Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  “Entering Earthshadow.”

  He hadn’t been paying attention. Now the Earth would be between the flare and Stellar One for the next, he checked the orbital data, twenty-eight minutes. If the flare was still passing when they came out the far side of the orbit, their life expectancy would drop dramatically.

  The center of the flare was going to hit square on the Atlantic Basin. The exact epicenter was…Bermuda.

  He barked out a single laugh.

  Everyone in the room spun to stare at him. He clamped his mouth shut. It was a joke no one else would appreciate. One by one they turned back to watch the unfolding drama.

  Bermuda. The seat of the world government, the home of the Premier. The palace of his parent. Of course the joke was that not even the entire focused malevolence of the Sun could touch him. Something as trivial as radiation wouldn’t dare to hurt the old bastard. Upper case. Old Bastard. Yup! That was more than appropriate. Big letters. Huge. Old Bastard!

  Another alarm pierced the station.

  Imminent collision!

  Every spacer in the room instinctively jumped to their feet and took a step forward, himself included, with nowhere to go. The light over the hatchway changed from the pulsing of Collision Warning to solid, steady, you’re-about-to-die-sucker red. They were in full lockdown. Nowhere was right here for the duration.

  Bryce kept clenching his fists. His hands were desperate for a console. For steering jets. To manually overcrank the flow gates into the engines. To get the hell away. But there was nothing to do. Nothing to grab. Nothing to prepare for, despite his body’s trained insistence on immediate action. All they could do was cover their ears and wait as the collision alarm rang out its obligatory thirty seconds. No one returned to their seats. For better or worse they were all stuck with each other until the crisis was past.

  He scanned the room. He’d been trapped with worse, no panicky civilians to coddle so they’d pay the remainder of their fare after touchdown. Hardened spacers, almost every one, and the rest were at least space-trained.

  The officer with the chill voice counted down the last thirty seconds to arrival aloud, as if it made any difference with an impact of thirty-billion billion tons of molten stellar material. People were grabbing their chairs for support. The cute brunettes clung to each other, maybe he should have tried chatting them up together instead of separately at the party last night. It was almost amusing when he noticed his own desperate clinging to his bit of wall. Even he wanted to survive. Surprising really, he’d have thought that instinct long since gone missing in him.

  “Three. Two.”

  He’d have to think about that.

  “One.”

  If he lived.

  “Contact.”

  Nothing.

  No sound.

  No thud of impact.

  No high whistle of escaping air. No whoosh of imminent death by vacuum.

  On screen, a sparkle formed along the horizon of the Earth. Small at first, just a brightness like an Aurora Borealis. Well, if that’s all it was going to be after all this buildup…

  It grew brighter. Grew until he could see the computer shuttering down the image, but it wasn’t going fast enough. In moments the entire wall was a wash of glare that had him shielding his eyes.

  When he dared peek again, the computer’s compensators had kicked in, or the vidwall had partially burned out. The horizon was a sheet of light ripping out into space in a big hurry.

  Someone was still working upstairs. Cameras bobbed and switched about in a vertigo-inducing array. In moments one locked onto African Solar Power’s platform, another onto the Shelxxon asteroid refinery station. A third pinpointed a tiny comm satellite in low Earth orbit. The last didn’t make any sense until he studied the orbital data. It was the closest object to Stellar One. It would slip out of Earthshadow just twenty-three seconds ahead of them. Not much of a warning for impending doom.

  Shelxxon slid past the horizon first. For a moment, it iridesced with reflected sunlight, sparkling brighter than the full moon on a perfect night. The next it just disappeared, wrenched spaceward by the flare. The camera zoomed in for a close-up of African Power’s platform. They could actually see the leading edge shatter and vaporize even as a couple of single-person skitters jumped off the back of the station. Too late to reverse orbital speed, they were all gone in a moment.

  One of the card players, a big, broad-shouldered welder, barfed all over the poker game. Not that anyone would be going back to it. A chain reaction followed that had five or six spacers leaning against walls making hideous retching sounds. Bryce swallowed hard and managed to keep it down though the bile burned hot and angry.

  Several had dropped back into their chairs. A couple fell all the way to the deck, having wandered away from their seats. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Interestingly, the brunettes were standing up to it better than some of the toughest-looking plas handlers. For the thousandth time, Bryce wished his brain would relinquish its obsession to observe and catalog and let him cower like so many others, but his parent hadn’t designed him that way.

  The imagers were scanning around for fresh targets. One picked out the full moon. It was no longer a soft yellow. It shone with the brightness of devil’s fire. Armstrong City, Tycho, Neil’s Dome, all gone. Not one of their domes could take this. Million and a half people. Zap.

  He checked the orbits of the outer planets. Mars was in conjunction, right in the path of the expanding cone of the flare.

  Another collision alarm blasted out, making them all duck. The officer’s voice sounded over the comm.

  “Attention, Mars. Attention, Mars. Solar flare will impact…six minutes after you receive this message. Six minutes. This is not a drill. Full collision protocols. Repeat. Not a drill.”

  He gave the ice-queen points for being on the ball. Not that it would do any good. Bryce had always wanted to see the fine, crystalline dome that nestled in the Marineris Canyon, often called the First Wonder of the Red World. Port Lowell’s dome would survive the harshest Martian sandstorm with an excess loading factor of five times for safety. The Sun was about to brush it aside as if it humans had never walked upon the red planet.

  More scanning about. A vicious billowing cloud of orange and brown flowed toward the camera so fast that everyone who could move was scrambling back from the vidwall. The only one who stood his ground was Johnson Merkar.

  The new Fabrication Chief stood his ground until he stood alone before the massive, roiling wall. His head was turned a bit to the side, and from his vantage, Bryce could see that he was wincing. But he was tough, he faced the onrushing demon alone with firmly planted feet.

  The camera pulled back, then another joined in and a third as the computer struggled to integrate and interpret the image.

  Then the screen blanked. Nothing at all on the wall. No orbits. No reports. No data.

  He willed it back on. Willed it with all his might. Reached deeper than he did for anything else, except his mental self-defense against his parent. He’s long since learned those deep leveles weren’t safe to go to, no matter how bad the crisis.

  The screen flashed back on and there was a unified gasp of relief from the lounge’s occupants that echoed his own.

  Then the silence returned. There was no data. No pretty necklace of orbits about a shining planet. Nothing. Just a single, well-integrated, three-dimensionally perfect image filling the wall from deck to ceiling.

  For a moment it looked like the Sun. A giant ball of fire. But then the brown of smoke clouds streamed over the brilliant oranges and red-golds.

  Fire!

  Earth was burning. The gravitational effect of the Earth had bent a portion of the flare into a ground-hugging, scorching orbit. For an instant, the conflagration tore apart. A group of islands he didn’t recognize were lit brighter than daylight from above by the b
urning planet, then they were gone as the fire and smoke washed over the dark side of the Earth.

  Gone. Everyone on Earth. Gone.

  Cappy was—

  A man screamed and bolted for the hatch to the corridor. He ricocheted off Bryce, smashing him back against the wall. He scrabbled at the hatch as if with sheer will and bare fingers he could tear open a decimeter of plas.

  His screaming echoed about the lounge. No one approached him as his fruitless digging turned into a steady pounding of fists soon split open and bloody with the force of his blows.

  Someone moved. A blur of red brushed past Bryce. Johnson Merkar grabbed the man by the front of his suit and lifted his feet clear of the ground. Merkar backhanded him sharply.

  The cries rose an octave.

  Another backhand had no better effect though it snapped the man’s head cruelly to the other side.

  Merkar hauled back and punched his face so hard that Bryce could hear bones crumble and shatter.

  The scream stopped.

  Merkar tossed the man headfirst into the closed hatch. Hard.

  He hit with a dull, hollow thud then slid to the ground, leaving a bloody trail on the door. The fabrication boss moved back to his place in front of the vidwall, once more planting his feet and crossing his arms over his chest.

  The screamer was silent now, except for a last long, slow sigh escaping his slack jaw. His eyes were open as blood dribbled out of his mouth and nose. No one else made a sound.

  “Comm satellite 14-24 departing Earthshadow in thirty seconds, mark.” He wanted to strike out at that passionless voice. Stop it. Somehow, if he could stop that voice, none of this would have happened. He could wake up from another hangover in a different transient quarters. With no alarm blaring. With Cappy and Buzz crashed out in the next bunks over. Melissa and Vicky on the bridge humping away in the astrogation chair.

  While they were watching the fire, space had gone dark. The perfect cylinder of light that had roared past the Earth was gone as if it had never been.

  The little comm satellite slid out of Earthshadow. It sparkled as the sunlight hit it. And continued on its way in a lazy orbit, probably desperately searching for where all its terrestrial signals had gone.

  Again the countdown. Steady. Implacable. Gibberish to his ears.

  Then they saw the Sun again. Unchanged. The brightest star in a field of a million others. No dimmer for its expulsion of such a trifling portion of material, and scorching the face of its most populous planet.

  A round of applause and cheers filled the room. People were hugging, thudding each other on the back. A lot of them were shaking Merkar’s hand, as if by adding infinitesimally to the day’s death count, he had personally averted their own demise.

  The Earth was gone. The moon as well.

  And, oh God if only there was one, Bryce begged the pain around his heart, please help him. Cappy, Melissa, Buzz, and Vicky. They would have been back aboard hours ago if he’d made the flight rather than Melissa. He’d killed his own crew as surely as Merkar had killed the screamer.

  And his mother. Suz Jeffers, the woman who had unknowingly birthed his parent’s clone and raised him as her own. The woman who had loved him despite the discovered truth of his origin: an exact replica of the most vicious dictator history had ever known. Suz had made this place among the stars for him to escape from his parent, but would now never ride to the stars herself.

  Bryce slid down his bit of wall until he landed on the deck.

  A pool of blood spread out before the screamer’s lifeless body.

  And Bryce wanted to laugh rather than cry. Of all the possible people in the solar system that had died, that should have died, that deserved to die a hundred times over, why was he the one who fate had chosen to spare?

  He did begin to laugh, couldn’t stop it. But he did it silently. For only he could understand the cruel thoroughness of the cosmic joke.

  # # #

  It had been there a moment ago. Japan was there a moment ago. Ri’d seen it through the clouds. A little archipelago of islands. Through a tear in the billowing smoke and fire.

  Japan. Home.

  The only one she’d ever understood. Her last view of the Earth’s surface revealed briefly before the fire closed over. Imaging radar presently showed the Korean peninsula. Visual showed nothing but billowing smoke clouds.

  The room was so silent that she wondered if her hearing still worked. Ri tapped a close-chewed fingernail lightly on the blinking red indicator of the hatch lockdown control. She heard the clicking. Her ears still worked.

  A quick glance to the side showed the Captain collapsed in her chair. Her impeccable hair and jumpsuit a sharp contrast to her blankly staring wide eyes. Not far behind her Rajesh Menala wept silently, his tears falling on the silver wings of the ship’s pilot pin clipped to his collar.

  She took a deep breath before glancing sidelong to her left. Olias Sunra, the meanest, toughest, and most dedicated officer she’d met on ship, sat blank-faced as well. His mouth wasn’t hanging open like the Captain’s but he wasn’t seeing what was before him either. She changed the big screen view from radar image to the comm satellite and back.

  No reaction. That scared her almost as much as what they had all just witnessed. Everyone else was at or near their stations. None were in any better shape.

  A quick review of Stellar One’s status showed the four completed rings spinning about the ship’s axis. The fifth, half-finished, hung still against the stars. It wasn’t due to be spun up for another month. No leaks. The initial radiation blast, mainly gamma, had been stopped by the hull. The heavier, slower, more damaging particles had been blocked by the Earth.

  The Earth. The blank orb was mesmerizing. She shut down the main viewer.

  The command crew came back to life slowly.

  Ri accessed the crew rosters. The entire command crew of fourteen was aboard except for one of the seven biome specialists. Marcus James was on a collecting expedition for the Savannah biome down on the plains of Alberta, Western Canadian Union. Had been.

  The seven biome teams were at full complement, another forty-five. Three hundred and six general and specific ship’s support personnel. Eleven thousand, three hundred and fifty-four fabricators, plas workers, and other construction specialists and their support including medical and food-service personnel.

  Total personnel aboard: 11,718.

  “That’s all?” Captain Conrad’s voice was barely a croak.

  The radio crackled loudly and everyone jumped.

  “Mission Control. Mission Control. This is Icarus One. Can anyone hear us? What’s going on out there?”

  The Sun had calmed down, there was no interference. The message was as clear as if they were standing in the same room, and not six minutes and a hundred million kilometers away.

  What was she supposed to tell them? “Hi, bad news. The planet you left three months ago no longer exists?” There had to be something. They’d be waiting to hear Mission Control’s response six minutes from now. What could she tell them? They were the last ship in the solar system able to maneuver itself.

  Captain Conrad leaned forward and spoke quietly.

  “This is Stellar One. Return to Earth orbit with maximum conservation of fuel. Further information to follow shortly.” She managed the whole message without her voice cracking, but it sounded close.

  Ri closed the channel at the Captain’s nod and changed the number of personnel— No! —of humanity upward by eight, the complement of the research ship’s crew.

  “Any more?” Devra Conrad spoke a little more clearly.

  Ri aimed the deep space radar at the moon. She started to program in close-ups of the various Lunar colonies, but stopped as the radar’s readings came back.

  The signal returned a strange double-bounce, two surfaces a half meter apart. A patter
n she’d never observed before, even in training.

  She turned on the first telescope.

  The surface of the moon was no longer a soft yellow-gray of reflected sunlight. It was a glistening mirror of red over gray swirls.

  The moon’s surface had been fused into glass.

  Red glass.

  Chapter 16

  31 December 2092 A.D.

  “And what the hell use are you to me?”

  Ri jerked back in the chair, her cheeks stinging as if she’d actually been slapped.

  Chief Merkar leaned forward across his massive desk. If the chair had allowed, she would have moved away from his threatening bulk and his ice-blue eyes. There was nothing in the room to define the man.

  He’d been here six weeks, apparently never leaving his office, and it held not one single personal item. The bare white walls of his office and expansive white desk left the Chief of Fabrication as the only color in the room.

  His close-cropped hair was almost as light as his eyes. Rather than command-red, he wore a space-orange shipsuit. It strained across his massive frame and declared his power as head of the space-workers who constituted most of Stellar One’s remaining population. Had it not been for that orange, Ri might doubt she’d ever lived in a world with color.

  Merkar’s thin lips twisted into what must pass for his smile. Like a snake about to strike.

  “I mean, Officer Jeffers, I have no damn use for a security officer who barely comes up to my navel. I sure as hell don’t need your protection. I have nine-thousand six-hundred and twenty-four people who report to me on this ship. You have what, six?”

  He anticipated her next comment.

  “Oh yes, you are in charge of your precious biomes, ever since the chief biologist got toasted along with the rest of the Earth. That puts you up to almost twenty. You take care of your little biomes, Officer Jeffers. I’ll take care of my ship.”

  Ri opened her mouth to protest, but she might as well have been on another planet. Merkar flipped on his viewer. She couldn’t see the screen, but the sounds of some old tri-dee about sports blasted out into the room, laying down a carpet of noise that would cover anything below a shout.