Long Fall

by Chris J. Randolph

Tom nodded. "Not really used to being out in space, m'self. Still feel like bloody Buck Rogers."

  "Yeah," Jack said again. There didn't seem to be a surplus of other words worth using right at that moment.

  Over the next few hours, the Moon inflated right in front of them and then slowly spun like a classroom globe. It took Jack an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the Pegasus was the one in motion, and not the Moon.

  Then the ship came around to the Moon's far side and Jack's eyes went wide with wonder. Here was an object he'd at least casually glanced at most nights of his life, and it was suddenly showing him a new face after all these years. It was like finding out his childhood home had a backyard he somehow never noticed, and he was gobsmacked.

  As they came around, something else appeared. It looked at first like a mountain hanging in the sky, and for just an instant, Jack worried that there were floating castles on the Moon that no one ever bothered to tell him about.

  But the thing grew larger and clearer, and he soon realized exactly what he was looking at. It was Donovan's alien warship, Legacy. The shape of it was peculiar, something like a traditional Hawaiian canoe with a single outrigger, with lines that were smooth and flowing, organic and clearly alive.

  Jack squinted for a second and realized how much it resembled the Yuon Kwon. There was a similarity of style, like that between humpback whales and giant squid: they were creatures born of the same environment, and that environment had shaped them with a single set of tools.

  Pegasus approached and skirted along Legacy's surface while the alien ship blotted out their view of anything else. It turned out to be much larger than Jack anticipated, and he felt like he was aboard an airliner coming in low over a city. One made of greenish metal, and encased in a clear coat that swirled with color like motor oil floating on a street puddle.

  Then the voice struck him.

  He felt it just before the surge and was confused at the sensation. There wasn't even time to panic, like that instant when waves shift before the undertow violently sucks someone under.

  She was in his head. Every dark corner of it. Every precious point of light.

  Her disembodied voice shouted so loud it shook him, battered him, flattened him. It tightened around his throat and squeezed his head inside out.

  He was powerless to stop it.

  Millions of her thoughts oscillated all around, arcing and splitting apart, but arising from and melting back into just one voice. A fearsome voice. An ancient voice. A dying voice.

  Then like a miracle, surprise reverberated through the many voices that were one, and it grew quiet. Anxious. It examined him with great curiosity, with shock, with panic.

  Despite her unimaginable age, she became a young child who had just caught sight of a sleeping kitten. Then a tidal wave of pure and unconditional love overwhelmed Jack, and it began to sweetly sing him to sleep.

  Be still,

  I'm so sorry,

  Sleep, and all will be well,

  Sleep.

  Chapter 14

  Two Aspirin

  Jack awoke in a soft white bed, shivering despite being perfectly warm. His upper body was tilted up, and he was neatly tucked beneath a pair of sheets that felt like cotton. They felt like expensive cotton, in fact, and didn't smell even slightly of a small family or pack animal.

  He didn't even know that sheets like that existed anymore.

  He heard an echo that wouldn't go away, and felt a panic that had become strung out and desperate.

  The room was a long bay furnished with a half-dozen identical beds, whose occupants were enjoying various levels of discomfort. Some were groaning, one appeared to be throwing up, and the last was blissfully slumbering away, unaware of his extensive burns and what looked like an unfamiliar kind of artificial leg.

  Jack had a splitting headache and his whole body felt like a rung-out dish towel. His eyes burned a little, and his cheeks were moist. They felt cool in the slight draft.

  The echo churned on and on.

  He moved his left arm and felt a pressure on it, which turned out to be an IV attached at the inside of his elbow. The other end of it disappeared into the wall, leaving him wondering what they were pumping into him exactly. Whatever it was, he wished it would start working already.

  A woman in a bright blue labcoat walked in. She was maybe a decade older than Jack, so slender that her coat seemed to hang empty, and wearing a pair of prescription glasses which Jack found unusual for being whole and unbroken. She glanced at the other patients as she walked by them, but her focus was clear.

  "Good morning, Mr. Hernandez," she said. She had a French accent so light that she must have spent her adult life in North America. Maybe Boston. "My name is Juliette St. Martin, and I'm head of medical here aboard Legacy. How are you feeling?"

  The echo throbbed, Jack's head pounded and he winced. "Bad," he said with a strangled voice. "Like someone... pried my skull open. Left the pry bar behind when she was done."

  The doctor made a note on a strange looking tablet, and her eyes studied him intensely. That turned into a problem. Jack suddenly felt like a sample in a petri dish and it made him intensely uncomfortable. Memories of his captivity started to roll in just a little too quick, then they chained together and began to steamroll him. A hundred days of torture shot through his brain all at once.

  He was sweating. Hyperventilating. The echo wouldn't shut up.

  He never could tell what was going to trigger one of these episodes. Those memories should be unimportant considering what he'd just been through, but they still had the power to knock the air out of his chest.

  What had he just been through?

  Calm swept over him like a splash of cold water, and he assumed the IV was to thank. The feeling didn't last, though.

  "Mr. Hernandez, are you still with me?" the doctor asked.

  "Sorry," he said reflexively. His rib-cage was heaving.

  She smiled warmly. "No need to apologize. I can see you're suffering. That's not your fault."

  Her sympathy tasted of bullshit. His skin crawled, and he noticed his hands were shaking. "What do you have me on?" he asked, giving a glance at the IV.

  "Fluids, blood thinners, anti-inflammatories, and..."

  Her silence drifted across the room.

  Jack bared his teeth and asked, "And what, Doctor?".

  "We call them omnibodies," she said. "Engineered antibodies. They're symbiotic biotech organisms that fight infections, help repair damage, and generally take care of... us... on a microscopic scale."

  Jack's eyes stung sharply. "You're being a little fucking coy," he said.

  She glanced to the side. "They're Legacy's antibodies."

  Jack growled. He reached across himself using his other scarred hand, tore the IV from his arm, and immediately felt sick to his stomach.

  "I understand you're upset, Mr. Hernandez."

  "You don't understand shit," he said beneath his breath. Indignance rose up in his chest, lifted unsteadily on his fluttering despair.

  "It's important for you to understand that this was an unexpected and unintended event, Mr. Hernandez... Jack, you're the first human Legacy has ever succesfully made contact with. The rest of us are deaf to her, but not you. There's something different about you."

  The muscles of his chest tightened. "You don't fucking understand," he repeated in a quaking voice.

  She took a deep breath. "I won't pretend to know how you feel, but I'm confident it will pass with time," she said. "The mind has an amazing ability to heal, to cope..."

  "You just don't get it," Jack said, and he choked out a bitter laugh. "This ship... your damned animal just mauled the fuck out of my brain." Tears raced from his eyes. "That thing was inside..."

  His voice vanished.

  The walls shrank in on him.

  Jack tried to breathe. Just breathe. He closed his eyes and searched inside himself for a quiet space, something that remained still even as the rest was turning
to pandemonium. Something that was always there waiting, watching, and calm.

  He opened his eyes and exhaled, then climbed out of the very nice bed. His bare feet touched a floor that was body warm and rubbery. "Get out of my way," he said to the doctor.

  She didn't budge.

  Jack turned slightly, lowered his chin to his shoulder. His fingers curled into jittery fists.

  "As difficult as it may seem right now, I'd advise you to stay," she said, perfectly uncowed. "This facility is shielded from Legacy's broadcasts, but the second you step outside..."

  The end of her sentence fell silent, both brilliant and insidious in its unspoken threat. "That's such fucking bullshit," Jack said on the edge of shouting. "Bullshit."

  He turned and punched the wall. The strange material soaked up his strike with a thud, soft as a throw pillow.

  He wanted to break something but there was nothing around. There wasn't a single god damned thing to grab, to throw against the wall, to smash into bits.

  There was nothing around him but this prison, a slightly paler shade of totally fucked than the last one.

  He struck the wall with his forehead and turned as his knees gave way. He shrank into the corner, burying his face in his knees and gripping the back of his skull with both hands, trying as hard as he possibly could to disappear.

  He tried and failed to disappear.

  Chapter 15

  Apex Predator

  Morning burned on the horizon. The sun reached out with bronze fingers that streaked across the sky, while clots of coal black and ashen grey bubbled up from the jungle to fight against its advance.

  War machines littered the air, spinning and tumbling like so many leaves caught on the breeze, while countless ground forces butted heads in a pitched battle to the south.

  Amira Saladin was at the end of a very busy night, and the start of what promised to be an even busier day. Her team had found her unconscious after they felled the last black knight, then they went about treating her wounds and setting her fractured femur. Afterward, her contact-suit hardened into a cast, which made for a stiff and nasty surprise when she woke some minutes later.

  Pegasus was nowhere to be seen, but Amira had expected as much. Tom was an expert at following orders, and that meant Jack would be safe and sound aboard Legacy, far beyond the reach of any of this insanity on the ground. Amira knew that Donovan would take good care of him, no matter what disagreements she'd had with the Fleet's ringleader in the past.

  She couldn't say the same of Sigrid Eriksson.

  As morning overtook the land, Amira was elbow deep in jumbled wiring and partially disassembled hardware. The mess of spaghetti she'd constructed was dirty, hacky work, but there'd been no time for anything more elegant. Not with death constantly dangling over their heads.

  The black knight was laid out with a single arm stretched forward, like a dehydrated man who died just meters from an oasis. A thick frayed cable connected its (mostly intact) Nikola cannon to a port on Tamsin's ribs, and the last flickering of the huge machine's strange, mechanical muscles dimmed and disappeared.

  "That's the end of it," Amira said.

  Tamsin popped her faceplate up. "Reading 30% charge, Chief. Stable."

  "Good, good," Amira chanted as she raised her goggles to the top of her head. "That's one problem solved... Well, 30% solved at least."

  The Unies' aggressive recycling of her technology had again proven useful, allowing her to bring the entire team's batteries back up to operational levels. She might've considered it an incredible stroke of luck, but she knew the way Donovan's mind worked.

  The rest of the team held positions around the perimeter. They were tense. Afraid. That was probably for the best.

  "Chief," Tamsin said. "Take my MASPEC. I can cover ground faster than you."

  Amira shook her head and pointed to her leg. "We're better off with five able-bodied troopers," she said. "Besides, that armor's imprinted on you. I'd be clumsy at best if it didn't reject me outright."

  She left the other reason unsaid: if her team was going to die (and all relevant data pointed in that direction), it wouldn't be due to her selfishness. She'd give them the best chance to survive—the best chance to win—that she could. She owed them nothing less.

  But it still wasn't enough.

  The black knight lay there, never reaching that near oasis. Amira gave it a sound punch that landed with a thud.

  Tamsin asked, "Could you fix it?"

  Amira hated that even her inner circle thought of her that way. This damned thing had shuffled off its mortal coil, and she wasn't a damned miracle worker. It was junk, an ex-machine, and there was no more fixing left to be done.

  On the other hand, she momentarily smirked at what effective killers her troop had become. They left the enemy in pieces.

  "Turn it over," she said.

  Half the squad snapped into motion, and with strength that seemed out of proportion to their diminutive size, they rolled the giant onto its back. When it and the dust cloud settled, Amira tested it with a foot, found it sturdy and awkwardly hopped on top.

  She pulled herself across the cracked chest plate and looked into the gaping wound. A particle beam had dug a deep crater that exposed the knight's metal skeleton, blocky modular components, and torn musculature. Her headset analyzed the materials as she went, and she could tell that this was unlike the myofiber technology she'd adapted from the Eireki. The knight's flesh wasn't truly alive; just a very intriguing facsimile.

  The gouge exposed the knight's cockpit, as well as the swiftly rotting corpse inside. A quarter of his torso was missing, and his permanent expression was tight and angry. Thin wires were plugged into his shaved head, surrounded by flecks of dried blood, and they connected him directly to the machine.

  The smell was cruel.

  Amira reached in and retrieved his sidearm. Nothing else of value remained in one piece.

  She made a mental note to pack survival gear in the future. She never thought she'd lose her armor in the field, and it was a stupid, prideful oversight.

  She rolled onto her back, slid back down the surface of the knight, and landed a little too hard on her broken leg. The grunt she let out wasn't sufficient to the task, but she pushed the hurt aside as it howled and throbbed, until it gradually began to fade. She hoped that the pain's quick retreat meant she hadn't made the situation any worse.

  Amira pulled her goggles back over her eyes and dialed into the sensor net. Soft lights pulsed in the distance, dispersed evenly across the landscape. Charts and graphs appeared to the side, summarizing information about the targets' weight, heat, speed.

  Some were scouts or walkers, others were heavy armor or large trundling Yuon Kwon artillery. Many of them were troop transports.

  Amira felt her heart skip a beat. She filtered out the other targets and left only the troop transports and their escorts visible. They were furious herds stampeding across the jungle, and she just needed to find the one straggler, the sick buffalo that had wandered off from the safety of the group.

  Her eyes lit up when she saw it.

  "Any of you ever hijack a bus?"

  She was greeted with silence, or a live combat zone's nearest approximation.

  "Luck had to run out sometime," she said in a cynical tone. She looked down at the pistol in her hand, and while the technology wasn't immediately obvious, the interface was suitably familiar. She was confident it'd put a hole in a person, but people were the least of her worries.

  "Alright, here's our target, team. Tamsin... I, uh... I need you to carry me."

  The last part struck Amira as impressively high-speed karma, but she tried not to think too hard about it.

  Without a pause, Tamsin stepped forward and scooped Amira up in her arms, and the armor was so strong that Amira felt like a child for a moment. It might have been comforting in any other situation.

  "Let's move out," she said. "Thrusters are emergency use only."

  The team t
ook off running at fifty KPH, weaving in and around the dense cover on silently nimble feet. It wasn't often that Amira got the chance to just watch her creations in action, but the joy was quickly replaced with a critical eye. She watched Adisa Ajayi running in his armor ahead of her, saw the subtle way his feet slid in the soil, the control surfaces that flapped into position just a little late.

  She was filing an unusual number of mental notes this trip, but it was better than the alternative. It was better than thinking about her impending death, or the conversations she'd have with Banks and Bukovsky's families in the unlikely event she survived.

  Better still would have been thinking up ways to get out of this hell-hole, but she doubted thinking harder was likely to provide any new insights.

  They approached the isolated transport and Amira tapped the side of her headset. The goggles showed her a simulated overhead view of the area, marking out areas of interest and the transport's expected route. There wasn't much to work with.

  She placed waypoints at three locations: one was a stand of trees on a small ridge, another a dry creek, and the last a moving point fifty meters behind their prey. She assigned roles through her interface, and without a word, the team angled off toward their new objectives.

  The system was coldly efficient, and it was precisely why she sought out former video gamers for her team. They responded well to stimuli like glowing objective markers and warning lights, and they were already used to taking orders from computers.

  They arrived at the dry creek and Amira was set down. She motioned for Tamsin to turn around, took a demolition charge from the MASPEC's cargo, then sent the other woman off to the next waypoint.

  Amira turned back to the creek and sighed. It was steep. She walked to the edge of the ravine, shrugged and tried to slide down the side as smoothly as she could, but it turned out not to be very smooth at all. Instead, she fell and rolled down the incline, kicking up a hazy brown cloud behind her.

  The contact-suit protected her from scrapes, but it couldn't do as much for her leg, which got knocked, batted, rammed, and stretched out of position as she fell. As she came to a halt in the dirt, her whole body was committed to screaming, but she kept it inside. She bit her lower lip and punched the ground, but she wouldn't scream.