Alone

by Scott Sigler

  Old Yong raises his hands, gnarled palms facing out.

  “I won’t hurt you,” he says. “So please, don’t hurt me.”

  He has no weapon. Bishop and Bawden are with me. Victor can shoot out both red eyes before the Grownup can even move. We could slaughter these people if we wanted to. They know this, yet here they stand.

  I snap my wrist right, then left. There is a small whine as the bracelet powers down.

  Old Yong slowly places his right hand on my left shoulder.

  “Hail, Em. We’re on the same side.”

  I’m so confused. I killed the younger him, yet he hails me in the circle-star manner, one warrior to another? He hails me with respect?

  “Matilda and Gaston hold the bridge and the Tactical Command Center,” Yong says. “That means they control most of the ship’s systems—engines, navigation, weaponry and all external doors, which is why we couldn’t open the landing bay for you.”

  “So let’s take the bridge,” Bishop says. “And kill her while we’re at it.”

  “We’ve been trying to do both for hundreds of years.” Yong sounds so much like the boy I killed, it’s disturbing. “Matilda reset the navigation control codes. We think she’s the only one who knows them, so we need her alive. And you have to be on the bridge to use those codes. That place is locked up tight. Not even Brewer could access it. Is he with you?”

  I think of the sad old man in the white coffin.

  “Dead,” I say. “Buried on Omeyocan.”

  Yong and Old Victor exchange a glance.

  “Then he is at peace,” Old Victor says. “We haven’t seen him in centuries, not since the early days of Matilda’s rebellion. His death is irrelevant to our needs—the bridge is untouchable.”

  Bishop is getting agitated. “Then we’ll talk to Matilda, convince her that we need to leave.”

  Yong shakes his head. His strange mouth-flaps wiggle in time.

  “She will never leave. Matilda is obsessed—with Em and with Omeyocan. She would rather die than leave this place.”

  There has to be a way. There is always a way.

  “We must take the bridge,” I say. “Just because you haven’t been able to do it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. We bring new eyes to the problem, new ways of thinking.”

  Yong shrugs. “Fair enough. Our war room is the best place to show you what we’re up against.”

  Marcus finally musters enough courage to step out from behind the Grownups.

  “Em, come meet your people,” he says. “We’ve been waiting so long. See the ship, see how we live.”

  I shake my head. “There’s no time for that.”

  Bishop leans close to me. “A word in private?”

  He and I walk toward the shuttle, out of earshot.

  “You should go with Marcus,” he says.

  “Are you crazy? I don’t trust these people.”

  “Neither do I. That’s why you should go. See as much of this ship as possible, figure out if they’re telling the truth. If we’re going to take Xolotl, we need to know if Matilda has allies or if she’s as isolated as they say. Farrar and I will work on the attack plan with Old Victor, you learn what you can.”

  His idea makes sense. Still, I hesitate.

  “I don’t like splitting up,” I say. “It’s a risk.”

  Bishop tilts his head toward the shuttle. “Take our Victor. He’ll protect you with his life. Take Barkah and Lahfah as well. The Grownups probably don’t know she’s an exceptional fighter. If all of you have charged bracelets, I’m sure you can defend yourselves.”

  Maybe the Dragon won’t attack us. Maybe the Wasps are happy with taking Omeyocan. If they do come for us, though, we don’t have time to play it safe.

  I trust Bishop to come up with the best plan to take the bridge.

  I’ll do as he asks—maybe I’ll find another way.

  There is so much to see. Barkah, Lahfah, Victor and I walk with Marcus and Old Yong.

  I also brought Spingate.

  She was with me when we first talked to the Springers. I want her with me now. Her arm is in a sling. She winces with every step, but she gladly bears the pain for a chance to see this new wonder. For now, at least, I don’t care what Theresa did—she is my friend and I want to share this with her.

  Lahfah still looks like she just stepped off the battlefield. Barkah, however, is wearing his emerald-green coat and the necklace, his symbol of office. I wonder how many outfits he packed.

  He tries to maintain his regal aura, but he’s slowed by his wounds, and he’s having a hard time processing what he sees. For him, a ship like this is the stuff of legends. No one he knows has ever seen anything like it. Only in the past year have his people stopped living underground—this must be overwhelming for him.

  Lahfah is amazed and doesn’t bother to hide it. She makes little noises at each new thing we see—the Springer equivalent of ooh and aah, I think.

  The hallways are similar to what Spin and I saw when we first woke up. Stone. Only now does it strike me as odd there’s so much stone on a starship.

  If I live through this, maybe I’ll research the Xolotl’s construction when I write the history of our people.

  Marcus shows us an orchard. The huge room is identical in size to the Garden where we first ate fruit, where I killed the pig, where Bello was taken. That place was overgrown and wild: bushy trees with dead branches galore; walled pool choked with thick plants and surrounded by waist-high grass; forests so dense you couldn’t walk through the underbrush without getting scratched; ceiling lights peppered with dark spots; water spraying out of a broken fountain.

  In this orchard, trees grow in regimented rows, not mad tangles. Nothing blocks my view of the massive room’s stone walls. Branches are pruned. The fruit looks healthy. The pool is bordered by a long rectangular brick wall, the grass around it is freshly mowed. There are chips and cracks here and there, sure, but those have been neatly patched with concrete or some other substance. The fountain consists of three stacked marble bowls, water spilling from top to middle to bottom. The sound it makes is lovely. And the light—the entire ceiling glows soft white. Our Garden was quite dim in comparison.

  Perhaps twenty people of all ages are working in the orchard. They wear togas similar to Marcus’s, in various colors and patterns. They pick fruit, prune trees, sweep the stone walkway surrounding the pool. When they see me and the others, they stop working.

  They stare.

  Spin, Victor and I are likely the first outsiders they’ve ever seen, and it’s a safe guess they’ve never laid eyes on a Springer.

  I learn that the orchard’s ceiling lights are specifically made for these fruit trees, and that all other crops are grown in a place called “the Flatland.” I remember Brewer mentioning that word. I ask Marcus what it is. He says I have to see it to understand it, that we’ll finish our tour there.

  Marcus and Old Yong show us more.

  The “Coop” is lined with racks and racks of cages, each cage holding a black chicken. Totally black: beak, feet, eyes, crest…even the feathers, which gleam with a purple iridescence.

  Thousands of chickens.

  Barkah looks at one up close, asks me if Springers can eat them. I tell him I think so, but we’ll check with Kalle. Lahfah hops up and down with excitement—I think her word for the chickens loosely translates to “fat midnight blurds.”

  The pigs that killed Latu were black, too. And when we were here before, Brewer showed us a display of all-black cows that are supposedly somewhere on the Xolotl.

  “Why are all the animals black?” I ask.

  “Per the Founder’s scriptures,” Yong says. “Animals were to have no color.”

  Spingate and I trade a glance.

  “Why no color?” she says. “What’s the purpose of that?”

  Yong shrugs. “I think I knew, once. It doesn’t matter. Hasn’t mattered for hundreds of years—these are the animals we have.”

  The tour contin
ues. This ship is twelve centuries old, and it looks it. Neat and clean, mostly, but stone walls are cracked, doors are worn down by the touch of thousands of hands. There are ruts in the stone floors, made over the centuries by countless footsteps. Some rooms are dim, some completely dark.

  As we walk, Marcus tells me of the complicated system used to keep everything alive. Grain grown in the Flatland feeds people, chicken, cattle and pigs. Animal waste—including human waste—is used to fertilize the grain fields. Crop leavings and any spoiled food are taken to one of a hundred compost rooms, where worms and insects break the matter down into fertilized soil. There are still huge chambers full of ice frozen even before the Xolotl left Solomon, yet all water is recycled.

  In centuries past, he tells us, computers and robots managed the recycling of food and water. But after the rebellion, most of those machines eventually broke down. For centuries, these “New People” have dedicated themselves to mastering the system. It’s become a religion unto itself, with strict “scriptures” dictating what must be done, when, and how.

  This, at least, is a religion I can understand—if the system fails, everyone dies.

  As we walk, it hits me that for most of this tour, I don’t have that ever-so-slight sensation of going uphill or downhill. Occasionally we turn, and I feel it, but for the most part I don’t—that means we’re mostly walking along the cylinder’s length, traveling deeper into the ship.

  Some rooms are massive, full of strange machinery that either doesn’t work or hasn’t been used for generations. Yong tells us that much of the equipment is only needed when the Xolotl is traveling from star to star.

  This ship was designed to last a thousand years—a thousand years came and went two centuries ago. Spingate whispers to me that it’s no surprise things have broken down. She’s shocked the Xolotl is still in one piece at all.

  That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence, but it does speak to the technical prowess of the Grub species. And, I suppose, to the willpower of the Founder. The ship designs came from the signal, but this marvel was built by people.

  Marcus takes us through long corridors: cracked stone walls, worn floors, glowing ceilings, doors made of sliding stone.

  We see rooms full of people working on low-tech machines cobbled together from parts of far more complex devices. I’m reminded of the simple Springer factories. People spin yarn, dye fabric, saw lumber, manufacture tools and furniture, process meat and chicken for long-term storage.

  In some rooms, we see Grownups side by side with normal people. They, too, are working on simple machines, doing simple tasks.

  In every room, though, Grownups and New People alike stop what they’re doing and stare at us. Victor stares back, hard, letting the universe know we are not to be messed with. He refuses to sling his rifle, choosing instead to keep it at the ready.

  As we walk, we see hundreds of people, yet the ship is so massive it feels like a ghost town.

  Spingate seems to sense the same thing.

  “You told Em there were over five thousand of you,” she says to Marcus. “So where is everyone?”

  “In the Flatland.” He’s obviously proud of that place, says the name with reverence. “We’re heading there next.”

  As we continue down the main corridor, I start to see marks from ancient battles. Chips and gouges in the stone walls, maybe from bullets. Blackened streaks from old fires or explosions. Some doors are cracked so badly that the slabs aren’t worth fixing.

  Below a particularly evil-looking scorch mark, I see three names engraved into the stone wall.

  Jasmine Givens 3461–3484

  Steve Wren 3470–3483

  Claude Zacanna 3465–3483

  “Marcus, who were these people?” Spingate asks.

  “They died in the rebellion,” he says.

  Yong runs his black fingers along Steve Wren’s name.

  “The fighting was awful,” he says. “It got so bad there was no time for proper funerals. Where people fell, we chiseled their names, then we ejected their bodies into space.”

  “What about where we woke up?” Spin asks. “There were bodies all over our area. You didn’t eject those.”

  Yong nods. “Brewer sealed that section off, to protect you. He didn’t let anyone in. Not Matilda, not us, not anyone. He was alone for over four hundred years.”

  All that time. He was more of a hero than I knew.

  Yes, Brewer—your life mattered.

  We keep walking. The names grow more frequent.

  One of them stops me cold: Halim Horn 3445–3484.

  I think of the boy that died in the streets of Uchmal, who wanted to become more than he was. The person who died in this hallway, was it one of Halim’s ancestors? Or perhaps even Halim’s progenitor? If so, both versions of him are gone forever.

  It makes things feel so futile. We fight to survive, we protect our own, we struggle on, and in the end every single one of us will die.

  The Grownups wanted immortality. There is no such thing.

  “These numbers,” I say, gently touching the 3445–3484 next to Halim’s name, “what are they?”

  Marcus gives me a funny look.

  “Are you serious? They’re dates. Birth year and the year of death.”

  Dates…calendars…I realize, yet again, that my lack of a past leaves me missing something important, something basic.

  “What year is it now?” I ask.

  Marcus starts to answer, then stops. He looks off, thinking. “You know, I’m not sure. Years don’t really matter here anymore.”

  “For you it could be year zero,” Yong says to me. “Start history over if you like. Leave all of this hatred and violence behind.”

  That’s what we’ve always wanted, really—to start anew. But if I am to write about the history of our people, I can’t do that without knowing how much time has passed.

  “It matters to us,” Spingate says, reading my mind as always. “What year is it now?”

  “It is the year thirty-eight eighty-eight,” Yong says.

  Halim died on this spot four centuries ago. Two hundred years or so before the Xolotl even reached Omeyocan, before Uchmal was built.

  Marcus seems annoyed at himself that he didn’t know what year it was.

  “You wanted to make this tour quick,” he says. “Shall we continue to the Flatland?”

  “No,” Yong says. “There is something they must see first.”

  Another corridor, a short walk “uphill,” then a rattling elevator takes us higher. The farther we go, the heavier we feel. When the elevator stops, my legs are already aching with the effort of just standing. We felt this same effect in the Crystal Ball.

  Yong leads us into a dusty, wide room made of metal, not stone. A window runs the room’s width. Waving cracks in the glass, or whatever the material is, show that the window is easily thicker than I am tall.

  Through the window, the grandeur of Omeyocan, surrounded by the void.

  Barkah and Lahfah huddle close together. I don’t know if they had any external views from inside the troopship—this might be the first time they’ve seen the blackness of space, or seen their planet from such a distance.

  Below our position, the Xolotl’s copper cylinder arcs down to either side. There are craters all over it. Directly below us is a long, thick tube, twisted and warped in several places.

  “That tube was our primary weapon,” Yong says. “A Goff Spear, similar to the one in the Observatory. It was destroyed when the vermin…” he glances at Barkah and Lahfah, then back at me. “…excuse me, the Springers, as you call them, detonated a nuke close by.”

  Spingate breathes in sharply. “This ship survived a nuclear explosion?”

  “Two of them, in fact,” Yong says. “Weakened the hull some, destroyed most of our external weaponry. Pretty much all we have left is point defense and some long-range missiles. That’s why Gaston wouldn’t engage the other ships—with the punishment the Xolotl has already taken, h
e doesn’t think we’d last long in a fight.”

  Gaston—their Gaston.

  “But the Goff rounds are nukes,” I say. “The Basilisk and the Goblin look just like the Xolotl—why were we able to destroy those ships?”

  “I’m a soldier, not a scientist.” Yong sounds like he’s asked the same question himself, many times, and never got an answer he was happy with. “All I know is that the Founder suspected other ships would answer the call. She had a weapon designed to destroy ships built just like the Xolotl. The Goff rounds penetrate the thick hull, then explode from the inside.”

  Zubiri said something similar, that the bombs are nukes but have to go through the armor to work.

  “Not that it matters,” Yong says, tilting his head toward the warped tube. “That was our Goff cannon. It’s destroyed. Even if it wasn’t, we used up all our rounds against the Springer ship.”

  Marcus sighs heavily, as if all of this is unimportant.

  “Enough with the dead parts of the ship,” he says to Yong. “Can I show them the Flatland now?”

  There’s a whining tone in his voice I don’t like very much.

  Yong gestures out of the room. “Lead the way, Marcus.”

  I’m grateful to take the elevator down—maybe in is a better word—and give my legs a break. Back in the main corridor, we only walk for a few minutes until, far down the hall, I see a pair of huge stone doors, the biggest I’ve seen yet.

  The closer we get to them, the more engraved names I see. The names become so dense they cover the wall from floor to ceiling, all the way down the corridor.

  The slaughter here must have been unimaginable.

  We reach the door.

  Marcus is all smiles. “Welcome to the Flatland.”

  The huge stone doors slowly slide apart.

  What I see beyond overwhelms me.

  My head spins. I must be imagining things. This isn’t possible, we’re inside a ship.

  “The cylinder,” Spingate says, in utter awe. “It’s even bigger than I thought.”

  Not that long ago, she used her fingertip to draw a picture in the dust, trying to explain how we walked in a straight line yet wound up where we started. I kind of understood, but also kind of didn’t.