by C. Gockel
“Damn it,” Noa hissed. “We’re carrying too much water.”
That was when James felt the water around his ankles.
“Open the skylight, James!” Noa shouted.
He did what he was told—possibly because he was in shock. Noa hit the forward thrusters, gave more power to the antigrav engine, and angled them for some rocks jutting out of some rapids ahead at steep angles.
“Be careful,” James said, “That will flip us—”
The craft hit the rocks, tipped over, and water poured out through the skylight.
“— over,” James said.
Noa spun the craft right side up and laughed. “Hold on, we’re doing it again!” she shouted, taking them over some more rocks even as the sweeper ship dropped charges behind them.
“Close the skylight!” Noa commanded, and he did. Another charge went off in their wake, but the canyon curved sharply and Noa took the hover along the curve. Above them, the sweeper ship did not readjust as quickly. As they twisted around another corner, James looked over his shoulder. The sweeper ship was farther away, contained by its own inertia, but soon—
“As it picks up speed, it will overtake us and drop more charges,” he said. He felt like his life had been very brief.
Leaning closer to the wheel, Noa said, “I know.” She slid the craft around another bend in the canyon at full speed far closer to the walls than he ever would have.
“Tell me when you lose visual sight of them,” Noa commanded.
James looked over his shoulder. “Now,” he said, his body hitting the side door as Noa slid around another bend—his data banks registered that they were headed northwest. Maybe they’d be able to reach the rebels before the craft overhead blew them to smithereens.
Noa snarled. James turned around just in time to see the ship barreling straight toward a canyon wall.
Water was sloshing over Noa’s feet. She heard the sound of drones and sweeper hovers fading into the distance. Northward, according to her locator app … she closed her eyes … and a little light flashed green in her mind. Smacking the steering wheel, she laughed in relief and amazement. James didn’t make a peep. Worried, she turned toward him. In the dim light, she couldn’t see more than his silhouette. He was sitting very still, and very upright. Trying to get a rise out of him, she said, “Sometimes I amaze even myself.” It was a reference to the ancient “move-ees” they’d watched the night before. If he was Fleet, she would have cracked a quip from Lightyears , but since he hadn’t watched it, he wouldn’t get the joke.
She got nothing from him, not even a, “That doesn’t sound too hard.” Which was, frankly, disappointing. Did she have to be the only one trying to laugh at barely-avoided death? She tried again. “I am the literal embodiment of ...” What was the character’s name? “Han Solo. James, I think you should be impressed.”
James’s voice was curt when he responded. “They will turn back soon, resume looking, and find us.”
Noa flashed him a grin that she doubted he’d be able to see in the darkness. “Not too soon. They’ll figure we hadn’t disengaged the turbo dampener, and have made it to the mountains. Got a flashlight in here? I don’t have augmented eyeballs.”
“I … ” James said. “ ... do have augmented vision.”
He said it like it was a new discovery to him, and Noa wondered how badly he’d been hurt when he’d been shot down.
“I also have a flashlight,” James said, with more surety. “Just a moment.”
A few seconds later, he pressed the flashlight into her hand. Turning it on, Noa lifted the door on her side and shone the light in directions the headlamps of the craft couldn’t go. Behind them was a slim band of daylight, only a hand’s width high above dark river water. Fortunately, the opening of the cave was much larger—just mostly below the river’s surface.
“How did you know that the cave mouth would be large enough for the craft?” James asked.
“It was just a hunch,” said Noa.
“That’s not reassuring,” said James.
“We’re alive, aren’t we?” Noa said in what was supposed to be a calm rational voice, but came out angry and half-shouted.
James was quiet for a moment, but then he said, “Why haven’t they found us?” He sounded irritated rather than relieved.
“You’d rather they did?”
“Of course not,” he snapped. “But I want to understand. ”
There was an edge of something frantic in his tone. She remembered his words last night, “I’m just trying to understand ...” He wanted the world to make sense. So much of it didn’t. Noa swung the light around to the front of the vehicle. They were parked in water, but up ahead was dryish rock. Suddenly feeling tired, she said, “Their sensors picked up the cave, but they’ve input the model of our vehicle into their computers. Our craft’s manufacturer’s description specifically says it is not meant to be an aquatic vehicle, and so this hiding place will be completely discounted.”
“How did you know this model was capable of submersion?” James asked.
Noa blinked and pointed the flashlight back at him. His sleeves were rolled up, and his tattoos were back. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, but they didn’t seem as dark this time. Remembering how he’d reacted to them before, she quickly brought her eyes back to his face. “When we hit the water last time, we survived.”
“You didn’t know we could survive the impact when you plunged us over a cliff?” James whispered, his eyes wide.
“Nope,” said Noa, testing the water with a finger. She stared at the uneven waves around the digit and realized she was shaking from head to toe to fingertip. The cave was tropically warm due to the depth of the canyon, but the water was snow melt from the mountains.
“You risked our lives—”
“I risked a quick death versus a long painful death,” Noa snapped, blowing her cool completely. She closed her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she opened them again. James’s expression was a blank mask.
“It was a Hail Mary move, James.” She swallowed. Hadn’t he heard her prayer? “I’ve seen what they’ve done to hyper-augments like you, and I know what they’d do to me.”
His face didn’t soften. Annoyed, Noa looked away. “I’d like to move us up to dry rock and let this boat drain while I disengage the turbo dampener,” she said, as much to herself as to him. Gently pulsing the accelerator, she moved the craft forward. Sliding it up onto dry rock and turning it off, Noa said, “It is really lucky that we found this hidey-hole, I thought we were going to be stuck underwater, gulping at the air pockets as the ship slowly sank.”
“Lovely imagery,” said James dryly.
Stepping out of the vehicle, Noa shone the flashlight he’d given her down a long dark tunnel. “Maybe we’ll discover a new species!” She tried to sound gleeful and carefree, to ease herself off of her adrenaline high, and to forget that she was still breathing too fast and trembling from it.
“What type of new species?” said James, sounding vaguely interested.
“A species like the one in the asteroid that tried to eat that spaceship in the move-ee last night,” Noa said.
“A creature of that size and mass would have been detected by now,” James said, climbing out of the craft.
Noa rolled her eyes in only semi-feigned exasperation. “I’m trying to lighten the mood here, James!”
James scowled at her. Noa’s eyes dropped to his bare arms. With each passing second, the tattoos seemed to be getting darker.
Shaking herself and leaning into the craft, she said, “Help me lift the seats up so I can access the turbo dampener ... do you have any tools?”
James didn’t say anything, but he helped lift the seat and retrieve a toolbox from the boot. Handing him the flashlight as he deposited the tools beside her, she said, “Go behind me and hold this over my shoulder.”
Rolling up her sleeves, Noa went about disengaging the dampening conduit. Since James wouldn’t talk to her,
she did it for herself. “Look at me, repairing the reverse power coupling!”
“You are joking,” James said, now standing behind her.
Not the witty repertoire or joking camaraderie she would have gotten from her fellow veterans, but it was better than nothing. “Yep,” said Noa. “I am Han Solo.”
Silence.
“Work with me! I can’t be the only one trying to crack jokes and raise spirits as we head on a course toward certain death.”
“Why not raise our spirits by not sending us on a course to certain death?” James said, his voice testy.
She turned around. His face was unreadable. She felt her skin heat. “Too late for that. No matter where we go.”
James was quiet. Noa put her hand over her mouth. The comment had been half barb and half justification for her risky actions, but she suddenly realized the truth of it. “They sent a hover-carrier after us.” A ship that could carry auxiliary vehicles and hundreds of personnel. She wasn’t finished with the turbo booster, but stood up, turned away from James, and took a breath that physically hurt—maybe just from the enormity of that sinking in. If the Luddeccean Guard wanted James and Noa so badly, even the mountains wouldn’t keep them safe. They’d be too busy running to help stage resistance in any meaningful way. She closed her eyes, bowing her head. “There are thousands of people in the camps. How can we save them on the run?”
“Millions.”
Noa spun to him. “What?”
Standing still as a statue, James said, “I’d estimate there are millions in the camps.”
Noa gaped. “How do you estimate that?”
“When you were asleep, I watched the Briefing Room channel for a bit.”
Noa’s eyes narrowed at mention of the “news” station.
“There were some callers to the Briefing Room—”
“How did they call with the ethernet down?” Noa asked.
“Telephones.”
When Noa blinked at him, he said, “They are devices that use the landlines they were talking about last night. Callers asked about missing family members and neighbors. According to Bob Wang, alien influence corrupted the data banks of many of the populace and they had been brainwashed into wandering from their homes and places of work—and the authorities were in the process of finding them and deprogramming them.”
Noa’s jaw fell. Her brain sort of blinked off with the sheer stupidity of it all. But when she finally spoke, the words came in a torrent. “That’s crazy—massive viral attacks of that sort of magnitude don’t happen when there is a biological interface. Even cockroaches can ward off thought control!”
James’s jaw did that sideways movement; his eyebrows rose. “I did an experiment like that in seventh grade!”
Noa’s shoulders fell and she looked at a puddle of still water on the cave floor. “I did too. But a lot of people on Luddeccea don’t believe their kids should study neural nets.” She’d only done that experiment because her parents had sent her and her siblings to a progressive fourth-wave school. She met James’s eyes. “There are a lot of people here who don’t believe in neural interfaces; and, even if they get one, they only use them for emergencies. They arrange their kids’ awakenings much later, they teach that the NI can be a direct ticket to the materialist culture of Old World sin, and that they are the antithesis of families.”
She touched the stumps of her fingers. And in some ways they were right, she supposed. Getting her interface had only increased Noa’s desire to get off world, to not become the happy housewife with six kids that Luddeccean culture encouraged. She pushed those thoughts aside. “So they’re claiming there are millions of people who just wandered off due to alien mind control?”
Voice too level, James said, “In part. Other callers asked about workers in the New Valley.” Noa lifted her gaze at the mention of Luddeccea’s small but growing cybernetics hub. The planet might be anti-tech, but the solar system was loaded with the rare metals that made cybernetics hum. Luddeccea’s New Valley was the perfect place to assemble the raw materials—cheap labor for the parts that had to be made by humans, with no need for an air dome, cosmic ray filters, or radioactive asteroid water. It was also where Ashley was from.
“The region is apparently a ghost town,” James continued. “According to Bob Wang, the workers were relocated to secure locations.”
Noa looked down at her tattoo. “They’re secure, all right.”
“It’s all very reminiscent of the Third Reich,” James said. “I’m sure many were exterminated … ”
Her skin started to heat at his calm, and the hair at the back of her neck stood on end.
“... but not all,” James continued. “There will be a need for cheap labor while Luddeccea transforms its manufacturing to a system not reliant on augments.”
He said it as though repeating a history lesson. She felt a prickle of sweat on her skin and it wasn’t just from heat.
“Do you have any feelings on this matter, James?” She didn’t try to hide the bitter edge to her voice.
“It makes me concerned about the possibility of being caught,” he said.
For a few heart beats, Noa couldn’t speak. “Don’t you want to help?” she asked incredulously.
“I want us to stay alive,” James ground out.
“Millions of people are dying. And you don’t want to do anything about it?”
“No,” he said levelly.
Noa rocked back on her feet. He wasn’t a coward; he hadn’t abandoned her—he’d taken care of her, very good care of her. But now he seemed remote, unfeeling. “You’re inhuman,” she whispered.
“According to the authorities I am not human,” he hissed.
And then she felt a little disgusted—at herself for saying something so cruel, at the fundamentalists taking over her planet, but also at him for forsaking the other innocent people caught up in the same mess he was in.
Turning back to the hover with a growl of frustration, she began carefully scanning the wires and ports, looking for anything that might have been loosened when she disengaged the conduit. And she also began to think. The Fleet wouldn’t let their own be arrested by locals without a court martial first. Which meant they didn’t know Noa had been arrested in the first place … and acts of genocide gave the Fleet carte blanche authority to intervene. So they didn’t know what was going on here, period. The Luddeccean authorities had managed to control the data packets that were being sent between Time Gate 8 and the wider galaxy by shutting down the ethernet, but that wouldn’t be enough. She shook her head—how did they control the mouths of travelers? Were they restricting travel somehow? That would be difficult, and the Republic would be suspicious and would question it. Action would be slow in coming, bogged down by the Republic’s near endless bureaucracy. She thumped her index finger on a wire and scowled. Still, she thought surely by now the Fleet would have an inkling …
She shook her head. Lifting herself out of the craft, she said, “I have to alert the Fleet.” She felt a small wave of dizziness.
“The ethernet is down … How do you plan on doing it?”
Noa turned in his direction, tools shaking in her hands. Why wouldn’t her hands stop shaking? “I’m not going to the Northwest Province to start.”
“Where do you plan on going?”
Where indeed? She took a deep breath, felt a bite in her lungs and sweat forming on her palms. She did know where. “I’m heading to Luddeccea Prime. You can drop me off at the nearest magni-freight line.”
She expected to hear “fine,” maybe “if that’s what you want,” and at most, “you’re crazy.” James took another step closer to her. When he spoke, his voice was almost a shout. “You’re going to do what ?”
Noa met James’s eyes. “You heard me.”
He didn’t want to believe what he’d heard. He didn’t care about millions, but Noa … he shouldn’t care, but he did. Dipping his chin, James said, “You’re going to the capital, the hub of the Luddeccean Guar
d, the location of the Central Authority of this world?”
“Yes,” said Noa.
“No,” said James, taking a step forward. She was so thin, her eye sockets sunken, her skin dry, and paler than he remembered. She was in no shape to go anywhere, much less to Luddeccea Prime. Noa didn’t back up, didn’t even wobble on her feet. She lifted her chin higher, as though she was challenging him.
He paused mid-step. Was he challenging her? A vision of swinging her over his shoulder, throwing her into the LX, and taking her to the Northwest Province flickered through his mind. And then he remembered finding her in the snow … She’d escaped a concentration camp; she would escape him. Or hate him. His vision went black for a moment. That was not acceptable. He took another step forward.
This time Noa did react. “Are you going to try to stop me?” Noa said, throwing up her hands. The pliers flew one way, and the pulse reader flew another, landing in water with a plop. And then Noa did back away, holding her hands in front of her. They were visibly shaking and she was looking at them with alarm … as though they weren’t her own. He could empathize.
Straightening and dropping her hands, she turned to the water. “I still need that,” she whispered, her voice slightly breathless.
He was barely listening. James felt like snarling—and couldn’t, just as he couldn’t smile or frown. She was going to get herself killed if she went to Prime. It shouldn’t be his business, but it was; and it made anger and frustration burn in his mind like a white hot solar flare. “I’ll get the pulse reader,” he ground out. He had to get away from her, just for a moment.
