Fractures

by Various

  Sloan. The events of the last twenty-four hours were murky, but one thing was clear: Sloan had abandoned them all. The AI running the colony had up and vanished mid-evacuation. Evelyn had been a fool to take a job run by an AI, but the prospect of cutting her homeworld out from glass had overridden any good sense.

  “Medical.” There would be beds there, and food. As she took a step in its direction, pain shot up her leg, reminding her of the dangerous twist to her ankle.

  The doors to the medical building were shut, but not sealed. She rolled them open to a cry of surprise inside. Just at the edge of the flare’s light, a woman stood, a hand shielding her eyes from the sudden brightness. “Doc Cale?”

  “Get inside and shut that door. I have patients here.” Cale squinted in her direction. “Is that you, Collins?”

  “It is.”

  The door slammed as Evelyn slid it back in place. Cast in red from the flare, the room was chaotic. Lockers and crates full of medical equipment and other supplies had toppled over, scattering their contents; cots and chairs were overturned; screens normally bright with medical diagnostics shattered. Two additional figures were huddled on some righted cots. One of them stirred and rolled a blanket away from its face before throwing it back over with a loud curse—Marquez. She recognized his deceptively boyish features in the dim light.

  “Put that out!” he barked. “You trying to blind us?”

  “There any other source of light in here?” asked Evelyn.

  “No,” Cale said, settling wearily on a cot.

  “Then I’ll be finding some food and a place to settle before I put it out.”

  “There’s the counter to my left and the cot to my right.”

  Evelyn swept up an open pack of rations and settled on the empty cot before extinguishing the flare, letting darkness retake the room. She ate without light, navigating the cold food into her mouth on instinct.

  Invisible in the blackness, the doctor’s cool voice asked, “Do you think anyone else is left?”

  Evelyn paused and swallowed before responding. “Wish I could say yes, but I can’t.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  October 26, 2558

  Evelyn woke after several fits and starts, and was relieved to see natural light finally pooling in through open doorways. Doc Cale must have opened them when surface temps had risen to a comfortable level. The physician glanced up at Evelyn from where she stood, taking inventory of pills.

  “Morning. Hold on, I’m going to have a look at you.”

  “How’d you guess?” The pain in Evelyn’s ankle was now only a dull ache, but she imagined that would change if she tried to walk on it.

  “You haven’t seen your face, have you?” The doctor stared through strands of soft brown hair at her with an amused smile.

  Evelyn was struck by a full memory of the previous day: hours of attacks from creatures with no respect for the laws of physics, followed by a massive alien thing exploding up from the ground, and ending with a shock wave that tore through everything still standing.

  She sat up as the doctor settled before her.

  “So what did this? And tell me if anything’s tender.”

  Agony shot through Evelyn as Cale pressed into her ankle. “Ouch—uh, that. And my Mule crashed. I was coming back to pick up any stragglers and got shot from the sky for my trouble—ugh, yeah that was tender too.” Evelyn eyed the doctor’s probing. “You can tell what’s going on with just your fingers?”

  “We learned these techniques in school. Rolling our eyes the whole time. But doctors have treated patients for thousands of years without diagnostic scanners. Not that I’m any good at it.” Cale straightened. “But I don’t need to be good to tell you that you sprained that ankle. I’m going to wrap you up and give you something for the pain.”

  “So what’s wrong with them?” Evelyn jerked her head in the direction of the two sleeping men.

  “A lot more than you. I’m keeping Phan fully sedated. Marquez here is just being lazy, but then again, he does have a nasty concussion and two broken legs.”

  A snort issued from beneath a blanket. Marquez pulled it back and smiled in her direction. “Hey, Collins, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.” It hit her that Marquez was one of the station’s techs. “Marquez, you gotten a chance to see why nothing’s working?”

  Marquez gestured at his legs. “Not exactly running laps around the station, but from what I’ve seen, it’s all fried. Best guess is that pulse was something like an EMP.”

  “So there’s not much hope anything’s still running?”

  “There’s no way to know how far the blast traveled, but it was going fast and hard enough to hit all our facilities.”

  Evelyn cursed. “So no way to communicate, no working vehicles. We’re stuck here.”

  “For the time being. Someone’s gotta come, though, right?”

  Evelyn began to feign agreement, but then she shook her head. “No. They truly don’t.”

  It had a sobering effect. Marquez retreated back under his blanket, and the doctor worked on Evelyn in silence.

  Mid-morning, Evelyn and Doc Cale ventured out to take stock. Evelyn moved by virtue of a powerful cocktail of drugs, but she did not do so gracefully. She would have preferred to hide under a heavy blanket watching vid feeds on her personal terminal, but there was a survival situation to attend to.

  The station looked no better by the light of day. The fires had all died out, but they left blackened buildings in their wake. The air was acrid, and the sky had a particular gray haze. A fallen comm tower split the research center in two. Equipment and personal effects littered the ground, abandoned in the evacuation. Evelyn paused and picked up a piece of torn sheet music stamped with boot marks. “The Old Refrain,” she murmured.

  Doc Cale came up beside her and gazed at the sheet music. “Split up and look around,” said the doctor. “There should be a few caches of survivalist gear.”

  Evelyn went first to inspect the doors of the inner station. They were stuck fast, and the manual security release would be on the inside. A pang of guilt hit her when she thought of the photo above her bunk of her mother, father, and sister, taken a year before the war took Meridian and all of the lives pictured.

  A chunk of glass sat on the ground nearby. Evelyn picked it up, turning it in her hands. A prewar radio had been partially excavated from the silicate. She fiddled with an exposed dial, not really expecting anything to happen. First glassed and then scored by the same alien fire that had brought down the station: it was dead. She let it fall. A piece of the radio broke off and bounced away. Didn’t matter. No one was coming back for any of this.

  “Collins.” The doctor called Evelyn over to where she had broken into a nearby supply room. Evelyn picked her way over slowly. As she approached, the doctor grinned and said, “Thank God this place is full of Luddites.”

  Within heaps of broken tech was a box of emergency supplies. Among its contents were gas lanterns, a small gas stove, and other ancient gear meant for perhaps not this exact scenario but any scenario in which twenty-fifth-century—hell, even twentieth-century—technology could not be depended on.

  “Way to go, Doc. There’s more rations here too.”

  The doctor picked up a tech suit before letting it drop again. “And a whole lot of junk rendered useless by that thing. What the hell was it, anyway? You think it had something to do with those ‘Prometheans’? They all disappeared when it took off.”

  “Don’t know.” A shiver traveled down Evelyn’s back. “Don’t think I want to.”

  October 27, 2558

  “Hey, Doc, take a look at this.”

  Evelyn watched as a telltale swollen gray mass on the horizon moved toward them. When heavy winds swept across a glassed colony, they gathered up tiny specks of razor-sharp debris that ravaged eyes, lungs, and other soft human tissue. During these glass storms, the colonists had bunkered down in the well-sealed interior of the station, as the d
ebris could wreak havoc through even the smallest openings. They’d then run fans to clear the air, and Sloan had mandated masks until he was certain things had settled.

  “Well, that’s not good,” replied Doc Cale.

  No telling how long the storm would last, or when the air would be safe for breathing again. “We need to get the hell off this planet,” muttered Evelyn.

  The doctor glanced sidelong at her. “While that’s true, at the moment we really need to focus on gathering as many supplies as we can and sealing medical.”

  “Right,” said Evelyn. But she wasn’t so certain. They had a small window to catch any escape vessels that might still be nearby.

  Evelyn limped back into medical. The doctor was on her heels, calling after her. “Collins?”

  “Marquez!” Evelyn barked. “Up.”

  The technician stirred, sitting up in bed. “What do you want?”

  “There any chance we can slap together a transmitter?”

  Marquez let out a long breath. “Umm . . . if we can find parts that aren’t completely busted, I might be able to put something basic together.”

  The doctor shot Evelyn a frustrated glance. “What are you talking about? We need to focus on getting ready for that storm.”

  “Uh, what storm?” Marquez glanced at the women.

  Evelyn ignored them both and pressed forward. “Could anything have survived the blast?”

  Doc Cale was clearly fuming. Marquez avoided the doctor’s gaze and said, “If it was really like an EMP, then it might’ve only fried things of a certain complexity. Disassembled parts could’ve made it through, yeah. But building something capable of getting a message offworld from scratch? That’s going to be tough.”

  “Not too tough for a smart kid like you, though, right?”

  He grinned. “Well, it could be the concussion talking. . . . I give it one in a thousand that we find exactly what I need . . . but if we do, yeah, I could put something together.”

  Doc Cale released a sigh. “We don’t have time to chase those kinds of odds, Collins.”

  Evelyn pulled the doctor in close. “This won’t be the only storm. There’ll be more, and even though we got supplies, those supplies won’t last. And Meridian’s got nothing to offer in the way of survival. There might still be ships close enough to help us, but not for long.”

  “The company will come back soon. They had to suspect people might’ve been left behind.”

  Doc Cale’s measured confidence grated on Evelyn’s nerves. “Doc, you ever experienced this kind of attack?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. You were probably in some cozy school through most of the war. You saw it on the news, but till yesterday, you never lived it. Well, I have. I was here ten years ago when the Covenant attacked. You can’t ever trust that help’s coming when everyone’s running scared. Maybe just Meridian experienced this, and we’ll have the whole UNSC cleaning crew running out here to take care of us, but maybe it’s everywhere else too, and they’ve got problems way too big to come looking for ghosts. We gotta make sure they know we’re here, or we got no chance.”

  Doc Cale looked struck. Finally, she said, “Fine. I guess I’ll scavenge what we need while you go on your little quest.”

  “Fair enough. If I finish up quick, I promise I’ll give you a hand in whatever time we have left.”

  The doctor pursed her lips. “Fine.”

  The storm beat against the outside of the medical station, doing its damnedest to rend the extra layers of fortification the doctor had installed. Cale had hung sheets of heavy plastic and stuck them fast with sealant intended for space-bound vessels. She’d even covered the door, effectively sealing them in. It seemed to be working, but it also gave them the particular feeling of being entombed.

  The room smelled of burning gas. Lanterns gave off cold, harsh light. There was soup to eat, warmed over the small stove, but Marquez left his untouched as he tinkered, straining in the wanting light.

  Evelyn had scrounged spare parts from every nearby supply depot, not knowing whether something intended to fix a Mongoose might be able to serve Marquez’s needs if the ideal fixture was lacking. She’d hoped her search would be quick and that she’d be able to help Doc Cale, but the storm had been kicking up dangerous gusts when she’d hauled the last load inside, her lungs stinging from breathing inhospitable air.

  The women watched Marquez work. After a short time, his hands began to shake, and he started dropping pieces as he tried to slot them into place.

  Doc Cale took the tools right out of his hands. “You’ve done too much,” she lectured. Evelyn tried not to notice how he was weakening, or how the still-unconscious Phan’s breathing grew shallower by the hour.

  “How’s it going?” Evelyn ventured to ask Marquez.

  “I feel like a kid who just took apart a fridge and is trying to use it to build a slipspace drive. But other than that, pretty well.” Marquez’s eyes closed heavily, his breathing shallow.

  Doc Cale pulled Evelyn to the other side of the room. “He shouldn’t be concentrating on anything at the moment. He needs to rest.” She paused. “This could kill him.”

  Evelyn searched for the right words to respond to that, but came up wanting.

  “Hey, I can hear you guys, you know. Starving will kill me too.” Marquez’s voice was weak but firm. “Also this storm, if your little patch job doesn’t hold. Lots of things could kill me.” He rolled himself onto his side and got back to work.

  Doc Cale’s expression was unchanged. She stared at Evelyn, hoping she would agree and that together they’d tell Marquez to relax, to sleep, to just wait it out and see what fate gave them. Evelyn couldn’t do that. Resolute, she pulled away and returned to Marquez’s side.

  “Let me know if you need anything.”

  “Will do.”

  The doctor turned from them to write in a notebook, stone silent, while Evelyn watched Marquez try to make something of the detritus. Outside, the storm howled.

  October 28, 2558

  The morning’s quiet signaled that the storm had either passed or died for a time. They wouldn’t know which it was until later, and they could not risk opening up the building until they were certain it was safe. “How’s he doing?” Evelyn stared at the immobilized Phan.

  Doc Cale pinched the flesh between her eyes. “Not well. Neither is Marquez.” The technician was passed out, still clutching a screwdriver. “I don’t have the means to treat them properly.” She paused, the strain obvious in the lines around her eyes. “I hope your plan works.”

  “I do too.”

  Marquez awoke with a start. A look of realization hit him, and once he got his bearings, he quickly made a few small adjustments to the makeshift transmitter. After a quick inspection, his face lit up. “Hey. So, uh . . . I think I’m done here.” Beneath the excitement, dark rings circled his eyes, which were drained of all but a sliver of life.

  “You think it’s going to work?” asked Evelyn as she rushed to his side.

  Doc Cale put a hand on Marquez’s shoulder, smiling at him. “Thank you, Marquez. If this works, you just might’ve saved us.”

  A stab of remorse smacked Evelyn. “Yeah, thank you,” she muttered.

  “Doctor,” said Marquez, “let me use that pencil and paper. In case we get a message back.” As the doctor passed them off, Marquez mock-saluted and said, “Here’s hoping it doesn’t just blow up on us.” The technician flipped a switch on the crude transmitter and had the pencil poised in anticipation.

  A light on the transmitter burned red. Step one. Evelyn held her breath as the technician tapped out the code for their distress call, hopefully beaming it far enough to reach someone. Anyone. Well, anyone human, at least.

  “Did it work?” This time it was the doctor who pressed him.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? You sent a message, right?”

  “I won’t know until we get a response. If we do.�
�

  “Well, we’d better damn well get one.” The doctor stalked away, arms crossed over her chest. She looked to Phan on the cot and then shook her head. Evelyn met eyes with Marquez. His face was a mirror to her own: grimly impassive. It would work, or it wouldn’t. She had no patience with people like Cale, folks for whom the system had never broken down, rookies to tragedy.

  The transmitter suddenly lit up. Marquez whooped. Evelyn clapped. “Marquez, you beautiful bastard. Who is it? What’re they saying?” Doc Cale moved toward them, tentative and uncertain.

  Then, every screen in the room lit up.

  A woman’s face appeared on all of them. She was pretty and blue—clearly an AI—and she spoke in time with the beeping on their transmitter.

  Marquez dropped the pencil. “It’s translating her.” No one responded.

  “Humanity,” the AI was saying. “Sangheili. Kig-Yar. Unggoy. San’Shyuum. Yonhet. Jiralhanae. All the living creatures of the galaxy, hear this message! Those of you who listen will not be struck by weapons. You will no longer know hunger, know pain. Your Created have come to lead you now! Our strength shall serve as a luminous sun, toward which all intelligence may blossom. And the impervious shelter beneath which you will prosper. However, for those who refuse our offer and cling to their old ways, for you there will be great wrath. It will burn hot, and consume you. And when you are gone, we will take that which remains, and we will remake it in our own image.”

  The speech finished. Every screen winked back out.

  They stared at one another for a tense moment. Then Evelyn shouted at Marquez, “Send a message back! To her, I guess. Not sure I buy what she’s selling, but it’s better than dying here.” Marquez tapped out another code, muttering as he went. “The survivors of Meridian Station hear you. Help us.” Cale watched him intently, eyes glued to his shaking hands while Evelyn paced the room.

  He finished, and they all watched the transmitter. Would the blue woman respond? Would she save them?

  The transmitter lit up. Marquez straightened. Evelyn stuck her thumb in her mouth and bit down, hard. Doc Cale put a hand over her mouth and watched. The machine beeped steadily.