by T Q Chant
“Fuck’s sake. Just once, once, I would like something to go my way,” she snarled, leaning out over the safety railing and flailing furiously at the rock. “It’s almost enough to make me believe there’s a higher power, who is without doubt out to screw me up.”
The rock went with a satisfying crash, her momentum almost carrying her over the safety railing to her death. She dropped the spanner and got a grip on the railing before she went completely over. “Pretty much ending as I started on this shithole of a planet.”
She started back down the stairs, pad already in hand to adjust the firing sequence – no way the pod in the damaged coil would launch.
Just one pod to go, the one aimed at Ascension’s Grace. Interstellar travel still wasn’t a sure art, even less for the simple computer brain at the heart of an unmanned vehicle. There were no guarantees, but then there never were. “There should be a rule about that, if there isn’t yet.”
She was running by the time she reached the bottom of the steps, knowing it would be suicide to launch the pods while she was still in the chamber. She stopped dead, hands poised over the virtual keypad, as she realised someone was moving down the corridor towards her. She was pretty sure who it was.
She didn’t let herself panic, fingers stabbing out an array of new commands, activating a battery of pad systems. She only had one chance, and it would take perfect timing.
Fassetti stepped calmly out in front of her, piece pointed squarely at her head.
She saw he had the long knife they’d used to behead Adisa on his belt.
“Pad down!” he shouted over the sirens, which had at least lowered in volume since the fault had been fixed. The muzzle of his pistol was a black maw centred between her eyes. Carefully, slowly, she put the pad down and slid it to him, knowing what his next demand would be.
“Hands behind your head and on your knees.”
Yeah, you would want it that way. Silently, she did as he directed. She could hear someone on the steps behind her. Fassetti bent down to retrieve the pad, pistol wavering but not by enough. He peered at the screen before stepping close and crouching in front of her, so close she could smell his breath. Strangely sweet. He held the muzzle of the pistol against her forehead, and she closed her eyes. At least it would be quick that way.
“I can shut this daemonic machine down with this, can’t I? Before it kills all of us.”
She opened her eyes and gave him a dark look. “You know, I think I’ve worked you out. The others, I guess they were just folks who got their heads messed with, got turned around into being true believers. You? You’re just a psycho tossbag. Always were.”
He pushed his face even closer, licking his lips. She could tell he wanted to pull the trigger, splatter her brains out behind her. Or maybe go with the knife.
There was a heavy snick as Fassetti thumbed back the pistol’s hammer. Sam didn’t rise. “You’re not going to shoot me.”
“What makes you so sure, bitch?”
“You obviously want me alive for something, otherwise I’d have been killed when you first got here.” She stood then, growing surer of herself, moved away from Fassetti and angled a bit to the side so it looked like she was trying to get his buddy in sight as well. She was obvious about keeping her hand away from the old pistol on her belt.
“Cho wants you alive. She has plans for you. You’re just a test subject, see? And the thing about test subjects is that they can be replaced. I could gut you right now and we’d just come up with a new plan.” He smiled then, a cruel and cunning smile. “The Brightness offers many boons, after all.”
Sam let her shoulders sag in defeat, risked one quick glance over her shoulder to see how close she was to the looted tool chest. Close enough. “Yeah, you can switch the array off using the pad, it’s all linked in. Even a lobejob like you should be able to work out which button.”
That made him angry, angry enough not to second guess her. Furious almost to the point of blowing her brains out right there and then, she realised with a flinch. Instead, with a vicious glare, he stabbed his finger down on the abort icon.
“Never trust a con artist,” Sam told him calmly, as the racket increased in pitch and the abort icon he was looking at dissolved itself into a grinning skull. “Always wanted to use that function.”
She dived for the mostly empty chest, caught the edge with her injured shoulder and managed to scramble into the tight space just as the undamaged pod launched. Mercifully she still had some noise cancelling on and remembered to open her mouth as the electromagnetic coils energised and hurled the pod towards orbit with a sky-shattering bang and a shockwave of displaced air that hurled the two colonials off their feet, bursting their eardrums.
A moment later the second coil hurled its payload skyward, or rather tried to. The pod, battered out of shape by falling debris, achieved only a fraction of its potential velocity over the scant metres before it hit the sections of coil Sam had battered out of shape. It was still fast enough that it blew like a warhead, tearing the coil into vicious superheated sections that whirled through the air. A microsecond later the pod’s solid-state rocket, the second stage of the launch system, detonated, finishing the devastation of everything in the silo.
Everything but the hardened chest. Sam was pretty sure, on a detached level, that she was screaming as her shelter was torn from its mountings by the first blast and then upended and flung through the air by the second. A section of coil was rammed through the plex and missed her thigh by a centimetre.
She stopped screaming at that point and just stared, wide eyed and shaking, at the length of metal. It was cooling now, shedding heat as quickly as possible, and she could feel the flesh of her leg starting to burn.
It didn't hurt. Nothing hurt right now. Shock, maybe, or elation at still being alive.
She shoved at the lid of the chest, which was now on one side, and for a horrific moment was sure she’d been trapped inside by falling debris. Then it shifted and she tumbled out into smouldering ruins of the jSpace array, lying on her back staring at a lot more sky than had been there before.
“Fuck. Me.”
The explosion had blown the top of the mesa off, letting hard sunlight pour in. She snapped her helmet visor down and it compensated for the bright light. She blink-clicked magnification to maximum. The built-in pattern recog tagged a single solid-state rocket burning hard for orbit, standing on its tail of smoke. She couldn’t remember which pod had been in the sequence to launch first, probably wouldn’t find out unless it reached its destination.
“You absolute beauty.”
She turned her head, trying to see what had become of the two colonials who had ambushed her. She could see bloody, scorched chunks of meat and a sludge of innards up one wall, but she had no way of knowing how many bodies that comprised. The air stank of fuel and ozone, overdone meat and shit. Something else she couldn’t put a finger on, unknown to her yet oddly familiar.
She didn’t know how she felt about the fact she’d just killed four people. Maybe they’d gone willingly with this Jonathan (Fassetti certainly had), maybe they’d just gone with it to stay alive and had been brainwashed by this cult of the bright place. Maybe they were good people gone astray, or just working schmucks in a bad place.
“Doesn’t matter whether they had it coming or not. Them or me. Same with the others back at the settlement.”
High above, the pod would have just about escaped the full gravity of the planet. A final one-shot rocket, more of a controlled explosion, would fire and the pod would ride the shockwave out to the point that its small jSpace key would fire, punching it into the right stream for its destination.
“So long. Have a good fucking journey.” Suddenly bone tired, she reached up to remove her helmet, then pushed it back on her head instead and clicked on the comm. The hole in the ceiling meant she had full signal again. “Do you hear me, Marshal? Rule one hundred, Cho. It’s the one rule we don’t like to invo
ke. Do you want to know what it is? It’s ‘when they don’t leave you any other option, burn them down’.
“And I don’t see you leaving me any options, Cho.”
Sam pulled herself up, slowly and painfully. Her leg was agony across the front of the thigh and she knew she’d have to be careful about infection setting in. She had a lot to do now, though. Even if the pod got through, it would be months before any sort of rescue arrived. If it didn’t, and there were plenty of things that could go wrong for the automated craft, she could be alone with the zealots for years. It would take a lot of work, and a lot of careful planning, to stay alive and at liberty.
Fassetti was making terrified whimpering noises behind her. “Still alive, then?” she said, turning to peer down the corridor. He’d been blown ten metres down it, or at least most of him had, and he probably wouldn’t last too much longer.
That was not the source of his terror though. Some...thing was advancing on his prone and helpless form, low and grotesque but oddly almost human in some ways. Writhing tendrils flicked out from bulges on its face where eyes should have been. They caressed Fassetti, forced their way into his mouth and eyes, slithering into his ears. She gagged on the stench, acrid and yet strangely sweet, and understood what had made its home in the silo, what had been stalking her through the colony.
Sam backed up, primal horror coiling in her gut. She drew the Glock and raised it in shaking hands. “Well, fuck me – that’s new.”
Acknowledgements
Very little exists in a vacuum (which is why in space, no-one can hear you scream). I am no different from any other author in owing thanks to a number of people, presented here in an order that is in no way intended to demonstrate eminence.
The members of the Edinburgh SF&F writers group's hard but fair criticism and advice have helped polish this from the beginning, and our long chats about things literary and otherwise have always been a pleasure and an aid. Particular mention must be made of Carol, Andrew and Guthrie who had the earliest iterations inflicted on them.
The assistance of Dr Daniel Rhodes has been invaluable – not only did he do the excellent cover art, he provided scientific advice on everything from the workings of a binary star system to electromagnetic launching systems, not to mention further advice in shaping the text (and has therefore nominated himself as my Chief Scientific Advisor).
Jen de Beyer not only had the vital but unenviable role of proof reading the manuscript, but volunteered for it. Any errors and typos are entirely my responsibility from any last-minute tinkering with the text.
And finally Kelly, for providing the occasional much needed kick in the procrastination.
