Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  And she’d be damned if she’d give him the satisfaction. She stood and turned to the door. The door slid open before she could have gotten in range of the sensor. He’d triggered it to help shoo her along her way. The desire to pound against him finally found expression when she turned and raised her middle finger to him.

  He laughed above the clamor of rending steel and gunfire of the Prison Gladiators playoffs. “Smartest thing you’ve said all day.” And then she was wholly gone from his attention.

  She folded her finger back into her fist, and strode out into the blessedly empty corridor. Once clear of the door and a dozen paces along the hall, the throbbing of his tri-dee finally faded, and Ri collapsed against a wall. Someone bustled by, but didn’t stop to check on her. She hated being weak in front of people who were probably all Merkar’s minions, but they hustled on as if she were invisible. How many people collapsed after meetings with the Chief of Fabrication? Was she but the latest in a long line of victims?

  What she really needed was sleep. No one, except perhaps Chief bloody Merkar who apparently never got off his ass in that sterile office, had slept in the six weeks since The End, as it had been dubbed despite Captain Conrad’s insistence on calling it anything else. The scramble from emergency to emergency as they struggled to keep the ship functioning had worn at them all. Twice they’d been within six hours of the death of all aboard. And when they’d managed to avert each crisis, there were no cheers, no celebration, just a weary acknowledgement and moving on to the next disaster.

  One more stop. She could find the energy for one more stop. If she did, it would be the first time she’d completed all of her rounds in a single day. Ri pushed off the wall and turned to anti-spinward, but there was no way she was going to go past Merkar’s office again, no matter how tired she was. Staggering spinward until she reached a dropshaft, she stepped on a passing footpad and held onto the guideline.

  She dropped down through the layers of Ring Four in the smooth, well-lit shaft. The Coriolis twist, as she descended from a half gravity to eight-tenths gee induced by the spinning ring, wrenched at her gut as always. She’d never liked heights and even worse was the tumbling feel of the lifts. She clung tightly to the dropshaft guide and clenched her jaw until the ride from the fourth level nearest the core down to L1 was complete and nearly collapsed as she stepped out into the corridor.

  The L1 corridor was quiet and empty. A small repair team, toolbelts swinging from their hips hustled by in a blur of brown shipsuits with barely a nod. They were gone as fast as they’d appeared and all was empty again.

  Ring Four Level 1 was about as far as you could get from Command back in R1. Beyond the lack of people, it looked quite different. Ri knew the corridor was the same fifteen meters high and twenty wide as the other rings. But without all of the finish work, the nice planters and artificial parks, it felt industrial. Nothing green grew here. The shop fronts were just that, empty fronts with unfilled spaces behind. A noodle shop filled one space and down the corridor someone had set up a makeshift bar in a wide spot in the corridor that would one day have been a park, but now looked dirty and abandoned.

  Her feet echoed in the unfinished space as she trudged anti-spinward toward the last biome. She’d been avoiding the Arctic habitat for over a week. Carla was so sad. They’d become good friends in the frigid dark of the Arctic’s wintery night, but so much of the habitat had still been left down on the Earth’s surface that it had never achieved sufficient biodiversity to stabilize. Now Carla fought a losing battle to save an incomplete ecosystem.

  Even then too many problems remained. The genetically miniaturized polar bears didn’t have enough fat for insulation and had to lie beneath heaters for hours after each swim. Also, while genetics could make the bears smaller, science couldn’t make the ice float lower in the water. The bears couldn’t climb out of the water without assistance. Their food sources were the least well-stocked animals before The End.

  When she could, Ri would join Carla for stolen minutes to watch the slow sunset of her brief winter day. They were both inured to the cold, she from struggling for survival among the street gangs of a destroyed Japan, Carla from her years of Arctic field work. It had become a common bond, and while Ri still couldn’t talk of her past, they’d become friends. Silence was a comfort between them. Conversation rarely followed ship news, but rather chased lazily down the trails of science and biology. But with the creeping death of her habitat, Carla had closed down more and more until she was as quiet as her frozen world.

  Ri squared her shoulders. A week was too long. No matter how busy she was, she should not have avoided her only friend. The corridor jogged to the side as the massive biome space filled the width of the ring. A narrow access corridor ran along the side of the biome at the outer edge of the ring. Halfway along the biome, the heavy airlock squatted in wait.

  She laid a thumb on the pad. And nothing happened. She had to double-thumb to open the security door. This door had never been locked down before. While the outer door closed and the lock cycled, Ri pulled on heavy boots and a parka. With her diminutive frame, these covered her almost as well as the bulky coldsuits.

  It was full night when she stepped through the inner door. The stars glittered in the clear, Arctic night. Her breath puffed out in little clouds. The starlight lit the space better and better as her eyes adapted to the dark. To her right, the thirty-megaliter ocean twinkled as the waves crashed onto the beach and dragged back with a soft, gravel-rattling susurration.

  The crisp cold hurt her lungs, yet tasted so clean. Ri threw back her hood and inhaled deeply. The air here didn’t feel as if it had been rebreathed by ten thousand people. Even though she knew it was the same ventilation system, the chill Arctic had washed it clean of the ship’s smells. The air would taste harsh and thick for hours after she returned to the corridors.

  Ri clicked on the flash she’d grabbed on her way in. The dim red filter didn’t completely ruin her night vision, but it did make the biome look as if it were bleeding. Picking her way among the rocks and ice of the shoreline, she worked her way toward the center of the biome. Perhaps Carla was asleep, or back in the lab at the rear of the landward side of the biome. But if she were in the biome, she’d most likely be up on the central promontory of rock that overlooked the ocean.

  Carla had designed a long sloping shelf of rock that reached out into the ocean and rose to a height of several meters. Humans could scale its heights from the landward side and the polar bears had climbed up where it reached down into the water.

  Now there was little life in the Arctic biome beyond a few lichens. The miniature seals had died, the genetically-engineered elk, the birds, and plants had never arrived. Even the fish in the ocean were eaten by the sickly bears or had died.

  Ri aimed her flash at the top of the outcropping. It bathed the rock in a red light designed to not destroy any adaptive night vision. The rocky height was covered in frost, glittering like frozen blood in her light. For the first time, ice had built up along the top of the rock.

  But it wasn’t ice. Ri launched herself up the slope.

  She knelt beside Carla. Her friend lay naked upon the face of the rock, her pale skin coated in the white frost of her last breaths. Her long, Nordic-blond hair spread white across the frozen surface. As pale as the fur of the last miniature polar bear, barely as large as her torso, who lay dead beside her. Ri lay her ear to Carla’s breast, hoping against reason for a single heartbeat. A single sign of life. Her own black hair spread over Carla’s icy skin, the night and day. Nothing. Ri wrenched at Carla’s hand, but it remained locked deep in the dead animal’s fur. Clenched and frozen.

  She had to get her free. Get her to safety. Save her. The nearest comm was back in the airlock. She tore open her parka and tried to heat Carla’s frozen form with her own heat. Another friend must not die on her watch. It couldn’t happen. She wouldn’t let it happen. She would be the
one to die. She should be the one to die.

  Too many had fallen before: mother, leader, hunter, cadre, and savior. All dead because of her. Each tortured soul whirled about her dark of the Arctic Night. Each crystal shard of her heart froze harder as she chafed Carla’s arms and legs seeking some form, any form of life.

  “Tinai!” Her scream echoed off the Arctic sky. Her leader dead beneath Ri’s blade, her head rolling free of her body, freeing her from the years of torture she’d suffered on Ri’s behalf.

  The cold tore at her throat as she cried once more against the merciless stars.

  # # #

  Hands held her, supported her, covered her. Conscious of little more than the aching pain in every frozen joint, Ri struggled feebly against those who guided her. At last she was allowed to collapse on a bench in a corridor so brightly lit that her eyes screamed as loudly as the throbbing in each knuckle. Cold. She’d never been so cold, not even on the long, lonely watches in the streets of Nara, awaiting unwary prey in the winter’s cold of those ruined city streets.

  Shivers wracked her body as she lay against the wall. People passed by, little more than blurred shadows in the brightness. So cold she couldn’t control the flailing of her limbs at first. Cold that penetrated. Cold that—

  “Carla!” She forced herself upright only to be restrained by strong hands.

  “She’s gone. They’ve already taken her away.” Ri should know that voice, knew the voice, but could only stare at the vast airlock before her. The one that had not kept her friend safe. The one she should have passed through days ago. Then she might have saved her, given her hope rather than avoiding confrontation with her sadness.

  Ri shrugged free of the hands and turned to face the speaker. Captain Devra Conrad sat beside her. Her face lined with age that hadn’t shown six weeks before when the stars will still ahead of them. They’d been aged by the trials of survival, by death. Carla also had been aged to death, a whole span of life lived in just those weeks. She had been the hope and joy and laughter that had begun to crack Ri’s hard exterior shell she’d developed surviving the street gangs and the hunters in the rubble of Japan’s last city.

  The shell cemented by the bitterness of her final parting from the Angel-lady who had made Ri the sole survivor of the entire Japanese race.

  “Is everyone out?” She managed little more than a whisper from her strained throat.

  The Captain nodded.

  Opening her heart had been a mistake. Knees screamed in protest and sharp needles of pain scraped at every joint as she staggered away from the aging face of the Captain. Ri crashed a shoulder into the wall next to the airlock commpad and thumbed in with both hands.

  “This is Chief Security Officer Ri Jeffers,” another death wrapped in her last name. She’d never made her peace with the Angel-lady. Suz Jeffers, who’d given her a second chance at life, now resided forever upon a scorched Earth.

  “Full security lockdown. No one enters. This entire biome is sealed. All entries.”

  Ri had to leave the past behind sometime. She lay back against the wall, exhausted by the effort, by the day, by the struggle to survive.

  The Captain had not risen. Her immaculate shipsuit was now wrinkled and stained. Smears of lichen, dead brown in the corridors, stretched down her legs and arms. The Captain had come for her without a parka or other protective gear. Anticipating her question, the Captain spoke softly.

  “You missed your watch, the last place you logged into the system was right here.”

  Ri had just locked the door against the Captain as well. Perhaps not. Devra Conrad and sub-commander Olias probably had override codes, but that hadn’t been Ri’s intent. She wanted no one in her past, including herself. She opened her mouth and snapped it closed. It was too hard to explain. She pushed off the wall and staggered spinward toward the nearest lift.

  # # #

  Ri sounded the ringing gong over the ship-wide address system. The deep rumble and shimmering overtones sliced through the soft conversations of the command center. The room was silent by the time the gong faded into silence.

  Captain Conrad stood by her chair, immaculate once again in her formal spacer’s black uniform. The pips on her shoulder showed her rank, and the emblems of the four planets she’d touched on, each sparkled above her breast. Just below, the various class of craft she’d piloted and commanded. She was far and away the most decorated person still alive.

  Her face was less lined than it had appeared hours before outside the Arctic biome. Her finger-length of gray hair made her appear wise and commanding rather than aging and worn. Her short stature did nothing to diminish the power of the Captain standing at the command chair of Stellar One. At her nod, Ri opened the pickup at her station.

  “This is Captain Devra Conrad, commanding. I greet the entire crew of Stellar One on this last day of 2092. I also greet the eight members of the Icarus Two crew who are still enroute to us from their solar observation station. It has been six weeks since we were marooned together on this desert island. For six weeks we have struggled together. For six weeks we have sought life and we have won. It is thanks to you and your efforts that we achieved so much with so little loss.”

  Ri scanned the room. Three hundred and six had died since Engineer Johns took that first fatal blast of radiation while seating a new communications dish on Ring Five, totally exposed.

  No. Carla. Three hundred and seven. She closed her eyes and struggled for composure. Just an hour ago, she had attended the Captain’s final service for Carla before she was sent into the reclaimers. Her nutrients and water would be spread through the ship within days.

  Ri forced her eyes open and her back straight. Carla may have given up, but by god she’d be the last person to die if Ri had anything to say about it. There’d been far too much death in her life. She was done with it. Her eyes lit on the woman at atmosphere control. Ri couldn’t even remember her name.

  Henri Mercer should be there, but he’d walked out an airlock the prior week. As the man in charge of their breathing air and drinking water the pressure had been on him like no other. Many felt it had been too much for him. But as the biome leader, she’d worked closely with him. The man had hope and drive. Ri held the minority opinion that he was simply so tired that he’d walked out the airlock by accident, too exhausted to recall that he wasn’t wearing an environment suit until it was too late.

  “We feel this loss like an ache in our souls.” Captain Conrad’s words jerked her back to the moment.

  “Yet look what we have achieved. Our habitat is stable and safe. Our supply of food and energy is at last secure. That is your achievement. That is something to be proud of. I, for one, am immensely proud to be serving with such fine people. Without you, I too would now be gone as are our sisters and brethren on Earth.”

  The Captain nodded to her. She told Ri to be prepared, but she hadn’t said for what. Temporary assignment of a staff of twenty to augment her tiny security team. Ri had debated different options and finally scattered them through the ship as observers. Her seat creaked loudly as she settled in and opened the pickups throughout the rings. The silence in the room took on a depth as the sounds of ten thousand held breaths filled the room.

  “Earth. It has been a topic of much debate.”

  A soft murmur agreed from the pickups.

  “All efforts to communicate with possible survivors have proved unsuccessful. Thus far I have not yielded to the pressure to launch a probe. We have very few resources and once they are gone, they cannot be replaced. I have decided, now that our safety is secure, we must also solve this dilemma once and for all so that we may move on.”

  Another nod, this time to Olias. He slid in beside her and activated a data queue. Odd that he should have piloted the probe rather than Rajesh. The pilot, with little to do on a spaceship without engines, would have been the natural choice. But he had al
so been the most vocal of the command crew in favor of finding a way of returning to Earth and abandoning Stellar One.

  Olias didn’t glance at her, not even one of his over-the-shoulder glares. So the news was bad. This shouldn’t surprise her, yet she could feel the weight of it land upon her.

  The main viewer flashed white. And resolved into the cloud-shrouded Earth. As the probe descended, the viewer filled with a wash of orange glow. The atmosphere once again heated into incandescent heat with the probe’s descent.

  “This mission was flown nearly two weeks ago. I have chosen to withhold these images until we were sure of our own survival. But before we look to our future, we must come to terms with our past.”

  As if on cue, the flame subsided and the probe slide into a gliding dive. But the readout showed only five thousand meters, barely half the height of Mount Everest. Other murmurs both in the command center and over the open pickups showed that others caught the meaning. The clouds were still far below. There was less atmosphere than there should be. The outer layers had been ripped away by the solar storm.

  Ri gripped the edge of her console and gritted her teeth as the probe fell. It hit the clouds and she gasped against the impact. The display jerked wildly from side-to-side as thermals buffeted the craft. At last it broke free of the cloud layer at a thousand meters with a gut-wrenching twist. A wide vista of white was spread before them. The twisted wreckage of a city lay spread across the screen.

  A caption flashed on. “Paris. Temp: -40°C. Wind: 240kph. O2: <1%.”

  That was it. All that mattered. No oxygen, no life as they knew it. Some deep sea sulfur-based ecosystems might yet exist. Perhaps the oceans still held life. But that question was answered as the probe skittered out over the Atlantic. Icebergs cluttered the ocean. Between the ice blocks as large as cities, the water had the impossible bright blue of a child’s spilled paint set. She’d seen it before. Carla had shown Ri the difference between dark, tropical water teeming with life and the crystalline blue of the Antarctic lakes that held little more than the occasional bacteria. This color made the pre-disaster polar regions look lush. Nothing that needed oxygen was left.