Tracer [Riley Hale 01]

by Boffard, Rob

  Go, Riley, go.

  74

  Riley

  “This is Riley Hale. I’m in the control room in Apex. Oren Darnell is dead, and I’ve turned the heat convectors back on. I …”

  I swallow. My next words were about to be: Okwembu is responsible. She did it all. But before I can utter the words, I realise that they won’t help. People won’t believe me. I have to find her. I have to make her tell them herself. Somehow.

  “Whoever’s listening, none of this was my fault. I am not responsible. But I will find the person who is.”

  I can’t think of anything more to say. I step away from the screen, and cast another glance around the room. All the readouts seem to be OK, and the warm orange light from the screens seems oddly reassuring.

  I’m about to leave to search for Okwembu when something catches my eye. One of the screens at the end of the room, showing a view that I haven’t seen in years.

  The Earth.

  Scorched brown land, dull blue ocean. Swirling, simmering clouds, flecked brown and white. It’s almost unchanged from the last time I was shown a picture of it, years ago.

  But there’s something else there.

  Something horribly familiar, hanging in the middle of the camera’s view, stark against the curve of the planet.

  Every muscle in my body is paralysed. My mouth has gone completely dry, my thoughts frozen in place. I know that silhouette. I know it because I’ve seen it more times than I can think of. On broadcasts, in pictures. On the Memorial wall in Apogee.

  It’s the Akua Maru. The ship from the Earth Return mission.

  I tell myself to stop being ridiculous, that it can’t be the Akua, that this is archive video, something set up by Okwembu as a cruel, cruel taunt.

  My hand moves without me telling it too, touching the screen gently. An orange square blinks around the form of the Akua. An option appears at the bottom, displayed in the orange light. Ship broadcast frequencies: Inactive.

  I touch the screen, and the broadcast activates. I manage to say one word.

  “Hello?”

  For a long moment, there’s nothing. Then there’s a burst of static, emanating from speakers somewhere in the room. And I hear a voice, twisted with time and distance, as familiar as my own.

  “Janice?” says the voice. “Is that you?”

  I don’t know what to do. My hand is still on the screen, and I can’t pull it away.

  “Are you there?” the voice continues. An edge of anger has crept into it. “Answer me. We don’t have much time, and everything must be ready for my return. Respond.”

  With my eyes on the ship, I manage to speak one more word.

  “Dad?”

  75

  Riley

  At first, there’s just silence, broken by the crackle of the radio signal in the empty room.

  I can’t take my eyes off the screen. I can see the Akua more clearly now: the curve of her hull, the swept-down fins jutting off the sides, the cylindrical body. It doesn’t seem real.

  The static swells and roars. “Who is this? Who are you?” The voice fires a bright line back down the years to a man standing tall in his captain’s uniform, looking down at me, with a gentle half-smile on his face.

  “It’s me, Dad,” I say, my voice shaking. “It’s Riley.”

  There’s contempt in his voice when he replies. “I don’t know that name.”

  “Dad …”

  “And I don’t know your voice either. Whoever you are.”

  “Dad, I promise, I’m—”

  “No!” The transmission is so loud and so sudden that I nearly fall backwards in surprise. The voice is warped now, malformed, not just by distance and signal quality, but by something else. “Riley is dead. She’s dead. You’re a liar!”

  “No,” I whisper. “I’m not dead.” And then, louder: “Please, Dad. Please listen to me.”

  “Don’t call me that,” he snarls, and the venom in his voice burns a horrible, ragged hole in my mind. “You’re not my daughter. Do you hear me? You’re not her.”

  The static vanishes, plunging the room into silence.

  I hammer the touch-screen, desperately trying to raise him, my voice cracking and turning from a harsh whisper into a full-on scream. Every fibre in my body wants me to run; to run and run and never look back. But I can’t run from this.

  It’s some time before I can raise him again. When the static returns, I don’t hear anything for a long time, nothing but my breathing. Someone has taken the world I knew and turned it inside out. There is so much I want to say, but every time I try, the words won’t come.

  Eventually, he says, “Whoever you are, it doesn’t matter. You’ll all pay for what you’ve done.”

  I can’t make sense of his words. It’s like I can hear them individually, but not connect them. There’s no way my father could be the one speaking them.

  I force myself to stay calm. “Dad,” I start, but then my voice cracks again. “Dad, how is this possible? You’re still alive – how …”

  “Why do you keep calling me that?” he says, but there’s something else in his voice beyond anger. A tiny, desperate note of hope.

  I close my eyes, and slowly say, “Your name is John Abraham Hale. You were born on December Tenth, in Apogee. You married Arianna Tahangai on Outer Earth when you were twenty-one years old.”

  “None of that means anything. That doesn’t prove who you are.”

  I keep my eyes closed. “When I was five, you showed me one of your space rocks. You got it from your missions on the asteroid catchers. Mom didn’t want you showing it to me – I think she thought it was radioactive or something. But when she was away you took it out and let me hold it, one night when you were putting me to bed. The rock had so many colours in it – we tried to name all of them, and then we made up names for the colours we hadn’t seen before. Afterwards, we—”

  “Stop,” he says, and this time his voice is quiet. “This … this is impossible. You can’t be her.”

  “No, Dad. I’m here and I’m alive and please, please talk to me.”

  “Riley” – and, at last, it’s his own voice that cracks, seesawing between fear and disbelief – “how are you doing this? Where are you?”

  “In the main control room in Apex.”

  “Is Janice Okwembu with you?”

  Okwembu. I’d forgotten about her. I look over my shoulder at the door, but it’s still shut. “No, Dad, she’s not,” I reply.

  Something catches my eye. A tiny lens, positioned at the top of the touch-screen. “Dad,” I say. “There’s a camera in the control room. Do you have one too?”

  “Yes,” he replies. His voice has a new note of strength in it. “Yes, of course. I’ll try to establish a link.”

  It takes a little while, and a lot of navigating through submenus to do it, but eventually a tiny blinking icon appears in the bottom right corner. I touch it; the Akua, and the stars behind it, vanish. The screen is black, and for a moment I think the link has failed – but then the blackness moves, and I realise it’s his body close to the screen, blocking out the light. The feed glitches and stutters, but it works. He moves into view, and for the first time in seven years, I see my father.

  The man staring back at me is a ruin, a scarred, wrinkled old man, his face ringed by a dirty, matted shock of hair. His eyes – at first, they’re as dull and lifeless as the planet he travelled too. But when they meet mine, recognition dawns, flaring like a tiny star. And in the crags and furrows on the face, I recognise him too.

  He’s wearing a tattered tunic. I can just make out a piece of faded red piping on the shoulder. Behind him, the cabin of the Akua is dark, with a few flickering lights illuminating black metal and coiled cables.

  “Oh, Riley,” he whispers. “I – I thought you were – she told me you were dead,” he finishes, and a single tear falls down his cheek.

  I had defences up the moment I first heard his voice. I didn’t think about it, but I did. When I s
ee the tear, every one of them cracks and collapses. My own tears come, too late, seven years too late.

  “I’m here,” is all I can get out, before the sobs come, thick and fast. Now it’s not the world that’s ended. It’s me. Every memory I’ve ever had of him swims to the surface, one by one: him picking me up, holding me above his head. With my mother, smiling at me from the door of our quarters. And that last goodbye, before the Earth Return mission, standing above me, the smile on his face warm and genuine. I can’t connect them to what I see on the screen.

  “You’re alive, Dad,” I say after a time, wiping away tears. “You’re alive! How? How did you do it? What about the rest of the crew? Where have you—”

  He holds up a hand, and for a fleeting moment I catch a glimpse of the captain he once was.

  “The first thing you need to know, my darling, is that this ship is on a course for Outer Earth. It’s coming, and in less than two hours it will collide with you. The whole station will be destroyed.”

  “What?” I say, confused. “Dad, is there a problem with the engines? We can fix it. We can come to you.”

  “No!” His face twists with fury. I physically recoil from the screen; I can’t understand the look on his face. “This is how it has to be. This is how it’s meant to be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he says, speaking through gritted teeth, forcing himself under control, “you left us to die. Everyone on Outer Earth turned their backs on us.”

  “I don’t understand. They said the Akua burned up in the atmosphere.”

  He laughs, a sound tinged with bitterness. “We didn’t burn up. The reactor malfunctioned during the entry process. We had to crash-land, bring the whole thing down manually. And everyone, every single person on Outer Earth, let it happen. You did nothing. You just went on with your lives.”

  My hands are gripping the edge of the control panel, the knuckles white. I release them slowly, keeping my eyes on the figure in the screen, watching him as one might watch someone wielding a knife. What he’s saying can’t be true. There’s no possible way a ship could crash, spend seven years on a broken planet, and then somehow manage to find its way back.

  “Tell me what happened,” I say. “Tell me from the beginning.”

  My father appraises me, his eyes locked on mine. After a minute, he says, “It took years to develop all the machines needed to establish a colony back home. Earth’s biosphere was a disaster, and we had to try and fix it. Outer Earth couldn’t hold us forever.”

  He pauses. “I should have been home in two years. With you. With your mother.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Something happened in the reactor. An explosion of some kind. How we didn’t burn up in the atmosphere, I’ll never know. We managed to put down in a place called Kamchatka, in what used to be eastern Russia. It was a miracle that we were alive. Nearly all the basic functions of the ship just shut down.”

  “Then why did they tell us that the ship had been destroyed? Why lie to us?”

  “A man named Marshall Foster was Station Command for the mission. He—”

  “I know who he was.”

  He gives a harsh laugh. “Then imagine if a rescue mission had been mounted. There’d be a chance to investigate the cause of the explosion properly. If it turned out that Foster was in some way responsible for what happened, if it was down to something he missed or a calculation he got wrong, then his reputation would be ruined.”

  “Dad, that doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does, if you knew Foster. He was always obsessed with his own legacy. He wanted to be on the right side of history. Better that the mission failed because of an unknown mechanical issue than because of something he might have done. He wouldn’t risk it. He thought we could be forgotten about. And you – all of you – believed him. You’re as guilty as he is.”

  “Dad, that’s not true. If we’d known, if everybody had known, we would have done something. We would have sent help.”

  “We sent endless messages. Activated our distress beacons. And we got nothing. We thought someone would come for us. But as each day went past, and each year, we realised that Foster had left us to rot, locking our signal away, and everyone on Outer Earth just stood back and let him do it.”

  “No. We were lied to. All of us. If anybody had known, a ship would have been sent. You have to believe me.”

  He turns away from the camera. I can hear him muttering something, but I can’t make out the words.

  A thought occurs to me. “Dad, how did you survive? How did you eat?”

  “Oh,” he says dismissively, still staring at something I can’t see. “A lot of our terraforming machinery was destroyed during the crash, but we managed to get some of it working again. Eventually, I worked out how to turn the power back on. How to rebuild the ship.”

  “But food …”

  There’s a long pause. Eventually, his eyes meet mine, and the face that turns back to me is filled with anguish. “I’ve done terrible things, Riley. Things you can’t imagine. We turned on each other, and I did what I had to. I survived.”

  I raise my hand to my mouth, all the blood freezing in my veins.

  “I worked for years to repair the system,” he says. “It was so hard. And there was no one for a long, long time. I forgot how to speak, for a while. All I did was work on the reactor. I was convinced the Akua could fly again. But even if I did get it working, I couldn’t have gone anywhere. Our guidance system was damaged. Without precise data, there was nowhere we could go. I’d almost given up hope.

  “And then one day, there’s a signal. And it’s her. Telling me she knows I’m here. That she wants to help, that she wants me to use the Akua to destroy the station.”

  “But why? You stayed alive for so long …”

  “The only thing that kept me going,” he says, “was you and your mother. As long as you were alive, I would stay alive too. I would get back to you – that’s what I told myself. But Janice said … she told me you were both dead.”

  “You could have come home.”

  “For what? The only reason for keeping myself alive was gone. Outer Earth and the people inside it hadn’t just left me to die. They’d taken the ones I loved the most. I wanted them to suffer.”

  I don’t want to picture what he must have gone through, but it’s impossible not to. Seven years in the cold, alone, barely hanging on. Aware that the people orbiting the Earth could save you – and believing that they chose not to. And then, right when you’ve lost the only thing that keeps you going, you’re handed a way out. A way to make your death mean something.

  “She gave me data,” he says. “Schematics, flight paths, positions in space. I’d worked out how to get the Akua moving again, but I couldn’t steer it. Not without her help. But we did it. It took two long years, but eventually I could point the ship towards Outer Earth.”

  “Dad, that’s impossible. You couldn’t …”

  “Oh couldn’t I?” he says. His voice has turned to ice. “I’ve spent my life in space. And I’ve spent years on this ship. All I needed was Outer Earth’s projected flight path, and I could line us up exactly.”

  “But she’d die too.”

  “Don’t you see? That was her goal all along. She told me that there was no place for humans in the universe any more.”

  “You believed her?”

  “What did I care?” he says. “She was giving me everything I needed. Her beliefs were none of my concern.”

  All at once, everything comes together. I see the Akua Maru, travelling at thousands of miles an hour, colliding with Outer Earth. I see the station tear apart, cracking in two, see it consumed in fire. No one will survive.

  Your world’s going to end.

  I pull my jacket around me. No, not my jacket: his. The one thing he left me. I push back the urge to tear it off, to hurl it on the ground and never look at it again. He must see the look on my face, sense the horror I feel, because his own expr
ession softens a little. “Riley, if I’d known you were alive … if I was told …”

  Deep in the hurt, in the fear and the confusion swirling in my mind, there’s a tiny core of hope. I lean close to the camera, forcing myself to stare into those eyes. I hunt for something beyond the hatred.

  “Yes, they lied,” I say eventually. “They lied about everything. About you. About the ship. Foster lied to us. But Dad, I’m telling you the truth. I’m alive. And I love you. I love you. Please don’t do this.”

  For what seems like an age, he stares at me. Then his face falls, and something in my heart shatters. John Hale, so proud, so courageous, has reached the end.

  “I can move the station,” I say, desperation in my voice. “I know how to turn it – I can figure out how to move it away from the Akua.”

  “Riley, I’m sorry,” he says. “The ship’s reactor is still active, but the main thrusters have died. Even if I kill the reactor now, I can’t slow us down. Moving the station out of its orbit will take too long. It’s too big. There’s nothing we can do.”

  76

  Riley

  I expect to feel something. But there’s nothing there. I find myself not wanting to look at him, my eyes fixed on the control panel instead. Looking at its lights. Its clean metal surface. It can control an entire space station – turn the lights on or off, cut the oxygen supply, kill the water or make it flow freely. All that power. And it means nothing.

  Again, I search for something to hold on to. But even when I focus on the faces of Prakesh, of Carver and Kev, there’s no reaction.

  On the screen, my father says, “Your mother. Is she …”

  My voice is flat. “She died a year after you … after we were told what happened. She just gave up.”

  I look at him. Sadness etches his face. “Who …” He licks his cracked lips, and won’t meet my eyes. “Who took care of you?”

  “Nobody. Myself. But I survived.” I pause, weighing up how much he deserves to know, but then decide that I don’t care any more. “I became a tracer, Dad. One of the best. Someone good taught me. She showed me how to run.”