Dusk

by Ashanti Luke

  “They seem a bit uninviting, no?” someone uttered more to themselves than everyone else.

  “Something is very unsettling. Why does a colony need fighters? Especially ones they can scramble that quickly. Something here is off,” Commander Uzziah folded his arms, watching the window intently.

  They moved farther away from the star that illuminated their way as the station loomed before them, now in clear view. They were close enough to see indiscernible movements in the windows like moirés on an antiquated vid monitor. There were four tethers that tapered into the base of the station. The tethers must have been anchored to the ground more than thirty thousand kilometers below. They gleamed in the light cast from behind and arrested Cyrus’s attention. Something moved along one of them toward the station. It seemed like a bulge in the cable at first, but the contrast of the polished gray to the shimmering gold of the cord it ran along proved to Cyrus that it was in fact an elevator car. It also proved that even though the station now eclipsed their view of the horizon almost entirely, they still had not witnessed the full magnitude of the thing’s size.

  As the elevator module became overshadowed by the titanic orbiter, the glistening tethers, catching and reflecting the orange rays of Set as the Paracelsus passed between them, gave the impression of white hot fire. It was as if the cables had been erected by the gods themselves to keep these strange men leashed to the planet they had chosen as their home. And then, the idea set upon him like a falcon, as swift as it was arresting.

  “Whoever these people are, they have managed something we could not accomplish on Earth for four hundred years,” the awe in Cyrus’s voice was magnanimous.

  Everyone, stymied in their own right, let the words hang on them until, some seconds later, Dr. Winberg expressed his puzzlement at the comment, “I fail to see what can be more dumfounding than this ordeal as a whole.”

  The statement was less rhetorical than it sounded, but Cyrus was too transfixed to be annoyed, “The very existence of this station is dumfounding. We could never build an orbital this size—not with tethers like that. This was all impossible on Earth.”

  “I don’t understand, we have the Lunar Tether, the Martian Cable Station, the Eros Slingshot,” Dr. Rousseau interjected.

  Dr. Qin understood what Cyrus was getting at, but was not sure where he was going with it. “Those tethers you mentioned are all much shorter; they aren’t under the same gravitational stress.”

  “Nor do they have the same problem of atmospheric corrosion. Aluminum suffices for the thinner Martian upper atmosphere, but these tethers—at least ten thousand kilometers of each tether—are coated in gold.”

  The words floated through the room, but were processed more quickly than his initial statement. “How can you know it’s gold? Any number of metals can exhibit that coloration and luster,” the anxiety in Milliken’s voice made him seem indignant.

  “True, but gold and platinum are virtually immune to atmospheric corrosion. The only coating suitable for Terran tethers is gold. Aluminum, in the atmosphere of Earth, would have to be repaired so often it would render the tether unusable,” the amazement in Cyrus voice could not be overshadowed by the angst of the moment.

  “Then how did they manage that here?” Dr. Jang asked, leaning on the console, trying to get as good a view of the glinting cables as he could before they were completely consumed by the sheer mass of the station.

  “Clearly, such an expense was not an issue here,” Cyrus said as a large bay door opened, still several kilometers in front of them. A mist of dust and small debris spread from the opening, catching rays of starlight as it rushed from beneath the door with the escaping oxygen. Then the humming ceased, and the new, profound silence, incomparable to anything they had heard in each of their lives, engrossed the ship. It was if death itself had enshrouded them and their ears had failed. The anxious warmth was now gone and was replaced with hard, cold fear.

  As their momentum carried them into the mouth of the colossus, lights inside the docking bay came to life. They were ushered closer and could see men in vac-suits in formation around the spot set aside for them. And the men were all brandishing weapons.

  eleven

  • • • • •

  —Did anything interesting happen at school today, Dari?

  —Not really…

  —Nothing at all?

  —Well, there was one thing, but it wasn’t a big deal.

  —It wasn’t a big deal? Is that why Miss Hasabe comm-satted me today while I was at the Arcology?

  —She comm-satted you?

  —Yes, and she told me about the whole thing. But I want to hear it from you before I say anything.

  —I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. Terry, Scott, and Anthony were playing by the air vent. They had some sweetbar wrappers and were making them hover over the vent. I was playing with them and I made a little man out of a stylus tip and put him on my wrapper. I was pretending he was riding on a lev-barge, giving a speech like the Chancellor, but the wrapper twisted and the stylus tip fell into the vent. The vent started smoking and it stopped, so we ran to the other side of the room and acted like we didn’t know what happened. They had to call a maintenance bot to fix it. It didn’t take long to fix, but we had lost class time because we had to wait in the hall. Miss Hasabe was losing her mind and screaming at everyone and when she started asking what happened, those guys told on me.

  —Is that it?

  —Well, no, not really. She calmed down a little and asked me in front of the whole class what my problem was, and why I was playing with the vent. It was kinda embarrassing and I felt bad because I wasn’t the only one, so I told her that I wasn’t the only one playing with it, but I didn’t tell who did it. She asked me if I thought that it was a good idea to do something just because everyone else did, and I told her that every day she’s always making me do things because everyone else does it that way. Then, she asked me if everyone was jumping off a bridge, would I jump off too, and I told her that it depended on how high the bridge was, what was underneath it, and why they were jumping off. After that, the class started laughing and she completely lost her y-drive and flipped out. She left class and a proxy came in for a few minutes, and when she came back, she was still kinda fritzy, but she was at least leveled-out again. She didn’t say anything else to me for the rest of the class, so I thought everything was atmospheric again. Besides, I was pretty hot at Terry, Scott, and Anthony for making me out to be the vent monkey.

  —I want you to listen to me, because I don’t want to repeat this again. I don’t care if your teacher is off her y and x-axis, you don’t mouth off in class again, copasetic?

  —But she started it. The way she came at me was sideways, Dada.

  —I understand that and I agree, but still, she writes policy in that room. If she comes at you sideways, you stomach it until you have a free moment, and you comm-sat me or you accept the consequences.

  —Well, what if she’s being a bully and she’s dead wrong? What if setting her level is worth the consequences?

  —If it is duly worth the trouble, and you feel you’re man enough to re-write policy, then when I ask you what happened, you damn sure better be man enough to tell me.

  —Fair enough, Dada.

  —Besides, I’m sure from now on, she’ll think twice about asking questions she doesn’t want answered.

  • • • • •

  As the ship had settled in the electromagnetic net inside the hangar, the armed men had stood around it as the hangar door closed and the bay pressurized. They had surrounded the ship, concentrating on the entrance hatch and cargo bay doors with guns that were integrated into the design of their suits—presumably so they could be fired in a vacuum. Instructions to lay down any arms and surrender their ship for boarding and inspection had been issued over their comm-link, and they had complied. The soldiers that had boarded their ship were neither hospitable nor gentle. The soldiers had shown complete disregard for the ship
and equipment as they had brusquely ushered the scientists from the bridge into the hangar, down a long hallway, and directly into a climber unit. The soldiers had only spoken to bark a direction through their speaker units, usually followed by some scathing insult, or to tell one of the scientists to shut up—usually followed by some barely decipherable, but obviously more scathing, insult.

  The alarming speed with which the climber descended had been countered by what must have been a gravity wave generator of some sort. The fall to the planet had taken a mere two hours—an impressively short time to travel thirty thousand kilometers in an elevator, but much too long to be shoulder to shoulder, surrounded by surly soldiers with loaded weapons who seemed to have a marked distaste for your presence—especially when you had no idea what the hell was going on. Jang had remarked to Cyrus that the station was called the J.L. Orbital as evidenced by a placard in the climber, but he had been immediately threatened with a weapon and told to shut his dung-sucking cake hole.

  Now, traveling along the ave in a personnel carrier that had been converted to carry freight rather than humans, wispy apparitions of vapor, too ephemeral to be called clouds, hang over the barren expanse like a cataract. The ave to the city was a wide, unnaturally straight depression, honed to a smoothness that made it look like water in the rays of Set that wavered in the lines of heat rising from the surface.

  The personnel lev that ushered them along was deceptively fast and yet moved more smoothly than anything planet-side Cyrus could remember. It was not clear how fast the carrier was moving until they began to pass tall, monolithic spires that seemed to mark each kilometer.

  The road seemed to be leading toward a second sun that stood at the end of the ave in defiance of the burning ball of orange gas alarmingly low on the horizon behind them. As they approached, Cyrus realized the orange flame they were speeding toward was a reflection of the light from the star behind them, and that the round ball that reflected it was a dome of some sort. It must have been overwhelmingly large as the spires appeared at a much higher frequency than its rate of growth.

  Even though it was smaller and less dense than the Earth in theory, everything about Asha this day seemed foreboding and unreasonably big. The personnel lev moved past a plateau alongside the road almost as fast as it had appeared on the horizon. Then, there was a pebble that grew to a boulder the size of the craft itself in a matter of seconds. The pilot must have known the boulder was there because he reacted to it even before it had become an obvious obstacle, accelerating the craft on its z-axis, rising momentarily above the precipice of the plateau, and then coming back smoothly down to its original altitude.

  Jang leaned close to Cyrus, uttering beneath his breath, “Did you notice something strange about that z-shift?”

  Cyrus mumbled a negative response through closed lips.

  “No hair-rise on the back of the neck. No EM flux,” he explained through his own lips, tightly pursed.

  “Gravity drive,” Cyrus muttered, a little too loud. One of the soldiers, his face obscured by his vac-suit visor, turned to face Cyrus. The soldier lifted the weapon enclosed within the arm of the suit and bellowed through a loud speaker, “No talking, terrasitic punt-mongrel!”

  Momentarily the heat that flowed into Cyrus’s face and centered behind his eyes overwhelmed his shock. He could not take weapons drawn on him lightly, especially with the pretense of intimidation. Even in his anger, Cyrus caught a glimpse of the thin badge over the soldier’s heart. It did not display a name, only a metal square with rounded corners and what looked like a hexadecimal barcode with a number beneath it—43235. When the soldier turned, the dome was large enough now to see that the light reflected by the construction was not a reflection at all. Blinding, a pale orange light was being cast from every inch of the city’s protective covering, but it wasn’t consistent. It was hard to look at for very long, but it seemed like the luminescence throughout the dome wavered slightly, and near the lower parts of the structure, the light seemed somewhat dimmer. All of the scientists were forced to turn away or look toward the ground, but the soldiers held their positions, the tinted faceplates of the suits sheltering them from the increasingly fierce light of the city.

  When they reached the dome, the light was almost unbearable, and even the interior of the personnel carrier was bathed in it. Most could only keep their eyes open for short periods of time, while others just kept them closed. Cyrus kept his open for as long as he could, sheltering his eyes with his hand when they began to hurt, and only closing them when the pain was unbearable. When he closed his eyes, streaks of orange and red still danced along the insides of his eyelids.

  The gates of the city were large bulkheads that slid open as the carrier approached without slowing. There was a long tube with track lighting that was much dimmer than the exterior. Details were hard to catch as their speed and dilating pupils lent too much contrast to the bleached, titian hues that commanded the bleak expanse outside. Then, as his eyes adjusted, Cyrus could see a fine mist dancing toward the center of the chamber in the tracking lights, swirling as it filled the tube. Some sort of mist was also being pumped into the carrier, which was beginning to slow down.

  Bulkheads on the opposite end of the long tube opened, and as they emerged from the tube, they were all flabbergasted. The city was large. There were high-rise buildings as well as smaller structures—all with a strange angular efficiency of design. Most of the buildings had windows, but a few seemed to have none at all. The aves were straight and uniform, teeming with levs of various shapes and sizes, and there was even a second layer of traffic several meters above the aves following the same patterns of movement. All of this would have been difficult to take in by a Fringer or someone who lived in a subsistence community, but it was only slightly stranger than the lives they all knew on Earth. The thing that floored their understanding was that inside this monstrous dome that harbored a seemingly cosmopolitan existence from the cruel wasteland outside, it was nighttime, and the stars were shining.

  “What the…” Milliken whimpered, involuntarily, and then immediately hushed.

  “The lights of the dome. They must be phase-canceling the sunlight,” Cyrus explained.

  “Not another word, you Earth-born son of a man-fuck,” 43235 was becoming more decipherable and more threatening, but Cyrus would not be silenced.

  “Probably been mimicking Earth day cycles for decades, maybe hundreds of years.”

  Soldier 43235 took a step toward Cyrus, his gun barrel nigh unto Cyrus’s chest. A harsh blend of anger, fear, and frustration moved through Cyrus’s body, rushing directly to his head and filling his limbs with impetus. Cyrus moved his face as close to the soldier’s visor as he could. He could not see the man’s face through the tinted plastic, but he didn’t need to. Cyrus’s words misted the visor as he spoke, “Shoot me, or get the fuck out of my face.”

  Cyrus could hear the soldier’s breathing escalating behind the visor as he extended his arm and pushed Cyrus back with the nose of the gun barrel. As soon as the barrel touched his chest, Cyrus lifted his knee and extended all the impulse in his body into a kick that hit the man’s solar plexus, sending him backward against the copilot seat of the carrier, and collapsing him to the floor on top of his gun. Cyrus stood fast. He was angry, confused, and rash, but he knew better than to pursue. And then it came—he knew it was coming, just hadn’t expected it when it did come. A blow to the back of Cyrus’s head sent him down to the floor. Cyrus caught himself, but lassitude overtook him even as the second blow came down between his shoulder blades. As his body settled on the cold metal of the floor, blackness swirled across Cyrus’s vision, and as the sound around him became increasingly more muffled, he heard the electronic hiss of, “Welcome to Eurydice, beta-hound,” as consciousness faded from his body.

  twelve

  • • • • •

  —Dada, where do uberhounds come from?

  —They are bred in labs in hystapods similar to the ones used f
or extra-uterine childbirths.

  —Extra-uterine means outside the mommy, right? Inside is called freebirth, but is really dangerous.

  —Well, ‘freebirth’ is a term I’d rather you not use. It isn’t proper or very nice. It’s called in utero birth.

  —How do they get the uberhounds to be so strong and scary?

  —They have nanoprocessors injected into their brains while they are in the pods to enhance their senses and strength, and so their disposition can be controlled by remote. Rumor is they may be able enhance the sense of smell so hounds can even ‘smell’ parts of DNA.

  —Does it hurt when they inject the nanoprocessors, Dada?

  —At that stage in life, I’m not sure they would even understand pain. I would think the unnamable shock of spending the very first stage of life forcibly detached from your own kind would be distressing enough.

  —Was I born in a pod, Dada?

  —Most everyone is these days. It makes it much easier to check for and correct defects.

  —Is that a good thing, Dada?

  —People seem to think it is.

  —What do you think?

  —Well, I tend to think our strengths make us good, but our shortcomings make us great.

  —I think that when I have kids, I want them to be born the right way. And no doctors tinkering with defects and all that.

  —Hopefully, when that time comes, we will have learned enough to just let nature do her thing and to keep our grimy little hands to ourselves.

  • • • • •

  The throbbing in Cyrus’s head and neck stirred him to consciousness. When he came to, he was propped up in a chair in a nondescript room. All the other scientists were arranged in three rows of chairs, while he sat in the center of the frontmost row. Tanner and Davidson sat on either side of him making sure his body stayed upright. There was a man in a peculiar outfit—a jacket that looked like a blue lab coat cut-off at the hips, buttoned with only the middle two of the four buttons along the front. The legs of the man’s pants were completely without pleats or seems, which made them look more like black plastic tubes than fabric. His hair was relatively short and looked as if it had been attended to, but still had no particularly discernable design. The man was flanked by two more men carrying assault rifles who wore khaki jumpsuits similar to early flight suits but lighter in color. Their insignias looked like a barcode and they had square medallions hanging above them.