Zero-G

by Rob Boffard

“What is it?”

  She digs in her pocket. “Doctor Arroway told me to give you this.”

  My hand is moving even before she pulls out the vial of liquid. It’s transparent, viscous and slimy, clinging to the walls of its tiny cylindrical container. “This is it?” I say.

  “First off the line. Why did he want me to give it to you? He didn’t say.”

  I tuck the cylinder into my pocket. “Never mind that. How do I give it to a patient?”

  “You just inject it into any vein. But that should be done at a hospital, so I can’t see what—”

  I don’t let her finish. I start moving, walking towards the dock entrance. After a few moments, I turn around and shout a thank-you in her direction.

  I’m going to have to move very, very fast.

  Carver jogs up alongside me. “Want to me to stay here? Or come with you?”

  He’s right. He should be helping prepare the dock. But I can’t find it in me to tell him to go. I need someone next to me. What I have to do next is going to take every ounce of will I have.

  “Come with me,” I say.

  He smiles. “Sure.”

  72

  Knox

  Beep.

  Morgan Knox hangs on to reality by the thinnest of threads. He’s awake, his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling of the isolation ward. Somewhere in the space below his neck, there is appalling, awful pain, as black and dry as space itself. He knows that if he pays attention to it, even for a second, it will overwhelm him, and he won’t be able to hang on. Instead, he focuses on the sound of the EKG machine. As long as he can hear it, he’s still alive.

  Beep.

  For the first time in what feels like decades, but must surely have been just a few hours, he’s fully lucid. He knows where he is, and what has happened to him. And he knows that he doesn’t have long left. Like the pain, he has to approach this thought at an angle, look at it from just the corner of his eye.

  Beep.

  If he had any strength left in his lungs at all, he would laugh. He set up his revenge so perfectly, executed it with the utmost precision … and then he was laid low by this. A disease. Something he couldn’t possibly have anticipated. If he’d put his plan into action only a few days earlier, he would have carried it off.

  Beep.

  It maddens him that he can do nothing about Janice Okwembu. But there is one bright point in the darkness: the little transmitter attached to his heart. The moment he dies, it will send out a signal to detonate the devices implanted in Hale. They will both die. But she’s the one who will die screaming.

  No.

  It takes Knox a few seconds to register that the sound has changed. His eyes track down from the ceiling to the wall, and it’s only when he gets halfway down that he recognises the sound he heard as human. Is someone with him?

  No. You’re not going to die.

  Amira Al-Hassan is leaning up against the wall. She wears the same faded red scarf, and blood has soaked the front of her top, wet and black. She shouldn’t be standing with a wound like that. She shouldn’t be alive. But it’s as if she barely notices it. She twists the end of her scarf in a clenched fist, and her eyes bore into Knox’s.

  He tries to speak, but barely has enough strength to move his lips apart.

  No. Don’t speak. Just listen.

  She propels herself off the wall, moving with an uncommon grace. She walks to the bed and stands over it, looking down at him.

  You think Riley Hale will suffer when you die? Sure, the explosives will hurt, but she’ll bleed out fast. You know that, even if she doesn’t.

  Amira leans in closer. Her lips don’t move when she speaks. We could have been together, Morgan. We could have spent our lives together. She took that away from us. You think she should die quickly? It’s not even close to what she deserves. Her death should take days.

  He reaches out to her, lifting his hand off the flimsy mattress. Trying to touch her.

  Stay alive, Morgan. For me.

  Beep.

  He blinks. The movement seems to last an aeon. When he opens his eyes again, Amira is gone and in her place is Riley Hale.

  73

  Riley

  It’s a very good thing that Carver and I used to be tracers.

  It means that we get back to the Tzevya hospital fast. We sprint across the sector, not talking, just running. I can feel the cure pressing against my hip, and some part of me thinks that every step is going to be my last, that we’re not going to get there in time.

  The hospital is still quiet, its beds empty. That won’t last. Now that we’ve got a cure – or what might be a cure – they’ll start distributing it quickly. Hospitals like this will become staging points, pulsing with energy, as Arroway and his colleagues start handing it out.

  Uncertainty nags at me – we don’t know how long we have before the Earthers reach the dock. We don’t even know where they are, or how many there’ll be in the first wave. But I can’t defend the dock until I’ve dealt with Morgan Knox.

  We find the isolation ward quickly. Knox’s face is caked with strings of Resin, and he’s still unconscious. But I can see him breathing, his chest shuddering as it expands and contracts. I don’t waste any time. I grab a syringe from a nearby tray, then jam it into the steel mesh cap of the container holding the cure. Carver grabs Knox’s arm, angling it towards me. With shaking hands, I inject every drop of the cure into his body.

  Nothing happens.

  “Is that it?” I say, watching Knox. There should be movement – when I injected him with the furosemide-nitrate, his entire body bucked and writhed as the medicine worked its way through him. Now, he’s still. Comatose. My nerves feel like frayed cables, their strands pulled impossibly tight.

  In that moment, I can feel the shape of the remote control, the one that would trigger the bombs. It’s still in my jacket, wedged in its container. But I have it, and Knox doesn’t.

  I snap my fingers in front of Knox.

  Nothing.

  “Let me try,” Carver says. Then he slaps Knox across the face.

  He pulls the slap at the last moment. Knox cries out, a gurgling sound coming out of his throat. His eyes fly open, track across us, not seeing. Carver grabs Knox’s chin, holds tight. “Wakey wakey,” he says.

  “Chest … sore.”

  “They’ve got a cure for Resin,” Carver says. I stop him with a hand on his arm.

  I take a deep breath. I’m thinking back to that little girl, Ivy. The one I grabbed when the Earthers were almost on us. Carver was right. I shouldn’t have done that. But I can draw on that same desperation, channel it into what I’m about to do.

  And Carver’s right. It’s easier when you’re not alone.

  “You haven’t seen people die from Resin, have you?” I say to Knox.

  Carver picks up what I’m doing immediately. “We have,” he says.

  “You’re awake for most of it,” I say. “The last half-hour or so. People cough up their own lungs. They go blind. They die screaming.”

  None of this is true. But Knox doesn’t know that. His breath is coming quicker now, rattling in his chest.

  “They’ve got a cure,” I say. “For Resin. You haven’t been given it yet.”

  “So,” he says, and coughs. It’s as if he has to use every muscle in his body just to form words. He tries again. “So cure me. I die, you die.”

  “Yeah. But now you die in agony, too.”

  I catch the spark of fear in his eyes. It flares for less than half a second, but it’s there. I lean forward, getting in his face. “And you don’t want to die, do you? You never did. You want to live.”

  “Help me.”

  “No.”

  “Help me.”

  “You want that cure?” says Carver. “Let’s trade. Her bombs come out, your lungs stay in. How’s that sound?”

  “Can’t … operate. Too sick.”

  I keep my voice as steady as I can. “You’re never going to touch me again. You’
re going to tell me how to remove them, and I’ll find another doctor to do it.”

  Anger and fear and loathing combine on his face. It’s one of the most terrifying expressions I’ve ever seen. I make myself keep looking into those eyes.

  “You killed my Amira,” he says.

  “She wasn’t yours, man,” Carver says. “She never was. She belonged to us. She was a Devil Dancer.”

  He doesn’t speak for a long moment. Then he says: “Left … wire.”

  I lean in. “What?”

  “Cut … the left wire. My left.”

  “So that’s it?” I say. “They open me up, pull out the bombs and cut the wire on the left? And what happens if they cut the wire on the right?”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Bullshit,” Carver says. I look at him.

  He returns my gaze. “He could be lying. The second those wires are cut, the bombs will go off.”

  “Telling … truth. Please.”

  But there’s no way of knowing. He could tell us anything, and we wouldn’t know until it was too late.

  I lick my lips. “You help me, I help you. You prove you aren’t lying, and I’ll inject the cure myself.”

  A little strength comes back to him then. He bats at Carver’s hand, trying to push it away. “I’m not lying,” he says, each word punctuated by a breath. “Cut the left wire on each bomb when you remove it. That’s all. Now cure me, because if I die, the transmitter on my heart dies, and it won’t send the answering signal back.”

  His words dissolve into a coughing fit. Carver sits back on his heels, his brow furrowed. “I don’t know, Riley. I’m not sure how we can—”

  I reach forward and grab Knox by the shoulder. “What did you just say?”

  He raises his eyes to mine. “What?”

  “No, no. You said—” I pause, trying to get the words right. “You said that if the transmitter dies, it won’t send a signal back. And that means the bombs explode. Right?”

  He stares at me in confusion, then nods.

  My heart is beating faster. “What kind of signal is it?”

  He points to his ear.

  All this time, it was right in front of me.

  Carver sucks in a shocked, delighted breath. He’s already way ahead of me. “I can do it,” he says breathlessly. “Won’t take long.”

  “You can duplicate the signal?”

  “Oh yeah. Just have to find the frequency he’s using, which I can do because—”

  “You’re a genius. Got it.”

  He flashes a huge smile, his eyes shining. “It’ll take him out of the equation. Even if he goes under, the gizmos inside you will still get that answering signal.”

  He punches me on the shoulder. It hurts, but I don’t care. I close my eyes, feeling relief too exquisite to describe.

  “Come on,” says Carver, pulling me up. “Let’s get back to the dock.”

  We’re halfway across the ward when Knox shouts after us, putting all the energy he can into his voice. “We had a deal,” he says, and coughs again. “You have to cure me.”

  I look over my shoulder, at the broken man on the bed.

  “I already gave it to you,” I say. “You’re cured.”

  Knox’s scream of fury follows us all the way out of the hospital.

  74

  Prakesh

  Prakesh sits on the edge of the roof, his feet dangling in mid-air.

  Two techs are crossing the floor below him, six storeys down. He’s amazed that they can’t hear him breathing – to his ears, each inhale is as loud as an engine turning over, each exhale an explosion of exhaust. But neither of them look up, and, in moments, they’re out of sight.

  Vertigo takes hold, the floor rushing up to meet him. He blinks hard, then squeezes his eyes shut, tilting his head back.

  “I have to think,” he says.

  The words come out as a confused mumble. But he’s been thinking from the moment he left Riley, from when he dodged the other techs and found his way up here, from the moment he swung his legs out over the edge. The result is no different. It’s as if something blocks the thoughts from forming, as if his mind is trying to protect itself.

  What keeps coming up, what keeps pushing past the mental barricades he’s hiding behind, are numbers.

  Population figures. The number of canteens in each station sector. Batch numbers, stencilled onto crates of produce in big black lettering. Monorail shipment times, printed in dull spreadsheets on his tab screen. There are strings of letters mixed in with the numbers, too. Cytogenetic locations: reference points for particular genes on particular chromosomes. Genes that he altered. Genes that he intuited would make the plants they belong to grow faster, bear more fruit.

  The numbers don’t matter. He can express the result in any equation he likes. He can rationalise it, tell himself that what he did made complete scientific sense. But at the other end of the equation is a single, stark figure. It measures in the hundreds of thousands, and it’s growing by the second.

  How could he have let this happen? How could he have been so short-sighted?

  Nausea takes him. He clutches his stomach, appalled at the sick pain. He is desperate to throw up, but the tiny, clear section of his brain tells him not to. It would spatter on the ground below, attract people’s attention, and he can’t face that. Using every ounce of will he possesses, he holds the tide back, clamping his mouth shut, gritting his teeth.

  Slowly, the feeling subsides. What’s left behind is even worse.

  Who is he kidding? He’s not up here to think. He’s up here because he saw what James Benson was planning to do – what James Benson did. He’s up here because it’s six storeys to the ground, a hundred feet up.

  A bitter smile sneaks onto Prakesh’s face. How could he have had that much hubris? Who was he to stop James Benson from taking his own life? He barely knew the man. That he could judge him, that he could try to control whether or not he lived or died … it’s obscene. If Benson felt there was nothing left, that the rest of his life was beyond saving, then who’s to say he wasn’t taking the honourable way out?

  And Prakesh’s situation is far, far worse than Benson’s. He can feel it pressing down on his shoulders, an almost physical weight.

  That number again. The one on the other side of the equation. Six figures, growing by the second. Because of him.

  Riley would miss him, for a time. But he saw how she looked at him, when she delivered the news, and he knows that taking himself out of her life would be a mercy. And his parents … it will be hard for them, yes, but it’s better this way.

  Prakesh is suddenly aware of his fingertips, clamped onto the edge of the roof. He can feel the grainy surface, scratchy under his nails. It would take the slightest push. A tiny amount of force. And there’ll be no Mark Six to catch him.

  His fingers start to move, his hands pushing downwards.

  Halfway through the motion, he opens his eyes. The floor rushes towards him, as if he’s already falling, and vertigo locks his head in a vice.

  It doesn’t matter. He’s almost off the roof, almost in the grip of gravity. In the next instant, it’ll take him.

  Prakesh lets out of thin cry of horror. His body is off the surface of the roof, on the edge of tilting into oblivion. He tries to pull it back, but he can feel gravity taking hold of his stomach. His fingers scrabble at the roof, his palms digging into it.

  No good. He’s falling.

  With a panicked howl, he tries to dig his feet into the side of the building. His arms are the only things supporting him now, the elbows bent at a strange angle, wrists screaming with pressure, his feet kicking in mid-air.

  Mastering every last ounce of energy he has, Prakesh swings his right leg up, hooking the heel on the lip of the roof. The motion is enough to shift his centre of gravity backwards. The edge of his ass touches solid metal. He teeters, every muscle straining, and then falls back onto the roof, slamming into it thighs first.

  “Oh,”
he says. “Oh no. No.”

  He’s barely aware of what he’s doing: crawling away from the edge on his hands and knees. He goes ten feet before he collapses, hyperventilating. The nausea is back. This time, he does throw up, retching thin streams of gruel onto the roof.

  The seconds tick by. With each one, he tells himself that he’s still alive.

  Killing himself would be the easy way out. That he could have thought otherwise amazes him. He would have regretted it immediately, cursing himself, horribly aware that there was nothing he could do to fix what he’d just done.

  And, really, what would his death mean? It would just be another number in the equation, another victim of Resin.

  Riley told him they were developing a cure. Resin won’t last much longer. Prakesh can do nothing about what’s already happened, but he might be able to change what happens next. He’s responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths; surely the only thing he can do now is to help save as many lives as possible?

  He can go to the dock, make himself available, do whatever they need him to do. Maybe he can convince the people trying to take the Shinso that there’s another way. And when it’s all over, he can help distribute the cure. Not make it – he’ll never set foot in a lab again – but he can get it where it needs to be.

  He lies there for a few more minutes. Then he gets to his feet, his legs shaking with effort, and walks back to the stairwell.

  75

  Riley

  The floor of the dock is humming with activity.

  The stompers have returned, lugging crates, filling the room with the sound of clanking metal. They drop the crates with an enormous bang, and start pulling out weapons – not just stingers, but other guns, too. I see Syria rubbing his hands with glee.

  Carver didn’t come back with me. As soon as we left the hospital, he was off, saying he needed to find a working SPOCS unit and a soldering iron. Now I’m jogging down the middle of the floor, wondering how I’m going to fit into the chaos. I do a quick headcount of my own as I go. Fifteen stompers, excluding Carver, Anna and me. Plus nine Tzevyans. Just under thirty souls. It’ll have to be enough.