But The Stars

by Peter Cawdron

  “You could die,” he says, and Dante has no doubts his comment is based on the most likely outcome as calculated by his AI companion.

  “I know.”

  “You’ve got five minutes. Then we breach.”

  He gestures with his head, signaling for them to advance down the corridor. As Dante steps forward, though, a soldier slips something down the back of her neck, hidden by the collar of her jumpsuit. Whatever it is, the device clings to her skin. Tiny metal barbs dig into her neck. She can feel the device positioning itself over her spine. This has to be the result of some non-verbal order given by Coe-Voy. She could protest. She could ask about its function, but there’s no time. Mags gives the soldier touching her a filthy look but continues on with Dante.

  “Mac?” Dante asks, keeping her hands raised and in sight.

  “Hey, buddy,” Mags calls out. “It’s me. Mags. I’m here with Dee. We’re coming down to talk, okay?”

  Blood has been smeared on the wall by someone escaping with an injury. Mags shakes her head. Not good.

  “Mac. It’s Dante. Remember me? Remember the Acheron? We’re here for you. We’re coming into engineering, okay?”

  Quietly, they step over the lip of the hatch leading into the equipment bay.

  “Mac, are you there?”

  From the darkness, Mac calls out. “Get out of here, Dee. You don’t want none of this.”

  “Hey, easy big guy,” Mags says, stepping away from Dante, putting some space between them.

  Digital screens line the walls, acting as control panels and displays. Several of them have cracks, falling dark where blasts have punched through the electronics. A bench runs around the room with pieces of equipment laid out in various states of disassembly and repair—wiring looms, an electronic chassis, pistons, solar arrays, hydraulics. They’ve been abandoned in a rush, with several parts having fallen to the floor. Most of the lights on the roof have been shot out. Dante notices a couple of the spiders she saw in the hallway, but they’re conspicuously still, blending in with a variety of sensors and vents on the ceiling. Watching. Waiting.

  A body lies face down on the floor. Blood seeps along an outstretched arm. Fingers twitch. He’s been hit in the back, just below the shoulder blade. The entry point is tiny, barely a bloody smudge on his jacket, but Dante has no doubt the exit wound includes at least one of his lungs if not an artery.

  From the shadows, Mac says, “I won’t go back there. I can’t.”

  “We’re here to help,” Dante says, edging forward. She crouches, reaching out and touching at the injured man’s neck, checking his pulse. Blood seeps from his lips as he wheezes softly, struggling to breathe.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” Mac says.

  Without taking her eyes off Mac still standing back in the shadows, Dante says, “I need to get this man out of here. Do you understand?”

  There’s no reply.

  Mags creeps up beside her, whispering, “I’ll do it.”

  She grabs the man by his armpits and drags him backwards. Blood smears across the floor. Mags stays low. It’s as if she’s huddling against a storm as she pulls him to safety.

  “What happened here, Mac?”

  “They started it. They grabbed me. I had to defend myself.”

  “This is wrong,” Dante says.

  “This is all so wrong,” Mac says, echoing her words back to her. “I didn’t want any of this. You have to believe me. I didn’t.”

  “Step forward,” Dante says. “Let me see you.”

  A woman appears, shuffling her feet slowly across the deck. She’s terrified. Her eyes are red from the tears that have been streaming down her cheeks. She trembles. To Dante’s surprise, she has a thick wire wrapped loosely around her neck, twisted at one end so it can’t be easily pulled apart. Mac nudges her forward. The wire leads back to the barrel of a gun similar to those carried by the soldiers in the hallway.

  “They made me do this,” Mac says. His red hair is frayed and frazzled, wild and out of control. “I didn’t want this, but they wouldn’t listen. They forced my hand. I had to take action. You know I’m right, Dante. It’s madness. We can’t go back there. No one can.”

  “Easy,” Dante says, stepping back. She has her hands out in front of her, gesturing for calm.

  “I know. I know too much. That’s why they’re afraid of me.”

  “What do you know, Mac?”

  “Everything. Like you said, it’s all a lie.”

  “We’re not on the Acheron,” Dante says. “Not anymore.”

  “Aren’t we? Are you sure of that?”

  The woman is terrified. She whimpers softly, locking eyes with Dante, appealing for help but knowing her position is hopeless. The wire around her neck is a noose leading back to the gun. Mac’s set up a dead man’s shot. Regardless of what happens to him, regardless of which way he turns or falls, the gun will always point at her neck, held on target by the wire. If they shoot him, she dies.

  “It’s all fake, Dee. Don’t you get that?”

  “Mac,” Dante replies, unsure how to continue. In all her years of training with the crew and their exploration of WISE 5571, she never saw any hint of anger in him or felt any physical threat despite his size. Mac always seemed composed. He was the kind of person that would take his frustrations out on a treadmill or by lifting weights. She can’t recall a single time he swore in anger, let alone anything as devious as this.

  “We’re still back there. We’re still on the Acheron,” he says with spittle flying from his lips. “We never left. It’s all a dream—a nightmare.”

  “Mac, please. Listen to yourself. You’re not making any sense.”

  From behind her, Dante can hear muffled sounds in the hallway. Mags hasn’t returned. It doesn’t take a neural net to figure out what’s happening. They’re holding her back, not willing to risk her again now they’ve got a good look at Mac. Dante’s got to talk him down.

  “Don’t go to sleep, Dante. You can’t go to sleep.”

  “Easy, Mac.”

  Dante edges back, drawing him in line with the corridor, wanting Coe-Voy to see what she’s dealing with and hoping he’s got some way of disarming or disabling Mac.

  “Don’t you see?” he asks. “Sleep is the reset. All those other times. All the times we broke through the darkness. The membranes. They don’t need those anymore. They never needed them. Only they didn’t know that, did they? Because they’re not human. But us. We see the darkness every night. Sleep is perfect camouflage for them.”

  Swollen red veins reach into the whites of his eyes. He’s fought to remain awake, probably for days, slowly working himself into a state of paranoia.

  “Mac. No one’s going to hurt you,” she says. “Just put down the gun and let her go.”

  “They change stuff. Each night. Don’t you understand? You must see it? We’re still back there. We’re still in orbit around P4.”

  “We’re on the Empyrean, Mac. We’re safe.”

  “Are we?” he asks. “Do you really believe that? Why? What proof do you have? You know what they can do. What makes you think they’d let us escape?”

  Dante treads lightly, backing up, drawing him out.

  “Why would they take us back to WISE 5571?” she asks. “If we’re still there, why would they tell us we’re going back to P4? They could take us anywhere. They could take us home.”

  “It’s all wrong,” he says, getting angry. “The timing. We should see more changes. Greater differences between our time and theirs. Don’t you get it? Everything’s anachronistic. Everything’s the same. The Empyrean is a joke. You’re telling me that after four hundred years the best design they can come up with is the Acheron? We went from horse-drawn carts to subluminal spacecraft in the same span of time. They should be way beyond us. Light years beyond us.”

  “Look at us,” Dante says, holding her hands out. “Look at our new bodies. Their medicine is like magic.”

  “Or an illusion,” he
says. “I don’t get you, Dee. You were so smart. The colors. The arrows. You saw through their lies.”

  “No one’s lying to you,” Dante says.

  “They’re using you, just like they used Cap, like they used Vichy.”

  Logic isn’t working. Dante switches tact.

  “Mac. I want you to let her go.”

  “No.”

  “This is an illusion, right?” she says. “So if I’m wrong, what’s the worst that happens? We go through another reset, but then we’ll both know, right? We’ll see it together. Both of us. We’ll know.”

  “We’ll remember,” Mac says.

  “Yes, that’s right. We’ll remember,” Dante says, reinforcing his point. “Now let her go.”

  Mac stares into Dante’s eyes. She can feel the connection, the familiarity, the trust. There’s resignation in his eyes. Hurt. Anguish. He’s trying to do what’s right. Things have spiraled out of control.

  “Please,” she says.

  His lips quiver. Although he still has hold of the gun, he reaches up with a trembling hand. His fingers twist the wire, turning it slowly.

  “That’s it,” Dante says, but she has the flat of her hand out, cautioning the woman, signaling she shouldn’t rush away, not wanting her to pull away too quickly and spook him.

  “We’re in this together,” Dante says, speaking to both of them. The woman nods softly, biting her lip, holding back her fear.

  “They get inside your head,” Mac says with tears streaming down his cheeks. His hands are trembling. He fiddles with his fingers, undoing the wire.

  “I know,” Dante says. “I know. Everything’s going to be okay, right? Just like before.”

  Mac sniffs, pulling the last of the wire apart. Dante gestures with her fingers, beckoning the woman to walk slowly over to her.

  “That’s it,” she says as the terrified engineer shuffles forward. As the wire falls from her neck, she runs, throwing her arms around Dante and knocking her backwards. It’s all Dante can do to stay upright as she grabs her.

  In that instant, two shots ring out. Pulses of light break forth from the mechanical spiders clinging to the ceiling. Heat radiates through the air. It’s as though someone opened the door of a blast furnace. Dante cringes, but the waves have already passed.

  Mac’s head lurches back. Two tiny red holes appear in his forehead. The back of his skull explodes, spraying the wall behind him with blood, brain and fragments of bone. He keels to one side, dropping the gun as he collapses on the floor.

  “Noooo!” Dante yells, but his life was over before she can even part her lips, let alone scream in anguish. She pushes the woman aside, rushing to his fallen body, but the room is already full of soldiers running in around her. They cut her off, grabbing her arms and pulling her away despite her protests. “No, please. No.”

  As she’s dragged from the equipment bay, she sees Coe-Voy.

  “You? Why did you kill him?” she yells at him. “He was going to surrender.”

  Coe-Voy doesn’t care. “If it’s any consolation, you defied the predictions.”

  Dante shakes her head in disgust, staring him in the eye and saying, “You sick bastard.”

  The soldiers pinning her arms back flex against her instinctive desire to lash out and hit him. She struggles, but they’re too strong.

  If Coe-Voy feels any remorse, it doesn’t show. He blinks but holds eye contact, refusing to be intimidated by her—as though Dante could intimidate anyone. With barely disguised disdain and speaking as though he’s replying to something she never actually said, Coe-Voy adds, “Honestly, it was the kindest thing we could do.”

  Dante spits in his face.

  But the Stars

  Dante sits on a park bench within the vast atrium onboard the Empyrean. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply, savoring the smell of the grass, the scent of wood and moist dirt, the rustic smell of flowers, enjoying the sound of leaves rustling, birds singing on the wind and the cool air touching at her cheeks. For a few seconds, she’s back on Earth, but the illusion is quickly shattered.

  Stones crunch beneath someone’s shoes and she opens her eyes to see a couple walking hand in hand along a side path winding through the gardens.

  In the distance, she sees Mags and Angel coming toward her from the other side of the atrium.

  It’s been several days since Mac was killed, but for Dante it still feels like it happened this morning and she’s not sure why. Perhaps it was that she witnessed the bloodshed firsthand, perhaps it was because she genuinely thought she could save him, or perhaps it’s because she feels betrayed by Coe-Voy, who originally saved both of them. As painful as the death of the others has been, Mac’s loss sent her into a spiral, which is strange to her as they were never that close.

  Cap and Vichy died long before anyone knew. When the crew finally figured out what was happening on the Acheron they were beyond hope. Their loss was sullied by the alien impersonators manipulating the crew. Although neither man actually had any involvement in their torture, Dante found it hard emotionally to separate them from what happened to her on the Acheron. Dante loved Vichy. She often wonders what happened to him in those final few moments of his life and she regrets not being there for him. Such thoughts leave her feeling hurt and angry as not only did the aliens mislead them, they robbed them of their friends, only, somewhat perversely, she finds that anger directed back at Cap and Vichy as those are the only forms these insipid creatures ever took.

  As for the others, Zoe never made it out of the alien warship. Benson died as little more than a bag of bones crumpled on the floor, something that was incongruous and surreal to her. The last time she saw Naz he was in a catatonic state. One moment he was there with her in the illusion, vibrant and full of life, the next he was just a shell. As far as she knows, he died on the adversarial dreadnaught.

  To Dante, none of their deaths were real on an emotional level. She feels as if any one of them could walk up behind Angel even though she knows that’s impossible. Mac’s death, though, was visceral. Mac was standing less than four feet from her, staring into her eyes, wanting answers, pleading for mercy—and then he was gone. One moment, he was alive and talking to her, the next his brains were scattered across the walls and floor. Unlike Angel’s apparent death on the Acheron, there was no reset. If only the bounds of reality could be redrawn. Oh, what she would give for a second chance, but what could she do differently?

  Dante warms her hands around a cup of coffee, lifting it to her lips and sipping gently. Some things never get old. She has no idea how far she is from Earth or whether the timings she’s been given by the crew of the Empyrean are relativistic or Earthbound, but it’s comforting to know some things never change, like coffee.

  Everyone she’s ever known is long dead. Dante knew that would happen before her launch from Cape Canaveral and she accepted that, but there’s now more time between her and her immediate family than there is between her childhood and the Revolutionary War. When she stops to think about all that happened in just that stretch of time, from the Declaration of Independence, the cultural upheaval of the Civil War, the suffragette movement, two brutal world wars, the civil rights movement and Armstrong walking on the Moon, it causes her head to spin, and yet the technological and scientific advances that led humanity from horse-drawn carts to rocket ships has been dwarfed by the rush to the stars. It seems the dislocation she felt on launching from Earth is now commonplace and accepted as the norm. Those that choose to stay on Earth are now in the minority and the planet is treated as a wildlife reserve. The crew she’s spoken to accept that they and their offspring will probably never see the blue skies of Earth and they’re fine with that.

  The Acheron missed the rise and fall of several empires on Earth. Hearing about the history that lay in her future is disturbing and yet it’s now in the past.

  Europe and the Americas fell into ruin within a few decades of their launch, with infighting preventing progress. Ignorance replaced kn
owledge. Ego won out over enlightenment.

  The Chinese federation spanned the western Pacific from Mongolia to Antarctica, but like all empires it outgrew itself. India was caught between the Chinese and the religious Middle Eastern bloc. When these two burned out, the subcontinent became an unwitting superpower. Just when it seemed as though there might be some stability for humanity, climate-induced hardships were compounded by the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and a pandemic that dwarfed even the Black Plague. By the time the dust settled, six billion graves had been dug. Entire cultures collapsed. Civilization crumbled. Like an organism fighting an infection, it seemed Earth was trying to rid itself of humanity. What remained of those devastated countries then began the long walk to the stars.

  From what she’s heard, eight colony planets have been terraformed among nearby star systems, although that process alone takes several millennia to complete. Homo sapiens, it seems, has become Homo stellae—humanity dispersed among the stars. Coffee, though, coffee has remained the same. Coffee still has those bitter undertones that cause her mind to stir. Coffee brings her home.

  “They told me you were down here,” Mags says, walking up to Dante.

  Angel waves sheepishly from beside Mags, although Dante’s not sure why. If anyone should be embarrassed by what happened it’s Dante, as she’s the one that accused Angel of being an imposter. Regardless, Dante casts Angel a warm smile in response, trying to make up for a mistake she can never erase.

  For Dante, the past is a bitter curse. No one can re-live a single second once it’s gone—not presidents or scientists, princes or paupers. The rich are mocked by the passage of time as though they were destitute and poor. Mistakes are carved in stone. Even forgiveness is shallow as nothing can undo the past. For Dante, living with regret isn’t a burden, it’s honest. Oh, she doesn’t let it weigh her down, but she doesn’t ignore it either as that would be insulting to both of them.