by Rob Boffard
“Eric!” Harlan shouts.
The sound drags me out of my thoughts. I turn to see Harlan leaning into the space at the back of the cockpit. Just past him, I can see Eric in the pilot’s seat, hands on the controls. He’s gripping them so hard that his skin has turned white.
He’s never flown a plane before–never even been inside one, for all I know. He might have the knowledge, gleaned from books, but that’s all he’s got. And now he’s at the controls, a thousand feet up. The plane starts to tilt, its nose pointing towards the ground.
I stagger up towards the cockpit, squeezing through the opening and slipping into the seat on Eric’s right. It used to be fabric and foam padding, but it’s been worn down to a bare skeleton, and the struts jam into my back. There’s a second stick in front of me, moving in tandem with Eric’s. I can just make out the dark shapes of mountains through the smeared cockpit glass.
The plane levels out a little. We’re still descending, but more slowly now. Eric is staring straight ahead, mouth open. Sweat drips from his chin, landing on his vise-grip hands.
I say his name, but it gets lost in the roar of the engines. When I reach out to grab him, I find that he’s trembling, his shoulder vibrating under my hand.
Finkler shoves his way through the opening, hunting for something. He reaches up behind me and jams something over my head. A pair of headphones, huge and bulbous, catching my hair and trapping it against my scalp. I adjust them, pulling the microphone stalk down as Finkler puts another pair on Eric’s head.
The sound of the engine is muffled now. I feel on the stalk for the transmit switch, clicking it into place. A thin crackle of static emerges over the engine.
“Eric,” I say. I have to repeat his name before he looks at me, and, when he does, there’s naked terror in his eyes. This isn’t the commander I saw back at the hospital. This is someone who is coming face to face with his worst fear.
I see his lips moving, but I can’t hear him. I point to the stalk, and after some fumbling his voice comes across the channel: “—do it. Can’t do it.”
“Yes, you can,” I say.
He shakes his head, letting go of the control yoke and gripping the mic stalk with both hands. The plane dips even further, sliding me forward in my seat. I grab my own control yoke, moving more on instinct than anything else, pulling it backwards. We start rising, but I’ve pushed it too far, overcorrecting the movement. The yoke feels heavy in my hands, the plane both sluggish and impossibly sensitive.
“Eric, listen to me,” I say. “I can’t do this by myself. I don’t know how.”
“You think I do?”
“You’ve read the books. You know how this thing works. Eric, please.”
“No.” He’s shaking his head. “We need to go back to Whitehorse. We’ll find someone else.”
It would be so easy to get angry, to scream at him. It’s not just that I could–I want to. But getting angry isn’t going to work–not this time. I don’t have the first clue what I’m doing. Eric needs to figure out how to fly this thing, and soon, or we’re going to crash. I have to help him understand that he can do it.
A memory tugs at me. Carver, back on the station. We’d been captured by Mikhail’s Earthers, and to escape I’d taken a little girl hostage. Ivy, her name was. I held her round the throat, used her to buy us some time. Carver gave me hell for it, told me that I was trying to handle everything myself, acting before my friends could help me.
I reach out, grabbing his hands, pulling them gently off the stalk. Then I place them on the control yoke, holding them tight, before returning my hands to my own controls.
My eyes meet his. “We’re going to do it together,” I say. “We’ll pull it up. All right?”
The terrified expression hasn’t left his face. But after a long moment, he nods.
“Here we go,” I say. Together, we pull back on our control yokes.
The plane levels out, and then slowly begins to climb.
48
Anna
Anna Beck leans over the control panel, her mouth inches from the mic set into the edge of the touchscreen.
She opens her mouth to speak, then stops.
It takes her several attempts to form the words. “Shinso Maru, please respond. This is Outer Earth. Do you copy?”
Nothing. Just static, ebbing and flowing.
“Shinso Maru, can you hear me?”
Her voice breaks on the last word, and she sits back, head bowed. This isn’t the first time she’s been in the Apex control room, and it’s not the first time she’s tried to find a sign that the asteroid catcher survived. Why should now be any different? She’s not going to hear from the Shinso. She’s not going to hear from anyone. Earth is silent–the last time any signal was picked up was decades ago. One by one, they all winked out.
Anna Beck doesn’t cry. She hasn’t shed a single tear, and she’s not going to now.
The Apex control room is a long and narrow space, with banks of screens bordering a thin strip of metal flooring. Most of the screens are dead. The few chairs that remain are battered and worn. Anna is sitting in one of them, elbows on her knees, staring at nothing.
Nobody comes here any more, mostly because there’s no point–most of the technicians who used the systems are dead, and what’s left is running on automatic, humming away while they wait for the reactor to die. The control room is the one place that Anna can virtually guarantee that she’ll be alone. She’s afraid that if she runs into anyone she won’t be able to keep Dax’s plan to herself. And she can’t tell anyone about it. Not yet.
Because it might be the wrong choice.
Anna laughs. There’s no humour in the sound. She’s thinking about the people she killed during the siege in the dock, when she squatted behind a barricade with her long gun and fired again and again and again. She’s thought about them a lot in the past few days. Why shouldn’t she? Nobody should have to take a life, let alone five or six of them, one after the other.
And yet, it doesn’t bother her. Not as much as it should have. The choice to do it was cut and dried. Those people–the Earthers–were coming to hurt her and her friends. They wanted out, and they didn’t care what was in their path. She did the right thing–no, she did the only thing.
This isn’t so simple.
Objectively, Dax is right. That’s the worst part. It does make sense to send the people who give them the best chance of survival. That doesn’t stop it from being completely insane, a plan that takes the chance of life away from almost everyone on the station, without their consent.
Anna could let it happen. She could let them die, and give humanity the best possible chance. Or she could tell everyone, and accept that in the chaos that comes afterwards–and Anna knows it’ll be chaos, knows it in her bones–there might still be deaths.
Every time she thinks she’s made her decision, every time she starts to rise from her chair, she falters. This isn’t just a group of people in a thought experiment. This is her parents. Achala and Ravi Kumar. Marcus, and Ivy, and the rest of the kids. These are people she knows.
Which ones will die, and which ones will live?
Without really realising she’s doing it, Anna leans forward, idly trailing her hand along the onscreen frequency band. “This is Outer Earth,” she whispers, not expecting an answer but not sure what else to do. “I need help. Please. If anyone can hear me, this is station control for Outer Earth. Please respond.”
49
Riley
Finkler’s voice comes through the channel. “Can you hear us up there?”
I twist round, looking through the gap in the seats. As I do so, I get a better look at the plane’s interior. It’s old–ancient, actually. The walls are caked with rust, and the floor is a mess of struts and hinges, the seats they once held long since removed. There are a few battered plastic crates scattered across the floor of the plane, and, at the back, there’s a loose mesh netting hanging from floor to ceiling, with more crates
stacked tightly behind it. Finkler and Harlan have found headphones of their own, pulled down from brackets mounted on the wall
Eric is staring straight ahead. “Yeah, I hear you,” he says, barely moving his lips. He seems… not calm, exactly, but a little more focused. We’re not going to crash, at least not right away.
“How much fuel do we have?” I say.
His eyes don’t leave the windshield. “We’re lucky. They’d filled her up. Probably getting ready to head out in the morning.” He glances at me, and his face hardens. “Before you say anything: yes, I’ll take you to Anchorage.”
I don’t know what to say. Despite everything that’s happened, he’s still got every right to turn this plane around and return to Whitehorse. He’d be putting his people’s needs above mine, and I wouldn’t be able to fault him for it.
He sees my confusion. “That plan of yours was the stupidest, most insane thing I’ve ever heard. It should have got you killed, and you know it. But you went out there anyway. That counts for something, at least to me.”
There’s a long pause.
“Thank you.” It’s all I can think to say.
“But let’s get it straight,” he says, and I can hear the strength coming back into his voice. “We’re not sticking around. Once we get you there, you’re on your own. I’m taking this thing back home. That’s assuming I don’t mess up the landing and kill us all.”
“Fair enough.”
There’s a square screen to his left, full of strange shapes, and he taps it with a fingernail. “The plane’s got some working nav software on it. We’ll head for…” He checks the screen. “Cook Inlet. It’s just up past Anchorage. If we get down safe, we can get you onto the shoreline. We should have enough fuel to make it back OK.”
I sink back against the seat. The plane is rocking gently from side to side, steadily climbing, and Finkler and Harlan are talking in excited bursts as they dig through the containers at the back of the plane.
Eric looks around for a long minute, hunting across the control panel. “Hit that button there,” he says, pointing to a spot on my side, where there’s a bank of toggle switches. I reach over and grab the one I think he’s pointing to, on the far left.
“No, that’s the—” Eric says, and then I flip the switch and our headphones explode with noise.
My eardrums feel like they’re tearing in two, like every frequency in the spectrum is trying to jam itself inside my head. I grab my headphones, trying to rip them off, but one of them is caught on my ear. Eric launches across the space between us, scrambling for the switch.
At the last second, just before he turns the switch off and kills the radio, I hear something.
Something that shouldn’t be there.
“Jesus,” Eric says, shaking his head as he sits back in his seat. He yanks the control stick downwards, jerking the plane back up. “That was the radio. The one I was pointing to is the autopilot switch, so if you could—”
“Turn it back on,” I say.
“What?”
“Turn it back on. Right now.” I don’t wait for him to do it. I reach forward, and flip the switch. Eric stares at me, wincing at the noise. Then he grabs a dial just under the bank of switches, and twists it all the way to the left.
The sound is still a jumble of noise, but it’s softer now, almost inaudible. Eric is staring at me like I’ve gone mad.
Slowly, very slowly, I turn the volume up. A little at time. My eyes are closed, as if it’ll help me find the signal in the noise.
Nothing.
I must have imagined it. My shoulders sag. For a second there, I thought—
The voice comes across the transmission, almost buried by the noise, split in two by the static: “—anyone hear me?”
Eric is staring at me, confused. “So some kid’s got hold of a transmitter. So what?”
“We have to respond,” I say, my voice curiously breathless. I’m hunting the panel for a transmit button, but I can hardly make sense of the labels: DOPPLR and TFREQ, RFREQ and OFFSET.
“Finkler!” Eric shouts, not bothering to use his headset. I hear clunking footfalls, and then Finkler’s flushed face pokes into the space between Eric and me.
“Mind giving us a little warning before you mess with the radio?” he shouts.
I grab his shoulder, jamming my headphones back on. “I have to transmit,” I say. “Outside the plane.”
“Hey, whoa,” Finkler says, his face serious. “I mean, I don’t know if—”
“Please.”
“Do it,” Eric says.
Finkler shakes his head, his eyes wide, but leans forward until he’s on all fours, half in and half out of the cockpit. He toggles some switches and adjusts some knobs, his tongue sticking a little out of his mouth.
“Hurry,” I say.
The voice comes again, and my heart almost explodes out of my chest. The sound is fainter this time: “—Control on Outer Earth transmitting. If there’s–out there—”
“My God,” Eric says, staring at the radio.
Finkler twists a knob, and reaches over to flick a second switch, his arm nearly colliding with my face. Then he leans back, and touches a button on the centre console.
The static vanishes.
For a second, I think we’ve lost her, but then Finkler gestures at me to speak.
“Anna?” I say. “This is Riley. Come back.”
Finkler releases the button. The static returns. There are more artefacts in the noise now, strange blips and clicks, as if my words have disturbed a strange god, slowly coming to life.
Then, almost inaudible, I hear Anna Beck’s stunned voice. “Riley?”
Finkler and Eric are staring at me in shock. Harlan has arrived, too, his face visible above Finkler’s back.
“I can hear you!” I say.
Anna’s reply is fractured “—shit, you’re alive! How–others, are you—”
“Anna, what about everybody up there? Is Outer Earth OK?”
“—dying. The reactor’s cut out, and—”
“Anna, say again?”
“—send a ship back to Earth, but we don’t know—”
“It has to be passing right overhead,” says Finkler, as Anna’s voice cracks apart in the static. “That’s the only way this is happening.” He grabs my shoulder. “You’ve probably got about fifteen seconds, maybe less.”
Hearing Anna’s voice, knowing she’s alive, after the breach in the dock, is almost too much to take. I hit the button again. “Anna, listen to me carefully. If you can make it back to Earth, aim for a place called Whitehorse, in the Yukon. We’ll be waiting for you.” I don’t know what Eric might say about that, and right then I couldn’t care less.
Her voice is even fainter now. “—ley, I copy, we’ll come–you. As soon as I—”
And then she’s gone. There’s nothing but static
“You have to tune it,” I say, pointing to the radio. “Get her back.”
“She’s out of range,” says Finkler, giving a helpless shrug.
“There’s gotta be something we can do.”
He reaches forward and adjusts the dial marked DOPPLR. The squelches and clicks mutate, lengthening and twisting into new sounds. He grunts in frustration, turning his attention to TFREQ, then RFREQ. After a long moment, he drops his hand.
“Nada,” he says. “Doppler offset didn’t catch her. She’s out of range.”
He looks genuinely distraught, like he’s let someone die. I reach up and put a hand on his, squeezing tight.
“Were we just talking to someone in space?” Harlan says.
“Who was she?” Eric says. “And did you just seriously invite more people to live with us in Whitehorse?”
I don’t have a chance to answer. At that moment, another voice cuts across the static.
“—broadcasting from a secure location in what used to be Anchorage, Alaska. There are at least a hundred of us here, and we have managed to establish a colony. We have food, water and s
helter. The—”
I flick the radio off.
50
Anna
Riley is alive.
The implications cascade through Anna’s mind as she sprints across the sector. The Shinso Maru made it down. The plan to use the asteroid as a heat shield actually worked. And what was that Riley said? We’ll be waiting for you.
She barrels around a corner in the corridor, slamming into the wall but pushing off it, sprinting even faster. She doesn’t have to make the choice any more. If there are people down there already, then Dax’s decision–to take only the best and the brightest–doesn’t have to be made. She doesn’t have to play his game.
Riley made it. Maybe Aaron Carver, too, and Prakesh. She has to tell her dad. She has to tell the Kumars. Hell, she has to tell everyone. She runs faster, pumping her arms, and this time she opens her mouth and let loose an ear-splitting whoop of joy. It occurs to her that she could have used the station comms, which are operated from the control room. Then again, she thinks, that would deny her the opportunity of seeing the look on Dax’s face.
She doesn’t slow down as she approaches the amphitheatre. The door is open, slid away into the wall, and she can hear the crowd as she gets close. She can hear—
Angry shouts.
She hesitates, and that hesitation nearly kills her. She’s going too fast, and the pause shifts her centre of gravity slightly, tilting her forward. Her feet try to compensate, stutter-stepping, and then she slams into the edge of the door. It takes her in the shoulder, and a starburst of pain explodes on her collarbone.
She comes to a halt, leaning against it, and finally sees inside the amphitheatre.
Everyone is on their feet, screaming at each other, giant knots of people hurling accusations. Her father is standing on one of the chairs at the front, his hands around his mouth, yelling at everybody to stay calm. An empty food container flies through the air, bouncing down the centre steps.
There’s a woman coming out of the amphitheatre, a grim look on her face. Anna pushes past the pain, and grabs her. “What’s going on?” she says.
