Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “Where is my headpiece?” Luc asks. Josiah won’t answer. “Where did you put my helmet? Tell me.”

  Josiah backs away, even though Luc still walks teeteringly.

  “You could help build something new,” Josiah says. “Instead of breaking things, over and over, until you’re broken in turn. You could build something.”

  “That part of me is dead.” Luc is already thinking about alternatives to the headpiece. There are prototypes, which he hid someplace even Josiah doesn’t know about. Flawed designs, but good enough for a night or two, until Josiah comes around. “This is all I have left.”

  The nanofiber-reinforced lower half of his costume still has that bullet-hole, and his leg is so heavily bandaged that the pants barely fit. This could be a problem, especially if the rip widens around the bandages. He could end up with a big white patch on his leg, like a target for every thug to aim at in the darkness. Stain the bandages black? Wrap black tape around them?

  “Luc. Please.” Josiah grabs his arm and shoves the letter, which he’s retrieved and uncrumpled, in Luc’s face. “I helped bury your son. I don’t want to bury you.” He has tears in his eyes, which are also puffy from sleepless nights caring for Luc’s slow-healing wounds. “There’s more than one way to be a hero. You taught me that, before all this.”

  Luc stares at the letter again. Departure date is in just a few weeks, and there are a lot of training sessions and tests before then. Someone must have backed out, or maybe washed out. “If I go,” he growls at Josiah, “I won’t leave you any money. I’ve spent every last penny on my fight.”

  “I know that, sir,” Josiah says, smiling wearily. “Who do you think has been keeping them from taking the house? We’ve restructured your debt five times in the last two years.”

  In the end, Luc says yes, even though every instinct rebels against it. Not because Josiah hid his mask, but because something inside him, his core, is suddenly too exhausted to do anything else. Sleeping for a hundred years sounds perfect. Maybe he’ll wake up having understood something. Maybe he won’t wake up at all—even better.

  After that, Luc’s trapped in the clutches of officialdom. Imprisoned. Every spare minute goes to medical tests—even with the healing mojo, he still has to explain the scars and old broken bones—and briefings on absolutely everything they know about Kepler, which people are calling Newfoundland. The same facts are repeated over and over, like the fact that Newfoundland has 1.27 times Earth gravity and a year that lasts fifteen Earth months. Only one of the seven continents is habitable, the south pole. Blah blah blah. There is a whole three-hour talk on what to do if you wake up early, and five days devoted to how to convert the ship into a survival module on landing—the crew should know, but if the crew are dead, then the colonists may need to know, too. The other colonists in the briefings are cute, fresh-faced. Mostly around Luc’s age, but he feels much, much older.

  And meanwhile, all of Luc’s sources in the underworld suggest that Dark Shard has blown town, and his organization is in disarray.

  At last, the day comes. Two days of fasting, then Luc strips naked and climbs inside the decontamination vat—which sears off a few layers of skin—and then the cryo-module. The technicians close the lid over his face, and he feels the ice threading through his veins and into his muscles and joints.

  Just as the paralysis starts to take hold, he’s dead certain he hears someone say, “Palm Strike.” With a chuckle.

  Palm Strike hears his name and comes to life. But it’s too late. Palm Strike tries to fight the cold tendrils immobilizing his body, to stay awake. He almost sits up in his tiny chamber. He only needs to pull out these tubes. He battles with everything he has, kicking against the top of his coffin. But the clammy grip pulls him under, into an ocean with no surface.

  4.

  Falling for years, drowning in slow motion, Luc sees Rene’s corpse over and over. The bullet hole in his side, the tell-tale dilated pupils, the broken capillaries in his face. Mouth frozen open in a last abortive yell. They made him identify the body.

  He only met Dark Shard once—and it was as Luc, not as Palm Strike. Palm Strike didn’t even exist yet. A few nights after he buried Rene, there was a shape in his window. A shadowy form, wearing a cloak over a chestplate, with a mask that appeared to be constantly exploding outward with black crystal pieces.

  Luc heard something and sat up in bed. The light wouldn’t turn on.

  “I came to convey my regrets,” Dark Shard said in a voice like the grinding of broken glass. His hands were obsidian fragments, flexing. “Your son was not meant to die. It was an unfortunate mistake. The responsible individual has been disciplined.”

  “What . . .” Luc stammered. Naked except for filthy boxer shorts. Half drunk since the funeral. He couldn’t remember, later, what he said to Dark Shard, but none of it had any dignity. He may have begged for death. He was sure he cried and tore his own sheets. He tried, over and over, to imagine that meeting if he’d been Palm Strike.

  “Your son was not meant to die,” Dark Shard said again. “We do not waste lives in such a fashion. We would have taken him for ransom, held him in our Pleasuresplinter a day or two, but he would not have been molested in any way. He might have been allowed to sample our dreamflies, which are highly addictive, depending on whether we desired a single ransom payment or an ongoing relationship.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Luc still didn’t know the answer to that question, all this time later. If Dark Shard hadn’t shown up to apologize for Rene’s death, he might not have felt such intense hatred. Luc might have remained a regular broken wreck instead of spending the fortune he’d made from his land-reclamation projects becoming Palm Strike.

  The way Dark Shard explained it, they had seized Rene, as a hostage, but then they’d gotten caught in a shootout with a rival group, the Street Commanders. Rene had taken a bullet to the gut, and he was bleeding out. So one of the Shardlings, a man named Jobbo, had cradled Rene in his arms and given him something for the pain.

  Rene might have survived if Jobbo hadn’t given him the drugs. The dreamflies thinned his blood and prevented coagulation, so he bled out faster. Plus Rene’s final moments were spent under the effects of a dissociative drug that made him feel lost to the world and slowed everything to a hideous crawl. He died not knowing who he was, or who loved him.

  Luc has imagined Rene’s death a million times since Dark Shard described it to him. But in this frozen sensory deprivation tank, he’s living it. Rene’s eyes, like empty wells—the image keeps tormenting Luc. The harder he tries to swim, the deeper he sinks.

  5.

  When the frozen waves recede and light invades, Luc cries out from deep in his strangulated throat. He’s sure he can’t face reality again, after the endless nightmare. But the light is remorseless, and the cold abandons him. He can move his arms again. At last, the lid of the cryo-module opens, and he’s looking up at a young round face. A girl. Twelve or thirteen. Red hair, in braids.

  “I did it,” she says. “Hot wow, I can’t believe I did it.”

  “Did what?” Luc tries to sit up, but he’s still too weak. She raises a sippy-cup of something hot and bitter, and pours it down his throat.

  “I finally got this thing working. It’s been my project, for years.”

  “Years?” Luc blinks. Something is wrong. He can see the chamber behind the girl’s head, and it looks old, broken. The gray serrated walls are bare except for some torn fibers and rough edges, as though every last bit of technology was stripped away long ago.

  “Oh, sorry. Yeah.” She leans over further, so she can make eye contact. Her eyes are hazel. “Better start at the beginning. The Endeavour landed, like twenty years ago. Your module was busted, the wake-up sequence failed. There was no way to revive you without killing you. But I’ve been tinkering, every spare moment.”

  “Everybody needs a hobby,” Luc grunts.

  “Take it slow, okay?” The girl puts a threadbare blanket o
ver him. “There was a lot of stuff here, originally. Procedures and things. You were supposed to watch some video that explained that a hundred and three years have passed on Earth and everyone you knew is dead. Plus any last messages from your loved ones back home. And there was an acclimation chamber to help you adjust to the air and gravity. But that stuff is all gone. Sorry, guy.”

  “What’s your name?” This time Luc does manage to sit up.

  “I’m Sasha Jacobs. Anyway, you should be glad. We almost ate you. More than once. The whole colony’s starving. Nothing grows here any more—the soil just kills all our crops. You were supposed to be some kind of big-time agriculture expert, right? I figured maybe you could help.”

  “Geo-engineer.” Luc shrugs. He’s naked under the blanket. He glares at Sasha until she hands him some pants. “But that was another life, a long time ago. These days, my main skill-set involves finding bad people and making them pay. Someone sabotaged my casket. And whoever it was, they’re going to learn my rule.”

  He tugs the itchy red pants on under the blanket and lifts himself up out of the cryo-module, only to collapse in a heap at Sasha’s rawhide-covered feet when his legs won’t support his weight. He twitches and grips his own knees, dry-heaving.

  “You might not want to rush into anything,” Sasha says.

  6.

  Luc and Sasha emerge, not from a spaceship or a survival module, but from a crude hut covered with some kind of rubbery wood, attached in overlapping wedge-shaped slats. There’s no sign of any source of that wood, though—the surrounding area is barren and the ground has a crumbly furrowed consistency, like the surface of a brain made of pale clay. Luc sees no other buildings or signs of civilization, which makes him wonder if they really did hide his cryo-module to save him from being eaten, after all.

  The sun is too bright and pale—reminding Luc of the time he experimented with night-vision lenses and someone shone a floodlight in his eyes. In the blanched daylight, Sasha looks a little older. She’s a rangy girl, with arms too long for her torso and a shiny blue dress that might be made out of the upholstery fabric from one of the ship’s escape pods. Her face has freckles and a thin nose that appears to twitch constantly, perhaps in amusement or maybe because he smells bad.

  “The air is higher in nitrogen than you’re used to, and the gravity—”

  Luc cuts her off. “I remember the briefings. Where’s the colony?”

  “Down the hill, a kilometer and a half away.” Sasha gestures. “Everyone is going to want to meet you, if you’re up for it.”

  “I’m up for it.” The sooner Luc meets the pool of suspects, which is everyone who was an adult when the ship left Earth, the sooner he can start narrowing it down.

  Sasha leads Luc along an unsteady slope covered with loose rocks that jab at his bare feet, and he stumbles repeatedly as the gravity catches him off guard. She keeps talking about the planet, how the other six continents have temperatures too extreme for humans to survive most of the time, but contain massive jungles full of megafauna, including nine-limbed mammoths that swing through a canopy of carnivorous fronds. She wants to visit someday.

  They walk maybe three quarters of a kilometer before they reach the first buildings, which are laid out in a pinwheel pattern around the center of the colony, set in a kind of valley. Most of the buildings are made of that same spongy wood, which looks like pumice, only softer. Pipes come out of the houses and disappear into the ground. Wires snake along their rooftops, connecting to junctions on poles.

  And then the ground levels out, the buildings grow denser, and the stench clouds Luc’s eyes just as the sights become unbearable. The crumbling shacks, made of a mixture of prefab construction materials from the ship, plus spongy wood, weak drywall and local rocks. The river clogged with effluent, running through the middle of Hopetown. The lashed-together pieces of failing technology. And above it all, the rank odor of wounds and sores that won’t heal properly due to the malnutrition. Luc saw a lot of nightmares, when he was helping to turn Benin into the world’s last breadbasket and visiting the Arkansas refugee camps. But here, no relief workers are coming. He passes a group of teenagers playing listlessly in the street, with arms like twigs and swollen torsos. Older people slump against the unstable walls.

  But there’s something else, too—some of the people standing around that ugly modern-art sculpture made of cannibalized spaceship parts at the center of it all have a vacant look in their bloodshot eyes that he knows at a glance. And festering trackmarks on their arms. Luc files that away, for now.

  The Survival Module—all that’s left of the Endeavour—is at the other end of Hopetown from where Luc and Sandy came in, along the filthy river and to the right. The dinged-up white structure, the size of the Opera House back home, has been dressed up as a town hall, with a podium and sound system out front, plus someone has painted a decorative gold leaf motif around the entrance using some local plant sludge. Sasha waves hi at the people sitting at desks inside the building, then runs off to tell her mother her amazing news.

  “Oh, my lord,” says a middle-aged lady, maybe around fifty, sitting in a repurposed cockpit chair at the rear of the Survival Module, behind a big desk covered with data tablets. “Sasha actually did it. Mr. Deveaux, you don’t know any of us, but you’re famous around these parts: the agriculture expert who didn’t wake up.”

  “Tell me what went wrong,” Luc says.

  7.

  Here’s the secret that almost nobody ever guessed about Palm Strike: he was a brawler. The name “Palm Strike” was an intentional misdirect, to make people believe he was some kind of martial-arts wizard and then catch them off guard with his total lack of skill. People tended to overestimate him, and then underestimate him. He’d had months, not years, of training, but he mostly relied on the healing mojo and the enhanced strength. His detective skills, too, mostly involved punching people and asking questions.

  So Luc sits there, for hours, and listens to the colony’s leaders talk about their incredibly meticulous terraforming process and all the things they did before and after planetfall to prepare the soil for farming. The tests that revealed nothing wrong, and the excellent early harvests. Inside, he’s still raging and traumatized by his endless cryo-nightmares, but he maintains a totally blank expression. Luc has to believe that whoever sabotaged his cryo-unit also made the voyage here—maybe even Dark Shard himself—and at some point Luc will have someone to hit. And that person will already know that Luc is Palm Strike, and will therefore fear him. He studies each of these people, looking for the signs of that fear. He’s a lousy detective, but he knows all about fear.

  “We brought bioengineered microbes from Earth that were supposed to neutralize any toxins in the soil and correct the pH balance,” one burly man named Ron McGregor is saying, “but most of them died in flight, due to cosmic radiation exposure in that section of the ship.” McGregor’s the right age and almost the right build, but he’s a fussy bureaucrat whose biggest worry is that Luc will make him look incompetent. He’s neither afraid of Luc nor happy to see him.

  They’re in a conference room behind the town hall, which turns out to be the ship’s flight deck with all of the equipment and panels removed and a big table made out of some kind of polished slate, surrounded by a dozen chairs. Luc begins to feel weary after just a couple hours of this briefing. The gravity takes its toll, as do the aftereffects of years of deathly cold and cryo-nightmares. But he wants to look all these people over while they’re still surprised by his return from the dead.

  Luc keeps drinking the hot brew, made from some kind of noxious weed that they also use for clothing, and it keeps him awake.

  “We tested the soil and it was perfect.” The governor, or president, of Newfoundland, is that woman from the town hall, Rebecca Hoffman. Attractive for her age, which is roughly the age Luc would be if he’d woken on time. Hair in a messy gray bob, blouse made of some local algae. “Five or six years of decent harvests. And then the crop
s just . . . stopped growing.”

  Ron McGregor keeps interrupting himself and nodding at his own points. He talks about the heavy terraforming engine that cleared the local vegetation, removed the biggest obstructions, and wiped out the local pests—these horrible bugs got everywhere and into everything, at first.

  Happiest to see Luc is probably Bertram Cargill, an old man who has hair coming out of his ears that matches his fuzzy vest. And open sores on his knuckles and wrists. Cargill took over as the water and soil expert when Luc didn’t wake up, and he found the river that provided irrigation and drinking water, one tributary of which is now a sewer running through Hopetown. Plus the geyser and hot springs that supply heat and geothermal power to their dwellings.

  “Geyser,” Luc says at last. “That explains the brain-like furrow pattern I noticed on the ground when I arrived. Soil near a geyser is often highly acidic. Plus those hot springs probably have bacteria living in them, kilometers under the surface, and they could be producing toxins we’ve never even encountered before.”

  Everybody pauses—even McGregor—waiting for Luc to finish his thought. “The mystery here isn’t why the soil stopped being fertile,” he says. “It’s why it ever was.”

  Luc catches up with Sasha, who’s hanging around the edge of town, basking in her heroism. Everybody in the world has been patting her on the back, and she’s got a crowd of other kids standing around listening to her triumphant narrative of how she cobbled together a new wake-up circuit out of spit and dead branches. The kids are all Sasha’s age, give or take—chances are, nobody’s wanted to have children in this colony, since the food started running out.

  “Hey,” she says. “How did it go? Want to meet my mom? She’s dying to meet you.”

  They walk toward the edge of Hopetown, the opposite direction from the hut where Luc woke up. He’s going to need some shoes, or better yet boots. Along the way, he sees plenty more emaciated people shuffling like the living dead, with tiny punctures in their arms. Even amongst the starving people with hair like dead grass and skin like bedsores, the addicts stand out.