by James Bow
* * *
When I slipped back to consciousness, I was in an infirmary bed. I heard Ethan’s voice, but he wasn’t talking to me. He had on a clipped customer service voice, as though he were dealing with a particularly trying client.
“… don’t think you should wake him, sir,” he was saying. “The heatstroke …”
Now that I listened, I heard a little tremble in that voice. Fear? I opened my eyes.
Grey. A pillar of smoke. Like a parachutist, burning, falling.
Nathaniel Tal.
“Ah,” he said, seeing my eyes. “Mr. Daud. I’m glad you could join us.” His metallic gaze flicked to Ethan. “If you’ll wait with my officers in the reception area, Mr. Oall,” he said. “I’ll take your report next.” Nathaniel snapped his fingers and motioned to another grey man to escort Ethan out the door.
Nathaniel and I were alone. The colony’s chief of security, and me, pumped full of drugs. Swell.
“I wanted to take your report personally, Mr. Daud,” he said. “I am sorry to wake you, but it seems the matter is becoming more urgent. You discovered sabotage, I hear?”
Take my report. He must have heard someone — Ethan, likely — talk about what I’d found. Someone must have let something slip about the pivot. Tal already knew.
“It was … it was a device.”
“You found a device in the service tunnels,” he said. “What sort of device?”
“Steam-driven, mechanical … It pulled the pneumatic tubes out of alignment, swapped them. It seemed to work at random.”
“Ah,” he said. “And hence: the failed deliveries.”
Wow. He was quick. He’d worked out the implications in about half a second. I just nodded. “It wouldn’t take many to disrupt communications throughout the city.”
“Just so,” said Nathaniel. “But now that we know what we’re looking for, it should be easy enough to address the matter.”
“But sir,” I said. “The fans.”
Nathaniel frowned. He looked — uncomfortable? Angry? “You’re not a security officer, Mr. Daud. Don’t trouble yourself with the fans.”
Don’t trouble myself!
Nathaniel nodded to me, and left. The door clicked shut behind him.
* * *
Drugs and exhaustion took me again. When I woke up, Rachel was stroking back my hair. She smiled to see me, and I smiled at her. “Hey, you,” I said.
“Hey,” she answered, softly. Then she looked over at the other side of my bed. Michael was standing there. He smiled at us sympathetically, but Rachel gave him a sheepish look and pulled her hand back.
“You’re both here,” I said. This was more than just a social call. I struggled to sit up. Rachel came forward to help.
Their uniforms were a mess of stains and wrinkles. Exhaustion was plain on Rachel’s face. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“I should be asking you that!” Rachel got me to my feet. She looked angry. “I can’t believe the CommController sent you into the steam tunnels! Your body can’t take that sort of abuse. You’re lucky you’re weren’t hurt worse!”
“Don’t blame him.” Though she was right, I felt a need to defend Gabriel. I think I was secretly pleased that someone of his rank had relied on me. “He needed someone he could trust.”
“I could have gone in there,” she snapped. “Michael could have.”
“We’d have no reason to go,” said Michael quietly. “We’re medical staff, not communications workers. Simon had clearance.”
Rachel let out her breath sharply and turned away.
I didn’t want to get in the middle of an argument. There were more important things to talk about.
“Nathaniel was here,” I said. “I had to tell him about what I’d found. Have you heard?”
“We can’t talk here.” Michael lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “It’s not private enough. Especially if Nathaniel was here. Remember your spyhole.”
A bell went off. My heart jumped before I realized it wasn’t a heat alarm.
“There’s an announcement up in reception,” said Rachel. “We’re all expected. And since you’re officially ambulatory, Simon, you have to come, too.”
* * *
The reception area was crowded with medical staff — doctors, nurses, interns, specialists — their clothes limp and crumpled, and some smudged with blood and heaven knew what else. Some of them looked asleep on their feet. Some had been crying. The rehab patients mixed in here and there looked like the picture of health and normality beside these people. I could smell sweat and burn fluids and the high, flowery stink of morphium. Creator save us.
Even the town crier’s professionally neutral face wavered as she climbed up onto the reception desk to be heard. She glanced at her timepiece. This was the real deal, an official announcement, to go out simultaneously throughout the city. She watched the seconds. We watched her. Then all at once she looked up and her voice rang out: “Attention, citizens of Iapyx! Attend to a message from Mayor Matthew Tal, on this, the 22,977th day of colonization! Message follows:
“The mayor shares your concern over the mechanical failures that have afflicted this city these past few days. He wishes to assure all citizens that he is taking the matter seriously. The mayor has assembled teams of workers with expertise in maintenance and security to investigate these incidents and identify those to blame. Rest assured, any and all corrective measures will be taken to prevent these failures from happening again. The mayor thanks all citizens for their patience during these trying times, and urges them to cooperate with their neighbours in working toward the safe and secure future of our city.
“In the name of Mayor Matthew Tal, of the Creator of the Stars and the Captains of the Icarus, message ends!”
The crier got down from the desk. Muttering started up all around.
“Corrective measures,” I said. “What does—”
“The Grounders,” someone answered. “He’s going after the Grounders.”
Michael shook his head, but that word echoed around us. The Grounders. They did this. Rachel looked ill.
I took her hand and squeezed it.
* * *
At Rachel’s order we separated, to meet in the prop room again. Aaron and Gabriel were waiting for us past the secret door. Gabriel nodded at me. “Good work, Simon.”
Rachel glared at him. “You shouldn’t have sent him into the steam tunnels.”
“Rachel,” I ventured, “I wouldn’t have gone in if I didn’t think I needed to.”
She turned that glare on me. “Don’t talk like a soldier, Simon. I’ve had more than enough of that in my life.”
I stepped back from that glare. Had she meant Isaac? The pilots? Or the Grounders?
“But Simon gave us the break we needed,” said Gabriel. “This is the first physical evidence we’ve found that the failures are acts of sabotage. More than that, there are logs about who goes into the maintenance tunnels — official ones, and the ones I keep in my head. I know who went into those maintenance tunnels, and that included a troop of security officers from the mayor’s office. They were supposedly on drill. I think they were doing something else.”
Michael looked up. The colour drained from his face. “What?”
Rachel gaped at Gabriel. “You’re sure of this?”
“Absolutely,” said Gabriel. “It’s not enough proof to take public, but it’s the first piece of evidence we have that connects the sabotage to the security office.”
Rachel clenched a fist. “I knew it!”
“Wait! Whoa! What?” I gasped. At the back of my mind, I’d wondered if this was how Nathaniel had figured out the implications of my find so quickly. But the implications of that were far easier to laugh at than accept. “A conspiracy,” I said flatly. “From the mayor’s office?”
“It doesn’t have to be a big one,” said Rachel. “This is a small city. Three or four committed security officers could do a lot of damage.”
“But why?” I c
ouldn’t keep the scepticism out of my voice. I wasn’t really trying. “Why would Tal’s men sabotage their own city?”
“They’re hiding something,” said Aaron.
“Like what?” I turned on him. “People died today, Aaron. This isn’t a game of ticktock monsters!”
Instead of answering, Gabriel glanced across at Aaron. “He needs to know.”
Aaron looked nervous. “Are you sure? This is pretty big stuff.”
Rachel pulled a roll of paper from behind a painted backdrop of Verona. “We’d have to tell him eventually. Better that it’s now.” She rolled it out on the table and held the ends down. “This is what we’ve been looking for.”
It was a map. Right away I noticed three things. First, I recognized the white sphere with lines tracing out from the pole, representing the deep chasms our cities hid inside, like someone had cracked the top of a very round, very white egg. Our thirteen cities were pinpointed in red.
Second, I recognized the handwriting. It was my mother’s.
And third …
“Notice something different?” said Rachel.
There was more here. Much more. Thinner lines criss-crossed the familiar thick ones, and some extended very far south.
Mom had added to the map.
I closed my eyes, hard, then opened them to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.
Why didn’t I know about this? Mom had worked at the mayor’s office; this map must have been one of their projects. And it had been almost eight years since she’d died. Why hadn’t the official record been updated?
There was still more. Mom had drawn red lines from each of the thirteen cities. All these lines stretched south, making a fan that widened out from the planet’s equator. I saw a scribbled annotation that might have said “angle of entry” and some calculations. There was a red circle in an area of white farther south than the southernmost city, dangerously close to the line beyond which was written Danger: Steam. In the centre of the red circle was a big question mark.
“This is—” I was too stunned to form a question.
“It’s your mother’s map, Simon,” said Gabriel. “Hagar’s map.”
“I—” I started to say, “I know,” then changed my mind. “This — How did she make this? Who surveyed it — this far south, where the fog turns to steam?”
Aaron shrugged. “The Grounders in Perdix cobbled together a couple of robotic flyers to do that, using some parts from before planetfall. That is, until their government found out and shut them down for misuse of resources.”
I shook my head. “Why haven’t I heard about this?”
“It’s not official research,” Gabriel replied. “That information has to be vetted and peer reviewed. I can tell you the Perdix discoveries are slowly being added to the official record, but independent verification has been slow. Someone has been throwing up roadblocks, and most of those have come from the mayor’s office, right here on Iapyx.”
“They’re hiding something, Simon,” said Rachel. “We don’t know what, exactly, but something big.”
I threw up my arms and set a stuffed raven swinging, scattering us with dust. It was beyond ridiculous. “You’ve got theories, though. Tell me.”
Aaron cut in. “Simon, remember the star I saw at Nocturne?”
Of course I remembered, but the sudden change in subject stuttered me to silence.
“I know,” he said. “We don’t see stars here, not even during Nocturne. That’s what the textbooks tell us. But it was there. I could barely see it past the chasm lip. I know that shouldn’t be possible. People laughed at me when I told them. But when I told Isaac, he made an interesting point: the light from our sun is so intense, it drowns out the light of other stars. But light from our own sun that’s reflected back at us? That might have a chance.”
He waited, smiling. I tried to make the connection. Reflected back at us by what? Then it hit me, hard. “You saw a planet?”
He nodded.
“But there are no other planets in the system!”
Aaron shrugged. “Again, that’s what our textbooks tell us. And that’s why I tell my students to think for themselves. I’m not allowed to say what I saw — that’s crazy talk — but it turns out the Grounders have been studying this planet for a while, whenever Nocturne gives them a chance. The interesting thing about this planet is that it’s about our size … and it’s blue.”
Blue.
We had been promised a blue world, an ocean world dotted with islands and broad salt flats, a long, lazy year in distant orbit around a brilliant sun. We didn’t know what had gone wrong.
But it was too big an idea for me to absorb. It had been too big an idea for the original colonists to accept: that we were lost on the wrong planet. We had no way to get off, so what good did this knowledge do? Sixty-two years of thinking about this could drive people insane, so nobody thought about it. At all. My voice shook. “That’s crazy. This is crazy.”
“I agree that we don’t have enough proof,” said Aaron. “But maybe that’s why the mayor’s office is so worried. They’re worried that we’ll find proof we’re on the wrong planet.”
Gabriel nodded. “I think we may be close to finding where the Icarus crashed.”
“No way! It’s been six decades. The Icarus is long gone.”
“We don’t know that,” said Aaron. “And we won’t know unless we look. Think of the tech we could recover if we found her. Living could get a lot easier in our cities. And yet the mayor’s office is opposed to that.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “No! This doesn’t make sense! Why would they care? How would they even know enough to be worried about what you might find? We don’t know if the Icarus is out there! There’s no one in our cities whose ancestors were aboard the Icarus that day!”
“There is, actually,” said Gabriel. “You remember that one survivor of the Icarus made it back before the ticktock monsters came.”
I frowned, but nodded.
“Do you know his name?”
I didn’t. I shook my head.
“It was Tal.” Gabriel looked at me seriously. “Chief Medical Officer Daniel Tal. Nathaniel and Matthew Tal’s father.”
I stared at the old man, and again my mind rebelled. “That’s insane!” My voice edged up. “If Nathaniel Tal’s father survived the Icarus, we’d have heard about it. The family would trumpet that legacy. Mayor Matthew wouldn’t be leading just this city, he’d be Captain by now!”
Gabriel shrugged. “Perhaps, except that Daniel Tal chose to lie low and bury himself in work — and there was a lot of work to be done securing the cities — before moving to Iapyx to raise a family that never mentioned their father’s service aboard the Icarus. It’s been almost forgotten in the six decades since.”
“But — there’d be names in history books. Someone would have found out.”
“I only learned about it thanks to your mother. Hagar was our eyes and ears in the mayor’s office.” Gabriel nodded at the map. “She was working on figuring out where the Icarus crashed. She discovered the Tals’ secret, and brought it to me. She died soon afterward. I’ve never been satisfied with the explanation that her death was a suicide.”
I shuddered.
“I don’t think she jumped, Simon.”
“Well, I don’t think she flew!”
This was way too much. I couldn’t stand to be here anymore. “No,” I whispered.
“The sabotage of the pneumatics suggests this is coming from the mayor’s office here on Iapyx,” Gabriel went on. “The Grounders in the other cities aren’t dealing with anything like this. This isn’t a government conspiracy, it’s personal. So, what reason could they have to keep us from finding the Icarus?”
“The Captain’s dying,” said Aaron. “There’s going to be an election. Everybody knows that Matthew Tal intends to run against the current mayor of Daedalon for the right to ascend. Maybe there’s some information on the Icarus the Tals fear will derail the campaign.”
Nothing to lose. The Grounders had taken Isaac. My mother too. And now they wanted me? Nothing to lose? “No!” My voice rang among the pipes, startling even me. I jerked my hand away. “I can’t do this!”
They looked at me, shocked, but I couldn’t stop. “This is crazy, you know that? Totally crazy! A planet? The Icarus? A government conspiracy? I can’t deal with this! Count me out.”
I tried not to see the hurt look in Rachel’s eyes. “Simon—”
“Count me out!” I repeated, more quietly. “I want to go home. I’m not going to turn you in, I won’t tell anybody about you, but — just leave me alone. Okay?”
Rachel stared at me a moment. Then she turned away.
The silence stretched. Then Gabriel stepped forward. “Fine,” he said. “We’re not violent people, Simon. Remember that, when more people die. Michael will show you the way out.”
CHAPTER NINE
SUSPICION
Michael escorted me back to the projection room and walked off, looking troubled and preoccupied. I went home and fell into bed. I slept until my alarm went off, and then lay there, wondering if I should bother showing up for work.
Then I thought that if the CommController wanted to reassign me, it wouldn’t be because I didn’t show up. With that rebellious thought in mind, I put on my uniform and headed out.
I’m not sure what I expected at the Communications Hub. An angry mob? Gabriel standing there, reassignment papers in one hand, pointing me in the direction I’d come?
Instead, I found the place as it had been the day before, if strangely quiet. Clerks bustled; pneumatic canisters slipped in and out through the tubes overhead. It was as if the fan failure had never happened.
“Is the CommController in?” I asked as Marni levered up the counter to let me in. I tried to keep the squeak from my voice.
