by V. M. Law
She went under, and the lid closed over her automatically.
***
The Age of Discovery rocketed forward and Ajax had one last look at the Neptunian space station where he had spent so much of his life. It would sit unused, decaying until some other organisms made it to the star system. Through the windshield, still splattered with the blood of a thousand alien insects, the war ship lingered, and beyond that, away from the sun, he saw the glint of the Morrow shooting past the planet’s satellites and making for the Kuiper Belt in the vast outlying desert at the edge of human existence. The Morrow would be the farthest reaching endeavor of human engineering. The first object to break out of the mother star’s gravity and reach the calm of interstellar space.
He had one view of the Morrow and one view of the Ides ship, and he had no time to think about whether his decoy would work or not. Controlling the ship by himself took all of his physical and mental energy, and from the control room in his quarters, it looked as if it was working.
The war ship spewed forth a cloud of tinier ships that looked like mosquitoes to Ajax, though he knew they were much larger and deadlier. And they approached.
He hooted in triumph, knowing he couldn’t outrun them, couldn’t shoot at them without a crew. The shields would hold for only so long, and then the structural integrity of the Age would be compromised and its main life support systems would begin to crash, one by one, until only the bridge power and air remained. Until the alarms screamed at him to retreat into the pods, to get to the safety of the cryogenics room and try his luck in the interstellar dart board. But he would not move. He would kick his legs up one final time and clasp his hands together behind his head. He had a cigar, and he would smoke it.
But before any of that, he needed to get as far away from the fracas as possible. If they got him too soon, they would be able to double back in time to possibly detect the Morrow. He slammed on the main thrusters and expended all of their power, manually overriding the safety switches that normally prevented the ship from traveling at any faster rate than it needed to break the orbit of the inhabited planets. The force of acceleration threw him back against his seat and pushed the air out of his lungs.
The missiles began making contact and the Ides fighter craft circled the windshield, still resembling a swarm of mosquitoes on a summer night when the standing water had been left to sit for too long and everyone is too relaxed to care. Strangely enough, he thought about the swamp, where he hadn’t been since he left the planet what seemed like ten thousand years ago. He thought about his childhood there, and the smell of his father’s cigars.
The rumbling of malfunctioning machinery sounded everywhere in the ship. The engines were shot, the shield about to go. He sat back and laughed. He lit his cigar and he inhaled, holding its acrid smoke deep in his lungs until the desire to cough passed and he could enjoy the true taste of what his father called a “Cuban.”
It burnt well, slowly. All around him, the room fell apart. Ceiling panels hit the ground and light fixtures fell and swayed on their wires. Computers turned over and sparked and sizzled and he just sat there, smoking and laughing, not having anything to worry about anymore after such a long journey through so many hard times. The fires broke out and he didn’t notice. The oxygen grew thin and he didn’t notice that either. The only thing he cared to take note of in that final moment was the smell of the smoke that rose from his cigar and the feeling of weightlessness that came with the depressurization of his cabin.
He unlaced his boots, and closed his eyes.
Epilogue
Kasey floated in space without knowing that she floated, without knowing anything except that the takeoff of the Morrow dazzled her and the stories of her grandfather sparked in her imagination the desire to leave the place where she stood rooted. The grove smelt of juniper and hemlock, salty, marshy air and the croaking of frogs that rose to the stars carried with it the harmony of a life on the surface that even at her young age she knew would not last.
“Take it in and remember it, Kasey,” Corbin told her, “because soon there will be a time when the only trees you can smell will be in a laboratory, and the sound of frogs will be argued over by leading scientists trying to put the planet back together.”
At the time, just as the Morrow was lifting off, she knew his words were true but the slow passage of time for a child is a confusing thing, and even though he said soon, she had no concept of the word. She floated. The world seemed so large and she floated through it because that is what people do when they are stuck in one place. They float and they pretend they fly but they really just stay in the same place and the sounds remain the same. The smells don’t change and everything that seems transient is really rooted.
The only thing that seemed to change was the pulsing beeps that sounded in the ether, somewhere far off. They came from the launch pad, she told herself. They came from where the big rigs take off. But inside, she knew to ask questions, she knew to look deeper, and when she really tried to think about it, tried so hard to concentrate that Corbin turned to her and asked her if everything wasn’t all right by her, she had the impression that she had done everything before, that the Earth hung far away in the blackness and she might never be here in this grove, in the swamp, and the planet ever again.
But she left it alone—the beeping that seemed to come from far across the swamp, the feeling of knowing what would happen next—because she had the smell of juniper in her nose and Corbin holding her hand. And as long as she felt the pulse of his heart in the palm of her hand, she knew that he must be alive, must be waiting for her, even though they stood next to each other, hand in hand, waiting for the lift off of the Morrow, the largest ship in the world, that would take humanity to the reaches of the solar system and into the depths of interstellar emptiness, where not even gravity could keep her.
The ship lifted off and they watched it until it was no longer perceptible to their eyes, and then they turned and walked away, back to the refugee camp from which they would be relocated into the Annex, and Kasey had no time to think about why she knew that, because she was too preoccupied with the beeping that sounded as if it came from a million miles away and from inside her own head. Corbin pulled her along and she thought about asking him if he heard the beeping too, but he would say, “Of course I do, love. It’s the future calling.”
About the Author
V. M. Law is a science fiction writer.
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Keep an eye out for the next book in The Ascendants series, coming soon.
