Oh.
Well, I suppose that’s why Laura refused to leave her quiver behind.
Light shoots through the Ahwahnee’s great hall windows. Ever since we lost the bridge, the old Ahwahnee Hotel’s been the crew’s de facto meeting area. Birds chitter in the rafters, bouncing atop the hall’s big wooden beams. Even their small sounds make me twitch. I killed two mourners in the tunnels today. Ran from ten more. They’re panicking out there. The temperature’s dropping fast. In an hour, maybe two, nobody will be able to run the deepdowns without an EVA.
And that’s a problem, seeing that all the Muir’s EVA suits have been missing since stasis-break.
I knock my hood off my head as I walk toward the assembled crews. Officers sit on one side of the big table, facing the room. Everyone else sits in chairs gathered close, a jagged aisle running up the center. I pause at the top, hooking my thumbs in my belt.
Frag me, there are a lot of people in the room. Fifty? Sixty, maybe. My palms start to sweat at the sight of them.
“You’re late.” The woman at the center of the table stands, her shoulders thrown back, head high. It’s the same pose Laura strikes when she’s feeling defensive. This woman, however, wears her authority and confidence with ease. Nobody needs to introduce her to me. I’ve spent enough time memorizing her daughter’s face to see the resemblance.
“Please, don’t stand up,” I say, sauntering closer. Anxiety scrambles through me, clawing at my insides. I’m conscious I wear my piss-off attitude like armor. I’m also aware it makes people not like me much, but I’ll be damned if I care.
I don’t get to run this time.
Laura’s gone.
Someone’s responsible.
As I get closer, I’m certain that woman’s Laura’s mom—I saw her in the medbay foyer. I’d bet the man on her right is her husband. The guy’s huge, with silver-shot black hair and stubble on his chin. He leans back in his chair. Crosses his arms over his chest. Watching me with a stare so heavy, I could probably bench its weight.
A lot of people sit at the Ahwahnee’s long council table. Some of the Muir’s, some of theirs. The crew of the Conquistador is like Laura, long-limbed and lithe. Future humanity must’ve eradicated acne and wrinkles. Everyone’s got great skin. My people look pasty compared to the way Laura’s people glow in rich shades of umber, tan, and brown. See also: My crew’s spent four hundred years in stasis. We survived. In many cases, our melanin didn’t.
Neither did the deodorant.
I’m conscious of this as I walk toward the council table.
The council table’s lit up, holoscreens showing the ship’s current status. Spectrograph schematics of the Muir float in front of me, the seven sectors lit up in greens, oranges, and reds. Our air levels have dropped to 40 percent in the deepdowns. Pressure’s low. Water’s looking worse, with the ship reporting massive losses in four tanks and freezing in the deepdown sea. The sea doesn’t just provide water to the park, but coolant for the ship’s systems, too.
“Explain yourself,” the woman says.
“I don’t answer to you,” I say.
“That’s exactly your problem. You don’t answer to anyone, Tuck,” Aren says to me, tossing his pen on the table.
“You want my help?” I ask. “Don’t bust my balls over a meeting. I was checking on the goddamn ship. And you know what they say about messengers with bad news.”
“What, that they get shot?” the woman says. Her tone tells me she has no problem shooting first.
Or a problem with shooting me, for that matter.
I chuckle. “I’d rather not get shot, Mrs.—”
“Doctor—”
“Dr. Cruz,” I finish.
She lifts a brow. “How do you know who I am?”
“Your daughter glares just like you do,” I reply, deciding to switch tactics and play it complimentary. “And she had zero tolerance for my bullshit, too.”
“Interesting choice of dying words,” Dr. Cruz says as she sinks back into her chair, exchanging a glance with Aren. “Do you know where Laura’s gone? She disappeared from the ship’s medbay almost forty-five minutes ago.”
There it is—through her hard-ass veneer, a small crack in her voice as she says her daughter’s name, one I’m sure few others recognize. They see the captain. The leader. Underneath, she’s also a mother. And I see she’s worried about her kid.
“I don’t know where Laura’s at,” I tell her, raising my voice to make sure everyone hears me. “But I do think that anyone who accuses her of terrorism is either, one”—I hold up a finger—“an idiot. Two, hiding an ulterior motive. Or three, disloyal to their respective crews and countries, and trying to push the blame off onto someone else.”
My words ring a little too loudly in the hall.
Several of the Conquistador’s crew members tense.
Chairs groan as people shift their weight.
Maybe that was a little too forward, but someone in this room deleted Dejah.
Someone tried to destroy my ship.
A blond woman leans back in her chair, smirking. I recognize her immediately—she met Laura and me at the neardowns bulkhead entrance. She sits a few seats down from the Cruzes. Smithson, I think her name was. I’ve seen her kind before. Mom’s work brought a lot of them into my orbit—smirking, sniffing, holier-than-thou. They parcel out backhanded compliments like candy. In four hundred years, it doesn’t look like humanity’s learned how to handle its money or its ivory towers.
Big surprise. So much has changed, so much has stayed the same.
“You can wipe that grin off your face,” I say, pointing at Dr. Smithson. “I don’t know exactly what you’ve done to Laura, but I’m sure as hell going to find out.”
Her grin loses a bit of its smugness. “I am certain I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you don’t,” I snap, anger flaring.
“Laura Cruz is a dangerous girl,” Dr. Smithson says. “She’s a hacker and a terrorist sympathizer, one who attempted to destroy the John Muir and everyone aboard the Conquistador. Do you have any idea what losing this ship would’ve meant for the advancement of mankind, boy?”
Humanity, not mankind, I think. Dr. Cruz responds first: “Alleged, Dr. Smithson,” she says. “My daughter’s an alleged sympathizer. You have no proof aside from circumstantial evidence—”
“Your daughter is gone, Elena!” Dr. Smithson snaps. “Caught on secure-cam knocking out her guards and sneaking from the medbay, alone—”
“Damn, Laura,” I say with a chuckle, but I’m not surprised, either. The girl moves like water. Try to put her in a container, and she’ll shift form and evaporate. “Look, I don’t know what your endgame is, lady, but I can tell you one thing for sure: Laura Cruz isn’t an enemy of the John Muir. And if she’s your enemy, well, that’s on you.”
“That’s preposterous,” Dr. Smithson says.
“Is it, though?” I ask.
“How can you be certain she poses no threat to the ship?” Aren asks me. “The girl had unauthorized access to the Conquistador’s bridge and captain’s chair at the time of the crash.”
Both Dr. Cruz and her husband look to me, breath bated, like I’m a lifeline.
“I don’t know about any of that,” I say. “But if Laura wanted to make sure the Muir was lost for good, all she needed to do was put an arrow in my back. Easy. Instead, she learned to tunnel run. She helped me get the auxiliary power hives online. And when we went code yellow against a griefer, she held her own and survived.” I spin to face the room, like I’d seen Mom do when she was trying to convince people to listen to her. “Now, remind me—how many of you jerks were in the deepdowns when the ship’s power grid went down?”
The other curators in the audience look away. At the floor. The walls. Nobody meets my gaze.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I say, turning back to the officers’ table. “If I know Laura Cruz—”
“But you don’t,” Dr. Smithson
says. “Not like we do.”
I ignore her and continue, “If she moved alone, it’s because she doesn’t or can’t trust someone in this room.”
Whispers slither over the floor.
“But who?” Dr. Cruz says, her gaze pinched. Pained.
“Give you three guesses,” I say, looking at Dr. Smithson. “While we’re throwing around wild accusations, Dr. Smithson, do you want to explain the piece of parasitic tech I found in Laura’s throat?”
Dr. Smithson goes so still, she seems to turn to stone.
“Parasitic tech?” both Dr. Cruz and Aren ask in tandem.
Dr. Smithson recovers: “Don’t you try to make me look like the antagonist here, boy—”
“No, Angela,” Dr. Cruz says, holding up a hand. “Let him speak.”
“Don’t you see? She’s charmed him,” Dr. Smithson says, rising from her seat. “Laura has filled his head full of lies, ones that will rip this crew apart while she runs off and destroys the ship—”
“You know what I saw?” I say, gesturing at Aren. “I saw a girl with broken and bleeding feet walk five steps because this woman’s asshole son told her to do it!”
Dr. Cruz slams her fists on the table and shoots out of her chair. The legs shriek against the floor. Everyone falls silent.
“Is this true?” she asks.
The birds leap from the rafters, chittering.
Aren presses his lips together, giving a small nod. “That’s what it looked like.”
“You’re all fools,” someone says behind me. I turn, seeing Dr. Smithson’s son sitting in the front row, smirking at me. He rises, spreading his arms wide. “One of the greatest criminal masterminds is conducting a symphony of chaos around us, and you’re all lining up to be in her orchestra.”
I fragging hate this guy.
“What’s your problem with Laura Cruz?” I ask, dusting off my right knuckles with the palm of my left hand.
“She’s a criminal,” he replies.
“Bullshit,” I say, taking a step toward him. Then another. “Answer the question.”
“She’s a dangerous hacker with a predisposition toward upsetting the status quo—”
“Wrong answer.” I punch him, just once, nice and clean. The cartilage in his nose crunches. His mother screams. Blood spatters down his face, across his lips and chin. Chairs shriek against the floor. People leap to their feet. I grab him by the shirtfront. “You know what? Laura doesn’t have a criminal bone in her body. But me? I’ve got no problem being an asshole.”
I shove him back into his chair.
“Tuck,” Aren shouts. “Enough!”
“One and done,” I say, shaking my hand out. The pain feels good. Wakes me up. Anger can be useful.
“You animal!” Dr. Smithson snarls at me. “If his nose is broken—”
“Lady, there’s no if about it,” I say. “Go ahead, sit here and bicker about who’s fragging loyal to your cause. I’ve got a goddamn ship to save.”
My cloak swirls around the floor as I pivot, heading toward the door.
I’ve got to find Laura.
She’s in more danger than I realized.
USS JOHN MUIR NPS-3500
PARK NEARDOWNS
LAURA
I head through the John Muir’s vacant halls. Where is everyone? My stomach squelches with nerves, my insides slipping and sliding against each other, wondering if there’s some new danger I’m unaware of, or if the halls of this ship are always this empty.
I walk past a large sign that reads NEARDOWN TUNNELS, which I suppose just means these tunnels are nestled against the park, rather than being located in the ship’s orbital bands like the deepdowns. Despite being well lit, the John Muir’s tunnels are still marked with rust and age. The tunnel walls are made from unpainted, slate-gray metal. Fluorescent lighting runs on tracks overhead, glaring at me. The temperature’s chill enough to make me grateful for my jacket and boots.
As I approach a bulkhead marked VALLEY FLOOR—LOWER YOSEMITE FALLS, I pull up the park map on my bioware. It’s my stop.
The bulkhead’s unguarded. The large door whooshes open for me, probably on a sensor. I walk through an air shower that blows the tips of my hair around my face, and step into the park proper.
None of the photos I’ve seen or VR trips I’ve taken have prepared me for the splendor of real mountains.
At first, the light’s so bright, I hold a hand up to shield my eyes. It’s brilliant everywhere, with augmented solarshine glittering off the stone underfoot and the granite mountains rising into the pseudo-sky. I blink hard and fast, hot tears streaming down my face, trying to see past the glow around me.
The sky darkens at the aerodome’s apex, where the atmosphere’s at its thinnest. Up there, the crescent-shaped gravity ring is visible, one that arcs around the ship every twenty-four hours. A thin, stretched-looking cloud drifts across the sky. The mountains tower almost as high, enormous, ancient sentinels that have guarded this valley for millions of years.
And everything, everything grows out of the ground, like magic. A spicy, sharp scent tickles my nose. I inhale deeply, taking in a smell I can only describe as green, and then sneeze. Tiny particles invade my lungs. Birdsong hops through the air, undercut by a long, low whistle. The air feels cool against my cheeks.
Beauty like this doesn’t exist in the Colonies: our terrain’s one-dimensional and only a meter higher than the engineered sea level. There aren’t canyons, mountains, or sweeping vistas; we have low hills for drainage purposes, not aesthetics. Our atmosphere isn’t thick enough to make the sky a deep, brilliant blue—not like this. The terrarium has the sky blue my bioware’s coloring set promised me as a child, the color I’ve seen in paintings and pictures from all over the world. I don’t understand how a pre-Exodus culture could possibly have created something so stunning with lesser tech.
No, humanity didn’t create this beauty—this was our home, before the Exodus. This is a small piece of the glory we had on Earth.
Seeing this place, I can almost empathize with the people who started the Pitch Dark movement. Pictures of the park simply don’t do it justice—one has to be dwarfed by these mountains, and to have the fingers of the wind in her hair, to really understand why the early ecoterrorists lashed out in vengeance against the whole human race.
But did they see the hypocrisy in their actions, I wonder? Or did they, like so many other villains in Earth’s history, believe they held the moral high ground, despite the misery they bred? What might’ve happened if the John Muir and ships like her had made it safely to the Colonies, as they were supposed to?
I wish I could admire the park for hours, but neither the ship nor I have that kind of time. Shaking my bioware awake, I check my map a second time. Several trails shoot across my ioScreen, but only one takes me to the cave entrance half a kilometer away. The trail arcs through trees that spear the sky like arrowheads, ones that smell like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.
I have to save this place. No time to waste.
I slide into the forest, leaving the ship’s metal tunnels behind.
* * *
I find the entrance to the Spider Cave ten minutes later, its mouth hidden in a thick tangle of foliage. The opening stands about as tall as me. The rocky ceiling’s slanted, low, and rough to the touch. I step inside, ducking. A gritty coating of dirt clings to my soles and the toes of my boots. The air’s chunky with dust—it clogs my nose and I sneeze again, and this time, my eyes water. Was all of Earth this dirty? Ugh.
I venture deeper. My jacket scrapes along the walls as the tunnel gets smaller, tighter, forcing me to my knees. I turn my bioware on for light. An ambient blue glow washes the walls in color, revealing a claustrophobic, rocky canal.
Cool air buffets my face, drying the sweat on my forehead. It’s a promise, I hope, that the cave isn’t a dead end.
Before long, the tunnel forces me into a crawl. This remnant of Earth is trying to swallow me whole. Dios, I hope I haven�
��t made a massive mistake in coming here.
Everything within me shakes, most especially my nerve. In all my sixteen years, I’ve never felt the slightest twinge of claustrophobia, no matter how deep I’ve been buried in an excavation. But I’ve never been pressed between two palms of rock before, in the darkness, without anyone knowing where I am. I could die here. Nobody would ever find me.
The thought is both a terror and a thrill.
I drop to my stomach, crawling along the floor like a lizard. My clothes and quiver make a shushing noise as they scrape against the rock’s throat. Bits of rubble stab into my forearms. My breath comes in forced, shuddering gasps. Something crawls over the tops of my fingers, a tiny creature with too many legs. Disgusted, I fling it away. My heart beats so hard on my bones, I worry the tightness of the space will squeeze it right out of me.
The deeper I go, the more my thoughts race: The cave is going to collapse on me, I think, shaking. Is the space getting smaller? I’m going to get stuck. Can I back up? Should I?
The ceiling pitches lower, pressing my bow and quiver into my back. I follow the slope, trying to make my rib cage as compact as possible.
I attempt to ease forward again, but I’m stuck. I can’t move. Can’t breathe. My chest won’t expand. I’m going to die buried in the rubble, while crawling things chew my toes off and nibble my eyeballs like grapes.
Not today, I tell myself. If you don’t survive this, Laura, you’ll never see your family again, and they will live the rest of their short lives thinking you betrayed them. Your friends, too, including Tuck.
Not today. Not—I push myself harder, muscles straining—today.
I worm my way past the chokepoint, sliding out of my bow. In another few wriggles, the space around me expands. The darkness grows so large, my bioware’s light can’t reach the walls. Collapsing in the dirt, I close my eyes. I breathe it in. Sneeze.
When I catch my breath, I retrieve my bow and quiver from the passage, and then stagger to my feet. The cave’s dark. Empty and cold. I turn my bioware up to full brilliance, holding one wrist up over my head. Toothy stalactites hang down from the ceiling, sharp as a wolf’s canines. Something drips in the darkness, a lone plop-plop-plop.
Pitch Dark Page 19
