Long Fall

by Chris J. Randolph

  They didn't die though, and more than four years on, Marco and Jansen simply did it by instinct, as naturally as a cat toying with a horrified lizard.

  Marco leaned forward in his chair and draped an arm between his legs like a lounging orangutan. An orangutan with a command insignia on his collar. "Crewman Hopkins, what's our current ETA?"

  "We're twelve minutes out, sir."

  Marco could have easily checked on his own console, but he liked to make Hop feel useful. It was just good management.

  He checked his cuticles again.

  Jansen said, "Marco?"

  "Call me Captain."

  "Sure. Captain Marco... we're not going really insanely fast, are we?"

  Jansen could have easily checked that information on his own screen, but he liked to make himself a damned nuisance.

  "No, Jansen," Marco said. "We are not going, quote really, insanely fast close-quote."

  Jansen wasn't listening to him anymore. He was gawping like a hunting dog, the entirety of his feeble brain consumed by something out the window. For a second, Marco could swear on his mother's ashpile that Jansen's arm was about to raise up and literally point, like some hammy child actor in an old horror film.

  Then Marco looked up. The far sky was glowing deep red. "Hopkins, uplink with..."

  "The Fleet," Hop interjected. "Message already transmitting with full sensor logs."

  Marco despised being cut off. It reminded him of long afternoons with his little sister.

  "Well, then... good work, Crewman."

  "Hrm. Comms are glitching out," Hop said. He smacked his monitor, and when that apparently didn't produce the result he wanted, he smacked it again.

  Jansen suddenly showed faint sparks of actually caring about his job. His fingers flew through interface screens, comparing graphs and figures of things Marco couldn't make out from across the bridge. "I think I know what it is," Jansen finally said.

  Silence.

  Marco's impatience got the better of him. "Well what the fuck is it, Technician?" He'd chosen to motivate his subordinate using a firm tone, and empowered him by properly acknowledging his position.

  "I think..." Jansen said, "It's... Gah. I can't think of the word."

  Marco's eyes tightened. His lips scrunched up and twitched.

  Jansen started tapping the metal casing of the console and said, "Damn. It's right on the tip of my tongue. You know the feeling... Ag. It's right there."

  Marco could strangle him if he were just a few meters closer.

  "Heliocrash?" Jansen spit out. His face said he was anything but confident. "It's like... our sun creates a bubble within the interstellar medium, and the... damned thing I can't remember the name of... it's where the solar wind mashes up against all the stuff outside."

  Hopkins sighed, placed fingers on either side of his nose, and shook his head for a very long time.

  "And?" Marco said.

  "Well, if I'm reading this right, something may be exciting the particles that sit along the... thing."

  Marco stroked his goatee. "Intriguing," he said. "How far away..."

  "The heliopause," Hop said haughtily, "is forty-two AU away. What we're seeing is just under six hours old."

  "Hmm." The light show was interesting, but all Marco could think about was confining Hopkins to his quarters for breaching Fleet etiquette. The punishment seemed a little steep though; their quarters were small storage lockers the size of a shower stall, like one of those old Japanese capsule hotels. They were essentially human kennels.

  "Dangerous?" Marco asked, cannily preventing Hopkins from cutting him off by only speaking a single word.

  Hopkins said, "Unknown."

  "Meh," Jansen said, as he so often did.

  Marco had to admit that Jansen made a compelling case. He said, "The mission awaits. Resume course to Charon, Crewman. Full steam ahead."

  "I never stopped the..."

  "Just let him have this," Jansen said in a stage-whisper, dripping thickly with feigned pity.

  And so The Beagle journeyed on.

  The shuttle and its intrepid crew arrived at Pluto and its near twin Charon without incident, the two bodies glittering pallidly against the strange redness beyond. Hopkins pressed at a few panels in front of him, took hold of the flight yoke and guided the ship around toward Charon, which looked rather comically like an old and mistreated golf ball.

  Pluto was the larger of the two by half, a mottled white and red-brown ball of speckled ice. Marco found it awfully pretty, especially for an object that'd received so much abuse and indignity at the hands of organized science. It had long-ago been downgraded from planet to dwarf planet, and things only got worse when the Global Aerospace Foundation took charge. They reclassified it a large dwarf planet, a moonlike planetoid, and finally part of a binary outer orbit object.

  The resulting acronym was surely coincidental.

  The Beagle approached Charon at a deliberate pace and came to a stop several hundred meters from the surface. They sat there for a few seconds in silence, then the ground visibly rumbled, cracked, and split open. It was a hatch, a perfect circle split into four parts which folded outward like lotus petals.

  "Crewman," Marco said, "commence docking procedures."

  "Aye aye," Hopkins said smartly, adding under his breath, "you frigging jagweed."

  Marco grimaced but held his tongue. He'd need to consult his command pamphlet about chronic insubordination later.

  The shuttle swooped in and gently set down in a marked landing bay while the outer hatch closed behind it. Sensors showed the room's seal had been re-established, and the environment checked out.

  The team got out of their seats and began to stretch and yawn. Marco plucked a device from his arm-rest—a metallic bead on an attractive silver chain—and snapped it around his wrist. It was what passed for a phone in the Legacy Fleet, and its like were distributed to all personnel for communication, mission recording, and the occasional game. He technically wasn't supposed to have taken it off in the first place, but who was going to report him?

  Jansen groaned as he put his own phone on. "You know this is how the military tracks you, right? Fucking government espionnage, man."

  Hopkins' phone had never left his wrist. "I do know that, Nils. It's in the manual. And on the back of the box. And on the front of the box. In case you missed it, we are the dang military. True story."

  "Psh," Jansen said. "I never signed any enlistment papers." He looked to Marco. "Hey, are we bringing the blasters along?"

  Of course they weren't. After The Europa Incident, The Beagle's crew were only allowed access to its arsenal with Fleet Command's express authorization.

  Marco shook his head.

  Jansen's shoulders drooped gloomily.

  Hopkins mumbled, "They're not blasters," but no one paid him any attention.

  With that matter settled, they headed for the ramp. They passed the pressure suits still hanging in their lockers, glanced at them and kept walking. Fleet regulations required personnel to wear the fancy new skinsuits on all off-world operations, but even Hopkins was willing to thumb his nose up at that one. They'd all lived in similar outfits for six straight months, and that was more than enough for one lifetime.

  The Beagle's ramp lowered and they walked down into a cavernous hangar bay. As they came out from under the shuttle's shadow, Marco took a look around and marveled at the installation. Charon had been transformed into a big pair of eyes and ears attached to one very large cannon, less a boatman than a gatekeeper it seemed. It was a tiger-trap lying in wait at the edge of the solar system.

  The base had essentially built itself. Legacy launched a seed-pod at the binary-moon-planet-thing-a-doo, and it hit the surface, dug underground, and turned the insides into a surveillance and early response post. While the delivery method had been borrowed from ancient Eireki technology, the actual design of the installation was entirely human.

  Marco somehow doubted any other design teams had work
ed together across a span of sixty-five million years.

  "So what's the job?" Jansen asked.

  Marco flicked his wrist and a glowing screen popped up at the edge of his vision. Most people could control their phones entirely with mental commands, but Marco was stuck using small gestures, much to his annoyance. The phone was always listening to their conversation though, and had already prepared the mission brief.

  He waved his fingers and made the image full-screen, then minimized the display and said, "Looks like a faulty memory module. Cron jobs aren't executing on-time, and the mainframe has thrown up a couple kernel panics."

  "Easy one," Jansen replied. "We'll be back aboard Legacy for dinner."

  Then the hangar's lights dimmed, turned red and began to pulse. A klaxon started.

  "Aww, what now?" Jansen moaned.

  Marco brought his display back up and checked for local network alerts. "Incoming vessel detected," he said with a hundred questions swarming his voice.

  Heavy machinery moved all around them. Thousands of tonnes of metal and stone shuddered and shook the ground, then locked into place.

  A light flashed, not blindingly bright but enough to surprise the three technicians.

  Marco glanced back at his phone's display. "We just fired on someone?"

  A second later, sparks exploded from the wall a few stories above them, and similar explosions sounded throughout the installation's corridors.

  The lights blinked out.

  "You've got to be kidding me," Hopkins said.

  With that, they all turned around in unison and walked back up the ramp, and it automatically closed behind them.

  Chapter 10

  Invasive Species

  The workshop was dead quiet except for the simulated tapping of small stones striking the walls, and the faint crackle of a tool that looked decidedly like a soldering iron. The device in Amira Saladin's hand was a bio-circuitry printer, one of several hundred things she'd invented in the few years since the world had been violently reborn.

  The idea for it first came to her when her first methods proved too slow and cumberson. Legacy's holographic chamber was a brilliant way to prototype and experiment with new designs, and she still used a similar technology for drafting, but the machinery it produced invariably came with subtle hardware bugs that needed to be patched away. Each minor revision had to be run off anew, which placed a significant speedbump in the path of progress, so she built a pen that could sketch fixes in place.

  Internally, the device worked much like a spider's spinneret, folding and combining proteins into complex tissues as she dragged it along a surface. With it, she could draw a new tendon or nerve and correct most problems in a matter of seconds, which allowed her to start fielding new functional designs at a startling pace.

  This was her life now: she was building whenever she wasn't fighting, and one became a release valve whenever she grew tired of the other.

  The components in front of her today belonged to something special. A pet project. The work on it had grown so complex and delicate that even a small error in her workmanship might prove catastrophic, meaning that only fresh prints could possibly be viable. It slowed her work, and she used her pen only to mark changes for the next run-off.

  In this case, her focus was a dense fabric of woven muscle threaded through with organic circuitry. A pair of mechanical arms held armor in a retracted position so she could work on the internals, while the component itself was held in place by another arm which gently pushed back whenever Amira applied pressure, preventing any shaking or instability.

  Each new generation of her pet project was brought into being, examined, then melted down and recycled into the next. She sometimes went through a dozen iterations a day.

  Staring at the fabric, she issued a mental command and her headset responded. It used an array of sensors to build a digital reproduction of the surface in microscopic detail, then displayed a live rendering on the connected glasses; at the same time, thin metallic strips on her wrists overrode her nerve impulses, giving her hands the precision necessary to work at such a small scale.

  Amira saw a red glare out of the corner of her eye which let her know someone was waiting at the door. As a matter of official policy, there was no damned knocking aboard The Pegasus.

  She continued working at a steady pace and patched the last two loose myofibers into place, then set her pen and headset down. "Come," she said.

  The door opened silently and Tom Greer waited on the other side. "We're ten minutes out from the insertion point, Sal."

  Tom was older, Australian, bearded. He lost his wife and kids in a car accident shortly before the invasion, leaving him already grief stricken when the world around was torn asunder. Instead of breaking like so many others did, he gained determination. He became unbreakable, and it made him a damned good executive officer.

  "The team?" she asked.

  "Prepped and ready to go."

  "Right," she said. Amira gave her project a soft pat then spun in her chair to face the computer behind her. She typed out a string of commands in the terminal and hit enter, starting the build procedure.

  Analyzing new topology...

  Complete

  Simulating protein fold sequence...

  Building cache...

  Computing...

  Complete

  Compiling gene code...

  Compilation would take a few hours, after which machinery on the other end of her workshop would automatically fabricate and assemble the pieces. At this point, every part of her process had sprung from Eireki technology which she'd torn apart, examined, crudely rebuilt, then tweaked and modified into her own.

  As for her special project, months of tweaks and fixes were finally coming to an end. This was the final draft; she could feel it in her gut.

  "Alright, let's suit up," she said. She was already out of her chair, and was striding toward the door while putting on her jacket. Tom had been prepared for her sudden departure and gracefully kept pace.

  The door closed behind them and sealed itself shut. The stakes were too high now for any lapse in security, even on her own ship and among her own people.

  Amira and her XO walked down Pegasus' wide and bare tunnels at a brisk pace, from Amira's workshop on the port side to the mission readiness bay in the forward section.

  The bay was an octagonal chamber with a second level recessed a half-meter in the floor, colored a dull mauve and lit by a single faintly blue light in imitation of evening on Mars. The walls were lined with shallow stalls, some of which held MASPEC armors in hibernation. They were accentuated human forms with hard exoskeletons covered in subtly sharp edges, standing in a slightly hunched pose like a man trying to stay warm against heavy snowfall. Their backs were split open revealing the padded hollow within.

  The other armors were in use. A team of eight MASPEC troopers stood in the middle of the floor among a seemingly random collection of large metal scraps. Their skin was muted and mottled, with a matte finish completely free of any stray glints that might betray their position. The material was a composite of chitin, titanium, and several silicates, overlapped in radiating patterns.

  Her earlier armor plates had aped human musculature, but that concept quickly revealed itself to be less than optimal. The pattern she developed to replace it was instead a natural complement to the muscles beneath, the many pieces sliding over one another, folding, and extending almost like origami. She called it dragonscale.

  Amira nodded to her troops as she entered, and walked straight for her own armor. All of her troops had modified their personal armors to better suit their abilities and style, but Amira's was something else entirely. It was called Kerberos, and it was her command armor.

  As she stepped up to Kerberos, it leaned back into her and they combined in one smooth motion. Dragonscale rotated and slid into place, sealing itself airtight as she turned and regarded her team.

  "What's the time to destination?" she asked.
/>
  Tom checked his antique golden watch. "Forty-five seconds," he said.

  Amira gave him a wave and said, "Don't scratch my damn ship while I'm gone, Tom."

  He left with a smile, and the heavy bulkhead ratcheted into place behind him.

  The inside of her armor was quiet, warm, and comfortable, like the embrace of an old lover. Its nervous system was tied into her own, nearly erasing the barrier between them and seamlessly transforming the engineer into a lethal predator.

  Amira snapped her arms into a guard, then threw a couple jabs and a cross. The system felt good, save for a amall dead spot in the right shoulder. Probably a nerve bundle getting pinched by some of the superstructure. Easy to patch when she had a moment.

  Tom's voice came in over her speakers. "At the waypoint and holding, Sal."

  "Ready to drop," she said, and flashed her team a thumbs up.

  "Roger. Opening doors."

  When the last word came out, the floor beneath folded away, revealing clumpy clouds and a ground so distant that it looked faded and hazy.

  The MASPEC troopers fell.

  Hundreds of actuated panels on the outside of the armors invisibly controlled their descent, reading the pilots' impulses and translating them into flowing movements. Troopers weaved in and around the falling metal scraps and turned to scan their surroundings, getting their bearings while plummeting through the sky at hundreds of kilometers an hour.

  Amira instead watched her ship shrink into the otherwise unspoiled blue. Pegasus was an asymmetrical and misshapen abomination that simply shouldn't stay aloft. The sheer grotesque awkwardness of it was an intentional design feature, serving as a firm middle-finger to any potential enemy. She liked to imagine it said to them, "I can make this idiotic contraption float like a happy little party balloon. What do you think I can't do?"