Zero-G

by Rob Boffard

  “Riley,” he says, his voice even, calm, reassuring. “You’re not making any sense. There is no way – no way – that I engineered Resin. Not even by accident.”

  The other techs have come up behind him, clustering in a loose semicircle. Above us, the Air Lab’s trees stretch to the ceiling, the lights filtering through their canopies. We could be in an old story – one that takes place back on Earth, with mythical monsters hiding out in the dappled half-light. I wish we were. It would be easier to fight those monsters.

  Slowly, I reach into my pocket, and pull out one of the beans. It’s one I took from the crates in the processing facility, where the Earthers were camped out. I gave ones just like it to Arroway, so he could test them. Beans that come from seeds identical to the ones Mikhail had when Anna and I took him down – the ones in the cloth bag that spilled out of his pack.

  I drop it into Prakesh’s hand. He stares at it, using the fingers of his other hand to turn it over. There’s a faded, pale stripe down the side of the bean, masked with thin hairs.

  “This is from a previous batch,” he says, then shakes his head. “Where did you get this?”

  He turns the bean over and over in his hands, his calloused fingers running up and down it, as if trying to make sure it’s real.

  I try to keep things ordered in my mind. “Some of us weren’t getting sick. Me, Carver, Anna. We hadn’t contracted Resin. Okwembu hadn’t either.”

  “OK…” he says.

  “Remember how you told me that the defective batches couldn’t be wasted? That it was being fed to prisoners?”

  “They tasted terrible,” Prakesh says. There’s no humour in his words, just an undercurrent of fear, and it nearly rips my heart in two.

  I keep going, telling him about the Earthers. How they weren’t sick either. “I still don’t know how they got hold of the beans, but my guess is that they stole them. They need provisions for the trip back to Earth.”

  “Trip back to – what?” Prakesh looks back at the techs. Some of them are shaking their heads in disbelief, but I can see the wheels turning, see them making the connections.

  “Nobody in the Air Lab got Resin,” I say. “Right?”

  He’s shaking his head, more in disbelief than refusal. “Riley, this is crazy.”

  “Because you were exposed, too. After all, you created them.”

  “It doesn’t prove anything. There must be others on Outer Earth who aren’t sick. Maybe some people just have a … a natural immunity.”

  “Maybe,” I say, trying to hold back the tears and failing. “But, Prakesh, so far everyone we’ve seen who isn’t sick has been exposed to those beans in some way. We’ve all come into contact with one of your previous batches. We either ate them, or touched them.”

  Prakesh slams the heel of his hand into his forehead, screwing it in, his eyes closed. “No, no, this is all wrong,” he says. He’s gone deathly pale, his walnut skin turning sallow.

  I try to keep things ordered in my mind. It’s hard, but I manage.

  “When we were exposed to that batch, we got a low-grade version of the virus. It was like those flu shots we get sometimes – we build up antibodies, and then we don’t get sick. Because we’d been exposed, we had antibodies that everybody else didn’t have.

  “The beans that came afterwards had a much stronger version of the virus. The rest of us – you, me, the techs, the prisoners – the antibodies we had kept us safe. We could fight the newer, stronger one off. Nobody else could, because they never had a chance to develop those antibodies.”

  I close my eyes. “The genetic engineering you did to the plants created Resin. You made the latest batch, thought it worked, put it on the monorail and shipped it out to every mess hall and kitchen in the station. People ate it, and they got sick. The only ones who didn’t were those who had been exposed to a previous batch.”

  He actually takes a step back, like I’m going to lunge out and bite him. It takes everything I have not to reach out for him. But I can’t do that – not yet. If I do, I’ll just collapse.

  Prakesh looks back at me. “A virus can’t jump from plants to humans,” he says, speaking to me as if I’m a child. “It doesn’t happen. That’s not how it works.”

  “Do you have any proof?” says one of the other techs. She’s come up alongside Prakesh, her arms folded, fury on her face. “If you’re going to come in here and accuse us of…”

  “Suki, back off,” says Prakesh.

  “Boss…”

  “I was in charge of production. This is for me to deal with. All right?”

  Suki looks at him like he’s gone mad, but nods. There are footsteps behind us, and I turn to see Jordan, along with Carver and a couple of other stompers. From the looks on their faces, I can tell that they’ve worked out what’s going on. I gesture at them to wait.

  “This can’t be true,” Prakesh says. “Tell me this wild theory has been tested, Riley. Tell me this isn’t just a hunch.”

  And I do.

  I tell him what Arroway found. How the link between Resin and the beans became apparent as soon as he began testing the samples I gave him. “They’re developing the cure right now,” I say.

  A cure. Unbidden, the ghoulish face of Morgan Knox swims up from the depths of my mind. I’m going to be OK.

  It takes me a second to realise that Prakesh is walking away.

  He isn’t running. He’s just walking away from the group, his hands laced behind his head, his shoulders trembling.

  “We need to take him in, Hale,” says Jordan.

  I didn’t hear them come up behind me. I turn to face her. “What?”

  “He’s behind one of the most awful genocides in human history. Hundreds of thousands of people…”

  “It was an accident.”

  “He’s still responsible.”

  “So what are you gonna do?” I’m shouting now, but I don’t care. “Lock him in the brig? In the dark? Make him invent, I don’t know, time travel so he can reverse what happened?”

  “Hale, listen to me.”

  “No, you listen. We’re going to need everybody we have to defend the dock. You touch him, and you answer to me.”

  Prakesh is sitting up against one of the algae pools, staring into the distance. The techs are standing around, talking in hushed voices, looking as if they’re not quite sure what to do.

  “Go talk to him,” Carver whispers. I look up at him, and he nods gently.

  I walk to Prakesh. Every footstep echoes off the walls of the hangar.

  He doesn’t look at me, even when I slide down next to him. After a moment, I rest my head on his shoulder.

  “It’s too big,” he says. “I try to look at all this, and I can’t figure it out. It’s like looking at the Earth. You can’t see all of it at once. I keep looking at it from different angles, and—”

  A single tear falls from his left eye, leaving a dark track on his cheek.

  “I was just trying to stop people from being hungry all the time,” he says.

  “You weren’t doing this alone,” I say. “All the other techs…”

  “Did what I told them to. I was the one who rewrote the genes of the plants. I mapped them, I coded them to make them grow faster. Maybe I didn’t test them enough. But I thought I’d cracked it – all the others did was help the plants grow. Not one of them could have seen this happening. None of them should have had to. It was my responsibility.”

  “I know what you’re going through,” I say, thinking of Amira and my father.

  “Do you?” he says, finally turning to look at me.

  I open my mouth to reply, and find I have nothing to say. The guilt I experienced after killing Amira and then my father was awful. Sometimes it felt like it was going to burn me up, turning my insides black and dry. But this? This is monstrous. I don’t know what he’s going through. What I know is only the barest fraction of it.

  My mouth has gone as dry as frost on the station hull. “I don’t care,” I
say. “You didn’t do any of it on purpose. You were trying to help.” I reach out and take his hand. “And none of this changes anything,” I continue. “Not between us. I love you, and I’ll always be here for you. No matter what you’re going through.”

  But as I say the words I can’t help but taste Carver on my lips. Feel his arms around me. That truth – if it is a truth – feels as enormous as the Earth itself. And like Prakesh said, I can’t see all of it at the same time.

  He gives my hand a squeeze. Very gentle, but it’s there.

  I hear the soft clinking of body armour, and look up.

  “Time to go,” Jordan says.

  71

  Riley

  I want to bring the techs with us, thinking that we’ll need all the manpower we can get. Jordan doesn’t let me. “There aren’t enough weapons,” she says. “Besides, these geeks wouldn’t know which end of the gun to hold.”

  Prakesh gives her a vicious look. I put my hand on his shoulder and his anger fades as quickly as it came. The sadness that replaces it is even worse.

  In the end, we compromise: a few techs come with us, and the rest head up to the Apex hospital, where they’ll help Arroway produce the cure for Resin.

  “What do you want to do?” I ask Prakesh. More than anything, I want him by my side. I want him close to me, where I can keep him safe. But I know better than to voice these thoughts.

  He takes a long time to answer. “I’ll be along a little later. I need to think.”

  Without another word, he walks off across the Air Lab.

  There’s nothing left to do but head for the dock.

  I’ve been here before, on a cargo run years ago. It’s in Gardens, right on the border of Apex. The entrance is on the top level by the monorail tracks, with a massive corridor leading off it. One wide enough to allow big shipments of asteroid slag to pass through.

  The doors at the front of the dock stopped working a century ago. Nobody ever fixed them. So as we’re walking up, I can see right inside the huge, cavernous hangar, just as big as the Air Lab. I’d forgotten how enormous it is – and how hard it’s going to be to defend.

  On the far side are the giant airlock doors, bisected by a magrail similar to the one that powers the monorail cars. From the little bit of knowledge I have of how the dock works, the magrail extends outside, running along the hull. Tugs match the speed of the spinning station, then latch onto it so they can come inside the dock without having to worry about crashing.

  The tugs are lined up along each wall, squat and menacing. There are only a few left – over the years, plenty of people have managed to steal one, desperately hoping it’ll have enough range to get them back to Earth.

  Tseng is nowhere to be seen. Can’t say I’m surprised. The remaining stompers are gathered by the rusted hangar doors. Usually, there’s a hardened group guarding the dock from intruders, so it’s jarring to see such a small crowd there, dwarfed by the entrance. Anna, Walker and the rest of the Tzevyans are with them.

  Syria is there, too. One of the stompers is looking down at him. He barely reaches the height of her shoulders. This time, she’s the one doing the shouting, while Syria stands mute, with his back to us.

  “Maybe you aren’t understanding the maths here,” she says. Her finger jabs his chest. Once. Twice. “Six crowd barriers left in this sector, and the entrance is about three times their length.”

  “I heard you,” says Syria, slapping her hand away. Carver glances at me, his eyebrows raised. Prakesh shakes his head. He hasn’t said a word since we left the Air Lab, lost in his own thoughts.

  The other stompers watch silently, their faces grim. Whatever they were doing before, it’s like they’ve been drawn to this. Like they want to watch things coming apart.

  The woman doesn’t relent. “Unless you personally want to go dragging back the ones we’ve deployed already, we aren’t going to be able to defend the dock. It’s not going to happen. We’re better off getting in one of the tugs and heading out to the Shinso ourselves.”

  “So you’re just going to give up?”

  “Stompers!” I shout. “Eyes on me.”

  Everyone looks me, eyes huge with surprise. It unbalances me for a moment – the words just burst out of me, and I’m still not quite sure what to say next.

  Somehow, I find my voice again. “We are going to find a way to defend this dock, crowd barriers or not. Give me a headcount.”

  There’s the oddest feeling coursing through my body. Like the feeling I get after a sprint, or a well-landed jump, when every muscle is humming with adrenaline. Carver has his chin to his chest, his eyebrows raised, looking at me with comical shock.

  I glance at the woman who was complaining about the barriers. Her name pops into my mind from nowhere. “Officer Iyengar. Headcount.”

  She clears her throat. “Outside of the people you brought with you? Fifteen. That’s all that’s left.”

  I expect her to tack a snide remark on the end, but she just holds my gaze. My mind is whirling, thinking that we might have to pull some Air Lab techs from the hospital. But it won’t help – much as I hate to admit it, Jordan was right about not giving them weapons. Even if they know how to use stingers, and even if we have enough, we can’t guarantee they’ll stay cool-headed enough to make a difference. It’ll be better if the majority of the people in the dock are stompers, or Tzevyans.

  Right then, at that very second, I almost turn and run. As far and as fast as I can, away from everything and everyone. I keep my feet planted.

  “All right,” I say. I start pointing, jabbing my finger at each of them in turn. “You and you. We need every weapon we can get our hands on. Every stinger we can find. You: go to the hospital, see if anyone’s responded to the cure yet, and get them down here. We need manpower. You three: start moving those crowd barriers. See if we can bottleneck these people.”

  Anna says, “Can we get word to the Earthers, somehow? Maybe if we tell them about the reactor, they’ll…”

  “Not a chance,” Carver says. “They’ll think it’s a trick.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” I say. “We have to let them know what’ll happen if they take the Shinso.”

  “No,” Iyengar says. “We don’t know where they are. We could miss them entirely, and they might not listen to us if we find them.”

  I think hard, picturing the Earthers in my mind. “They’ve got weapons, and they’ve got heavy equipment with them, plus supplies. My guess is they’ll be sending an advance force to clear us out, so they can take the tugs. There won’t be as many of them, but they’ll be heavily armed.”

  Behind us, Jordan shakes her head. “They’d be walking right into the line of fire. They’d have to know that.”

  “Maybe,” I say, choosing my words carefully, aware of the need to have Iyengar onside. “But I don’t think it’ll stop them. They want to get off this station bad.”

  Without another word, I walk past her into the hangar, looking around for something we can use to create longer barricades.

  An idea forms. “The tugs,” I say, pointing at one of the ships. “Can we get them going? Position them in front of the entrance?”

  Jordan interjects. “Flying a tug in an enclosed space? That’s a bad, bad, bad idea. Not even seasoned pilots try that one.”

  “This is insanity,” says Syria. “Why don’t we just blow up the tugs? Hell, I’ve got demo experience – I could do it.” He takes a step towards the nearest tug, but Carver stops him.

  “If we survive this, we’re going to need to get the broken-up asteroid inside for processing,” he says. “We can’t do that with disabled tugs.”

  Taking a deep breath, I turn to Jordan. “Find us a pilot. Somebody with tug experience. I don’t care how dangerous it is – it’s all we’ve got.”

  “I don’t even know if there are any pilots left.”

  “Just look.”

  As she turns to leave, something else occurs to me. I call her back. “Find Tseng. Get h
im down here. And get on the line to the Shinso. Tell them to get as far away as they can.”

  Shaking her head, Jordan walks off. Syria and Anna follow her, leaving Carver and me standing by the tug.

  “They won’t have time, you know,” says Carver.

  “Who?”

  “The Shinso. They’re in orbit around us, and they won’t be running their engines. They won’t have time to get out of range of the tugs before this is all over.”

  “Doesn’t matter. We need to warn them.”

  “Right.” He lets out a long, slow breath, staring around the dock. “What about us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, Captain Riley’s dished out orders to everyone,” he says. “And hasn’t left any for herself. Or her trusty sidekick.”

  Before I can answer, he says, “Listen, about earlier…”

  I cut him off before he can remind me of our kiss, hating myself for having to do it, hating myself for not knowing what to think. “We’ll deal with that later, OK?” I say. “After all this is over.”

  “Right,” he says, a small smile crossing his face. “When we’ve saved the world. Again.”

  “From what I remember, I was the one who saved it last time.”

  The words are out before I can stop them. But when the memories come – Amira, my father, Okwembu – I’m surprised to find that they don’t feel quite as sharp as before. Carver stares at me, and then bursts out laughing. “Of course,” he says. “Sorry. Then this will be my first time. You can show me how it’s done.”

  I hear my name shouted from across the dock. I turn and see a white-coated figure jogging across the floor towards us. It’s a young woman, not much older than me, with golden-brown skin and a bob of dark hair.

  At first, I think it’s one of Prakesh’s techs. I’m on the verge of telling her to get lost, but then I see that she’s wearing the insignia of the station medical corps: two curved snakes around a vertical staff, the faded patch stitched onto the top pocket of the coat.

  “You’re Riley Hale?” she says, as she comes to a stop.