Old Ironsides

by Dean Crawford

  ‘How fast can this thing go?’ he asked.

  Lieutenant Foxx leaned back in her seat and rested her head against the headrest.

  ‘Mach Eight,’ she replied as though it were nothing. ‘Most shuttles are hypersonic.’

  Nathan saw the airspeed indicator reach Mach Three and then looked out of the window to see the sky above darkening. The clouds were now vast sheets and blankets of rippling white cast across the continent below. Nathan found himself gripping the rests of his seat as the shuttle rocketed silently into the stratosphere, an altitude indicator reading twenty thousand meters. Nathan did a quick bit of mental arithmetic and came up with a dizzying solution.

  ‘Sixty thousand feet,’ he uttered.

  ‘What’s that?’ Foxx asked, glancing across at him.

  ‘We’re sixty thousand feet in the air and climbing,’ he said as he pointed at the displays. ‘We’re doing Mach Six! How is this happening? Where are the engines?’

  Lieutenant Foxx frowned as though she could not fathom his problem.

  ‘We don’t need engines, and what have feet got to do with anything?’

  ‘Our height!’ Nathan said, almost panicked. ‘Are we supposed to be this high? It’s still going up!’

  Nathan looked out of the main windscreen and saw the graceful curvature of the earth appear before him, realized that the ground below was becoming darker as they rocketed across half of North America at hypersonic velocity: the sun rose in the east, he recalled, so it would be very early morning in Colorado.

  Lieutenant Foxx surveyed the instruments for a moment and then looked at him quizzically again. ‘Everything’s normal,’ she insisted. ‘Have you ever flown in one of these before?’

  ‘Must’ve missed out.’

  ‘Damn, what rock have they had you hiding under?’ Foxx asked. ‘And why do you want to go to Denver anyway, there’s nothing much there.’

  Nathan regained control of himself as he saw the nose of the shuttle gradually dropping, revealing the earth’s horizon in all its glory before them as the altimeter stabilized at a giddy twenty five thousand metres.

  ‘It’s personal,’ he replied, his voice reduced to an awe struck whisper as he looked at the twinkling stars above them in the velvety blackness of space.

  ‘Orbital perigee achieved, descent cycle will begin in four minutes,’ the shuttle’s computer intoned.

  Nathan kept staring ahead as he realized that they’d just flown eight hundred miles in about six minutes. From his seat he could gaze through the vast windscreen and see the desert wastes of Colorado and Utah ahead of them, Utah enshrouded in darkness and Colorado bathed in the orange glow of sunrise. To his right were the great lakes, to their south Illinois and Iowa, to his left Kansas and Missouri, their vast plains moving by as though the earth were a mere fraction of its real size, betraying the colossal speeds the shuttle had attained.

  ‘The world really is getting small,’ he uttered to himself.

  Then, his eye caught upon one of the stars out to his right. The flare of the earth reflecting the sunlight made most stars dim points of light in the blackness, but one of the stars burned fiercely bright and seemed also to be moving behind them.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, leaning around in his seat for a better look.

  Lieutenant Foxx barely glanced in the direction of the bright light.

  ‘New Chicago,’ she said, ‘one of the orbital cities.’

  ‘Orbital cities?’

  ‘Okay, what’s going on here?’ Foxx demanded as Nathan noticed the shuttle begin to nose down toward the earth below at who-knew-how-many gazzilion miles per hour. ‘You’ve never been in a shuttle, don’t know what hard light is and you’ve never seen New Chicago. Who are you?’

  Nathan turned back to her and rubbed his temples. ‘Amnesia,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve got complete amnesia and can’t remember anything.’

  Lieutenant Foxx watched him for what felt like a long time, as though weighing up the likelihood of his telling the truth.

  ‘If that’s the case then why am I here baby-sitting a man who can’t remember his own name and how come you’ve got some personal reason for going to Denver? If you can’t remember anything, you wouldn’t know where to go, right?’

  ‘I remember some things,’ Nathan said, changing tack a little. ‘They come in little bits, here and there.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Foxx murmured. ‘Convenient.’

  The shuttle was now descending at a tremendous velocity, cruising down through the rarified atmosphere toward Colorado. To his amazement he could see the city glittering gold in the sunrise, the Rocky Mountains beyond bathed in the same light and the South Platte river intersecting the city, but Denver looked far smaller than he recalled.

  Nathan felt the shuttle slowing almost imperceptibly, the airspeed and altitude winding down as the craft swept down through veils of cloud glowing an ethereal gold in the dawn light of the sunrise behind them. Nathan said nothing more as the shuttle glided down toward what looked like an airport on the north eastern corner of the city, but he could see no runway, just a large terminal building and multiple circular landing pads with craft large and small upon them.

  The shuttle seemed to have selected a suitable landing pad for itself, but now Lieutenant Foxx took the controls and deactivated the autopilot system. The shuttle turned as she guided the vessel away from the spaceport, if that’s what it was, and instead began to focus in on a small area of what looked like forest to the west of the city.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Aurora, right?’ Foxx replied. ‘That’s what you said.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Nathan agreed, glancing behind them at the city and then ahead to the open ground ahead. To his amazement he could see a sizeable river running through it.

  ‘Where did the river come from?’ he asked.

  Lieutenant Foxx glanced at a display screen before her.

  ‘Coal Creek,’ she identified it. ‘Local river, nothing special about it.’

  Nathan swallowed thickly. Coal Creek had been a feeble dribble of a stream the last time he’d seen it, the kind of stream kids jumped in to cool off during the long, hot summers. Now, it was broad and glittering like a sheet of beaten gold in the sunlight as Lieutenant Foxx guided the shuttle in and it settled onto the ground in an open glade, clouds of dust driven upward around it in a swirling vortex and then drifting away on the light breeze outside.

  ‘Okay, here you go. Aurora, Colorado.’

  Nathan looked through the windshield and saw nothing but open wilderness.

  ***

  XII

  Nathan stepped down out of the shuttle onto the dusty earth and looked around, Lieutenant Foxx following a discreet distance behind and saying nothing. As he walked away from the shuttle across the clearing amid the ranks of aspen lining the glade, he could see the soaring skyscrapers of Denver a dozen miles away, the buildings taller than he remembered them but also less in number. Their towering heights glowed gold in the sunrise, and to the right of them he saw a further glint of light as a craft of some kind lifted off from the spaceport they had seen during the descent and climbed away silently into the perfect eggshell-blue sky.

  Nathan could hear nothing in the stillness of the dawn. He turned to his left and saw the dense trees and knew that the creek was somewhere just to their north and the old High Line canal to their south. Nathan turned west as he realized that he was standing where Potomac Street had once been and found himself looking at the wooded glade.

  Nathan struck off toward the woods and heard Lieutenant Foxx hurrying to keep up with him.

  ‘What the hell are we doing out here?’ she asked.

  Nathan did not reply as just ahead he saw something out of the ordinary: a straight line, something that did not exist in nature. He slowed and crouched down onto the dusty ground. Laying buried in the soil was a metal girder perhaps ten feet long, almost completely concealed. Nathan dusted it off and despite its age he kne
w what it was.

  ‘Power line tower,’ he said to himself.

  Aluminium, lightweight and used for the power cables that had run in a line alongside Potomac, just a couple of blocks from his home on East 4th Avenue. Nathan struck off toward the woods and almost immediately he recognized the aspen that had stood on each and every lawn of every home in his street, old now but still in perfect evenly spaced rows.

  Nathan hurried onward, the light mist in the air causing the light from the sunrise to beam in shafts through the glade as he moved. Almost immediately, amid the trees he could detect the hint of another straight line of forest growth, of gnarled old trees long dead demarking the boundaries of East 4th Street.

  Nathan broke into a run and beneath his boots he felt something solid. He looked down, and in between the thick deposits of soil he could see broken chunks of angular asphalt poking through, could see here and there the occasional sidewalk stone littering the forest floor.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Lieutenant Foxx asked. ‘There’s nothing out here but junk.’

  Nathan did not reply. Instead, he looked behind him to where the edge of the old Potomac Road was and judged its distance, then walked another two dozen yards between the trees and slowed down as one of them grabbed his attention.

  He knew from elementary school that aspens grew in large clonal colonies derived from a single seedling, and spread via “root suckers“: new stems in the colony could appear at up to a hundred feet from the parent tree. Each aspen could live for up to a hundred fifty years above ground, but the root system of the colony could be far older, sending up new trunks as the older trunks died off for thousands of years.

  He slowed as he saw the shape of the tree before him, so similar to one he had looked out upon most mornings before getting up for work. Images flickered through his mind of Angela pushing Amira in the swing that he had fastened between the old tree’s trunk and the garden fence, or of Amira playing hide and seek behind it with Nathan.

  The tree was standing in line with many of the others that still formed a loose line where the gardens of the houses used to be. Nathan stepped forward, easing his way past the tree and to his right he saw the faint shapes of uniform holes in the ground where fence posts had once stood, crumbled chunks of old concrete still embedded in the soil. He edged forward through the dense foliage clogging the glade, and then he saw the unmistakably angular concrete foundations of his home.

  Nathan felt pain twist his throat as he saw the boundaries of house, the shape of the living room, the back rooms, the kitchen and even the ghostly rectangle of the drive to his right, mosses clinging to the hardcore that had been beneath the asphalt surface.

  Behind him, Lieutenant Foxx had fallen quiet, somehow detecting the change in Nathan’s mood despite his silence. She waited nearby, not interfering as Nathan crouched down and touched the concrete where the front door to his home had once stood, centuries before.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Foxx asked softly.

  Nathan stood slowly, swallowing down his pain.

  ‘There’s just one more thing that I need to see,’ he said, aware of the croak in his voice as he turned away and walked back toward what was left of Potomac Street. ‘We’ll need the shuttle.’

  Nathan quietly led the way back, and directed Lieutenant Foxx to fly two kilometers to the west. She did so without complaint, Nathan guided by the sight of Windsor Lake, which evidently had also survived the intervening centuries. Lieutenant Foxx landed the shuttle in an area of level, open ground to the west of the lake, and Nathan could instantly see alongside the High Line Canal a series of geometric, orderly lines of stone.

  Nathan climbed out of the shuttle once more and walked through a small glade of trees and out into a vast sea of standing stones. Lieutenant Foxx followed and looked out across the perfectly arranged stones.

  ‘An old burial ground,’ she said.

  ‘Fairmount Cemetery,’ Nathan replied.

  It took almost a half hour for him to find what he was looking for. Nathan’s great grandfather had been buried in the area and his family had been fortunate enough to have a private plot near the cemetery’s northern border, alongside the calm waters of the canal. Now, most of the gravestones were crumbling and worn smooth by the passage of the centuries and the rigors of the environment, so much so that he could barely read the names on any of the stones.

  ‘Doesn’t anybody look after these places anymore?’ he asked as they walked.

  ‘I didn’t even know they existed,’ Lieutenant Foxx replied. ‘Nobody much comes out here anymore because the land was given over to nature. We limit the human footprint on earth.’

  Nathan slowed as he recognized one of the stones before him, a darkly polished monolith befitting the giant of a man who had been his grandfather. The stone was no longer glossy as he remembered it had once been, muddied now and leaning to one side where the coffin far below had decayed and the ground had sagged into the cavity. Alongside it was his grandmother’s smaller headstone, and alongside that the stones of his mother and father.

  Nathan stopped and looked down at his father’s headstone, the last words he’d heard him say echoing through his mind. I’ll do everything, son, everything I can to bring you back. Nathan felt a ghostly smile flicker around the corners of his mouth, and then he saw the other graves. He moved to stand before them and read his wife’s name on one, the stone also leaning at an awkward angle in the ground and heavily weathered. Beside it, that of Amira Ironside.

  Beloved daughter of Angela and Nathan,

  Forever missed, never lost.

  July 7th, 2010 – August 14th, 2114

  Nathan stood before the stone and stared at it for a long time. She’d made a hundred four years of age, a good run for his little girl who had been so feisty and energetic. That she had done so much, saved so many lives and yet was remembered only here in this calm, quiet little spot of land so long ago abandoned by her fellow human beings seemed so terrible an injustice that Nathan wanted to pick the stone up and carry it with him wherever he went, to tell anybody who would listen what his little girl had done with her life, so long ago.

  He was lost in his thoughts when Lieutenant Foxx moved alongside him and managed to read the faded inscription on the stone before them. Her jaw dropped and she stared up at him in horror.

  ‘Tell me you’re named after that guy,’ she said as she pointed at the stone.

  Nathan sucked in a breath of air, heard it tremble, heard his own words whispered awkwardly as he replied.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said simply.

  Lieutenant Foxx stared at him openly, then took a pace back from him. ‘You’re that guy, they’re your family…?’

  Nathan could not bring himself to speak further and simply nodded. He wanted to lie down on the earth alongside Angela and Amira and just go to sleep, forever. Suddenly he didn’t care about being brought back to life after so many centuries: he just wanted to see them again, to hold them again and then vanish with them into history.

  Lieutenant Foxx ran a hand across her face as she paced away from him, then turned back, struggled to speak.

  ‘How?’ she gasped.

  Nathan could barely bring himself to form words, his sentences abrupt and bitter.

  ‘An alien virus infected me,’ he said. ‘No cure, but they were able to cryogenically freeze me after my death in the hopes of a cure being found. It took four hundred years to get that cure and bring me back, just like my dad had promised me he would.’

  Lieutenant Foxx stared down at the headstones as she slowly put it all together.

  ‘The plague,’ she said, ‘you were ground zero, the first person ever to become infected.’

  Nathan shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but they were sure interested in me at the time.’

  For some reason it seemed that Lieutenant Foxx was suddenly beginning to understand why she had been assigned to him, why he was being protected.

  ‘Damn it,’ she whispered, ‘you’re a walk
ing laboratory for the plague. They must have studied you in order to find the cure, and then only released you once the virus was completely controlled and understood. Until then, you would have been…, quarantined.’

  Nathan sucked in another breath that shivered through his chest.

  ‘I don’t know why they bothered,’ he said, ‘there was nobody for me to come back to, no reason to be here. My life ended four hundred years ago and now I’ve got nowhere to go.’

  Lieutenant Foxx’s stern expression softened a little. She moved back alongside him and to his surprise one of her small, seemingly delicate hands rested on his forearm.

  ‘You can stay here a while if you want,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s got a reason to rush you, ‘specially since you’ve waited four hundred years to say goodbye.’

  Nathan squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. ‘We said goodbye back then,’ he replied, but he could not bring his legs to move and carry him back to the shuttle.

  Lieutenant Foxx gently guided his arm to one side and Nathan followed without resistance, knowing somehow that if he did not walk with her he would never leave this place again. As they began to walk he realized again how quiet it was out here, the trees and the canal serene in the dawn light.

  ‘They’re at rest now,’ Lieutenant Foxx said, ‘and there couldn’t be a better place for them than here. Most people are cremated these days via atmospheric burn up and never get to see the earth for themselves.’

  ‘Sounds fab,’ Nathan said, a vague attempt at humor.

  ‘It’s most people’s only option to go out with a bang,’ Foxx said, taking the opportunity to lighten his mood, ‘y’know, their chance to shine and all that.’

  ‘You a born comedienne or is it something you’re learning?’

  Foxx smiled. ‘You can see the lights at night from orbit,’ she said. ‘When people pass away these days their last act is to become a shooting star. It’s quite calming to watch, believe it or not.’