than enough for our purposes,” Odgan says. “We just have to get it back.”

  We shove the cylinder through one sealed doorway and then the other, and peel off the suits in the tight space. I’ve never been so eager to climb into a vehicle’s seat in my life. Odgan starts the propulsion as I engage the pressure monitors, and we’ve lifted off in a matter of seconds.

  “Get ready to jump,” Odgan says. The pod rushes upward, and my teeth rattle. When I open my eyes, we’re near the hills again, hovering just below a patch of crimson cloud.

  “Glad to have you back,” Isis says into my earpiece, and I laugh in relief. “Don’t get cocky,” she adds. “We’ve only got about eighteen minutes before the next patrol passes by. Let’s not cut it too close.”

  We soar up through the clouds. On the other side, we’re met with a wide view of the space station, like an immense silver disc encased in a shard of glittering ice, against the star-scattered blackness beyo
nd. Its rippled surface is tinted with the ruddy glow of the sunlight glancing off the planet’s atmosphere.

  My breath catches. That’s where I’ve been living for the last month. It feels so much less impressive on the inside, where nearly every space is cramped and designed for practicalities rather than grandeur.

  We speed across the space and into our dark bay without a hitch. The pod’s screen goes dim. “All shut,” Isis announces. “Great work!”

  I push the side of the pod open and scramble out. My legs wobble, but the still station air has never tasted so refreshing. I wipe my damp bangs from my brow and find myself grinning at Odgan.

  “We did it,” I say.

  The words are barely out of my mouth when lights overhead flash on and off and a siren wails through the room.

  24.

  That’s the lockdown signal,” Odgan says through the siren’s peal. “Everyone on the station must go back to their living space.”

  “Isis?” I say, but my earpiece doesn’t respond.

  Odgan shakes his head. “They cut off all nonessential communications. And they’ve probably completely shut down parts of the station. We have to get out of here—fast.”

  He doesn’t need to tell me twice. I close the pod door and hurry to the ladder. As I grip the pebbled rungs, I pause.

  “What about the kolzo?”

  “I’ll get it to the others,” Odgan says. He’s already opened the back of the pod. There’s a clang, and he emerges with a gray capsule a couple feet long. All that work for one small container. He stuffs it into a canvas-like bag that he slings over his shoulder. “Go on!”

  We scramble up the ladder into darkness. I don’t know if Odgan’s forgotten to bring a glow square or if Isis was originally supposed to meet us, but it doesn’t seem worth stopping to discuss. Though we’ve left behind the flashing lights, the siren is still wailing, oscillating across the corded walls of the passage we clamber out into. The air prickles against the back of my throat as I gulp for breath. I nearly trip on a seam in the floor, scraping my hand as I catch myself against a rough edge beside me.

  “Here!” Odgan says a moment later. He tugs a door, murmuring a few Kemyate words of gratitude when it opens. A blinking light from the hallway spills over us.

  We rush to the shuttle stop, Odgan’s limp becoming more pronounced as he hefts his heavy cargo along. I hug myself while we wait. Half the station must be calling an inner-shuttle right now. Then a terrifying thought strikes me.

  “You said they might have shut down parts of the station?”

  “It’s unlikely we’d have made it this far if they targeted this sector,” Odgan says. “Thank Kemya Isis had us launch from a maintenance exit rather than any of the standard docking bays.”

  “You think this is because they know someone took an unauthorized pod out?” I ask. Did our traitor pass on the information after all, just a little too late? The timing seems too much of a coincidence to assume this has nothing to do with us.

  “Impossible to say,” Odgan replies, but his jaw is clenched.

  “What about the others—the control room . . . ?”

  “Those might have been targeted. I’d think Thlo and Isis would have been prepared.” He halts, his face paling, and drops his voice to the barest whisper. “I don’t know if Isis’s trick with the surveillance system will still be in place. We shouldn’t talk.”

  I snap my mouth shut. Thlo and Isis should have been prepared—but how prepared were the Enforcers?

  We hustle onto the shuttle when it finally arrives, and Odgan enters Jule’s sector. Every hitch of the journey makes me brace for the appearance of a security force. But we make it there unhindered.

  I nod to Odgan and dart into the hall, stumbling when I remember I should be playing the pet in case any cameras are watching. Would even a drugged-up pet be frantic now? The lights are stuttering all around me, the siren screeching at full volume. Dizzy, I totter on to Jule’s apartment. What if he’s not there? What if he, and the others in the control room—

  The door opens just as I reach it, Jule on the other side, poised to stride out. I could fall over, I’m so relieved to see him. His expression flashes from startled to pleased. He steps back, drawing me in and straight into his arms.

  “I was starting to get worried,” he says, leaning his head close to mine. “I thought I’d go look for you.”

  “We’d just have crossed paths,” I say.

  “Well, I didn’t say it was a great idea,” he replies, but his eyes are too serious to match his self-mocking smile.

  As much as I want to sink against him and imagine the chaos outside away, I can’t. I ease back. “What’s going on? All I know is a lockdown alarm went off. Did you get more information in the control room? Did they try to close you off there?”

  “Isis had a reroute in place that bought us enough time to get out,” Jule says. “Our best guess is Security caught and decoded one of Isis’s last transmissions to you and realized something big was going on, but not exactly what and where, and now they’re taking every possible measure to interrupt it.”

  “Or whoever’s betraying us figured out we were up to something and told them,” I say.

  Jule’s mouth tightens. “It could be. But we should all be okay. The important thing is that you and Odgan made it back before the lockdown started. Otherwise every hatch on the station would have been sealed.”

  The time between us landing and the alarm going off was no more than a minute. I swallow thickly. “So what do we do now?”

  He presses a kiss to my temple. “All we can do is sit tight, and see what they do next.”

  Information trickles in slowly. The next morning, a report arrives at every private terminal announcing that the Security division has identified a potential threat to the station, and they’re working to track down the perpetrators. Only essential workers are asked to appear at their jobs. Those who cannot eat in their apartments have assigned times by sector when they may leave to access the cafeterias; otherwise, we’re housebound.

  Jule and I spend most of the day scanning the public network for more details about what exactly the Enforcers believe this “potential threat” involves. There’s nothing. I don’t know whether to be reassured that they can’t know much or concerned about how much they could be hiding.

  “If the traitor just wanted to make sure we can’t go through with the mission, this seems like a pretty effective approach,” I say.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Jule says, but right now I can’t imagine what.

  I hole up in my bedroom once that afternoon, when an Enforcer stops by to ask Jule a few questions. It sounds like a routine door-to-door, trolling for leads. But when I come out afterward, Jule’s face is drawn.

  “You shouldn’t even step outside the apartment, all right?” he says. “The Enforcers have split up to cover different sets of wards in pairs. And he said the other one handling our area is Kurra.”

  I’ve spent a lot of days cooped up in here, but knowing at any moment Kurra could be on the other side of that door makes my skin crawl. Jule cooks a dinner out of the pasta and sauce he’s saved from his Earth food purchase, and gets me to play my favorite songs on my MP3 player for him with a promise to attempt to appreciate them, but the restless urge never quite leaves me. I keep getting up to grab a drink or use the bathroom only to realize I don’t want one or need to. Jule must notice. When we turn in for the night, he just pulls me to him and tucks my head under his chin, stroking my hair. I finally unwind enough to fall asleep nestled against him.

  The next day, Isis sends us a ping letting us know she’s set up a temporary protected channel through which we can conference. Jule taps in via the screen in the main room while I bring it up on my bedroom terminal.

  “Hey,” Isis says, her expression weary. The video image quavers and divides as the rest of the group joins in, until I’m looking at all ten of my co-conspirators. I study Pavel, Mako, Tabzi, and Emmer for signs of
guilt. All of us look tired and tense.

  “The first order of business,” Thlo says, “is how this complication has affected our plans. Isis?”

  “We have all the materials we need, as assembled as they can be while we’re still on the station,” Isis says. “We just need to leave. That’s where the problem is.”

  She glances to the side, to something—or someone—in her real space. Britta nudges a strand of hair back toward her ponytail. Her eyes are hollowed, her face more worn than earlier this week. I hope the stress of the lockdown hasn’t set back her recovery.

  “The ship we were planning to use for the trip back to Earth is inaccessible as long as the lockdown is in effect,” she says. “Every docking bay is secured; only a limited number of Council-approved vehicles are being granted permission to exit the station. The Security division has added extra precautions to the docking records, and I can’t see any way I could falsify the data to get us ‘official’ permission.”

  Isis takes over again. “I could break the locks on one docking bay long enough for us to get the ship out, maybe, but they’d find out almost immediately, and our ship isn’t fast enough to outrun the Enforcers’ vessels.”

  “Pavel has been looking into the status of the lockdown,” Thlo says, and the dour man nods.

  “From what I’ve heard, I would say the Security division is preparing for a long term . . . operation,” he says. His eyes flicker as if he’s scanning the faces across his screen, and I wonder how he feels about being let back into the group’s plans. Whether his frustration was really out of loyalty. “I don’t think they’d want to end the lockdown until they have their ‘criminals.’ ”

  “Is there any chance we could distract them with a false lead?” Emmer asks. “Point them in one direction and leave before they realize the trick?”

  “They won’t remove all the restrictions until they’re sure,” Mako says. “No criticism toward Britta, but I doubt even she could manage that without any trails leading back to us.”