by Matt Levin
None of the other names she had submitted had enough publicly available information on the net for Russ to do a real security screening, meaning he had instantly rejected them. But the security adviser had finally grudgingly agreed to allow Boyd to join Nadia’s crew, albeit with a few precautions.
Everything Boyd brought with him had been subjected to multiple scans, and he wasn’t allowed any weapons of his own. Even though the Exemplar had a footlocker’s worth of plasma handguns, Russ had required Vincent to install a fingerprint system on all of them so they would only respond to Nadia, Mason, or Gage. Same with the ship’s computer. And she was pretty sure the two former EDF enlistees were keeping close tabs on Boyd.
Boyd pulled himself into view. He was tall and well-built: broad-shouldered, without being overly stocky. He kept his hair quite thin, and his skin was the color of warm, brownish sepia. And he had more than demonstrated his value as a crewmate even in the one short week Nadia had known him.
“We had to recycle everything back during my childhood on Calimor,” Boyd had told her. “Air, water, you name it. My parents were mechanics. I liked following them and figuring out how to make everything work better. I wonder if that’s how I got into architecture after the exodus,” he had explained with a laugh. “Actually, do you mind if I see what I can do with the Exemplar’s recycling systems…?”
After Boyd’s improvements, Nadia appreciated being able to spend longer than two minutes in her cabin’s vapor bath chamber. “We should be landing any minute,” Nadia said with a grin. “Care to enjoy the view?” she continued, pulling out both the pilot and co-pilot’s chairs. “Best seats in the house.”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Boyd said, lying back into the co-pilot’s chair and stretching his legs out.
The shimmering light of distant stars and the achingly gradual enlargement of the planet Calimor were mesmerizing to Nadia. It was almost like the view was pulling Nadia out of the flow of linear time, transfixing her.
Next to her, Boyd uncrossed his legs before crossing them again, this time with the other foot on top. “The first thing we’ll need to do once we hit planetside is check the power grid,” he said, frowning. “I’m sure it’s fallen into disrepair, but we built those systems to last. I’d bet a good chunk of our power lines will still be operable.”
So much for the moment. “Boyd,” Nadia said with a wry grin, “you said you wanted to get away from your old life because you were stuck in a rut. Let’s just enjoy this moment, yeah? We can figure the rest out once we’ve landed.”
The man chuckled. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
While in transit to Calimor, Boyd had told her about leaving his job: “When I started, it wasn’t too bad, but in recent years I was working at least eighty hours a week. I’d spend the free time I had on various hobbies—I got into stuff like fitness, or cooking, or going on long hikes, or even a brief dating spree—but I usually burnt out after just a few months.”
Even after just a week, Nadia had gotten a sense of the man’s intense energy. She mostly didn’t mind it. Just not while she was trying to enjoy the best view of her twenty-seven years.
Returning her attention to the Exemplar’s viewscreen, she noticed grey specks floating in front of the planet. As the ship approached even closer, she realized they were derelict starship husks.
Most of the debris was just hull plating, fully removed from whatever ship it had once belonged to. But there were a couple of dead vessels that were mostly intact. Half of a Union warship gently lumbered by, orbiting the planet in its everlasting final journey.
Nadia knew from her own research and from Boyd’s accounts just how devastating the final battle between the Union and the Horde had been. But seeing the bones of the old war drove the point home in a way no story could. “I still remember what it was like, fiery debris raining down from the sky around the clock,” was how Boyd had described the situation. “Entire plantations were destroyed.” If even a fraction of the debris still in orbit had fallen planetside, Nadia could more than understand why the original settlers left.
Now, it was her job to make the graveyard a home for her people. Our first foothold in the Natonus System, she thought. The dead warships circling around their vessel felt like terrifying ghosts, warning her away. She refused to let them scare her.
The ship’s autopilot informed her that they were preparing to breach the Calimor atmosphere. Both she and Boyd fastened their seats’ straps over their torsos, and she dispatched a message to Mason and Gage urging them to do the same.
She realized she had been holding her breath as they crossed beyond the planetary threshold. Exhaling slowly, she felt her body jerk around violently as they entered the atmosphere. Immediately after exiting the silent vacuum of space, she heard a furious pelting sound as microscopic dust particles slammed into the Exemplar’s hull. Billowing red clouds engulfed her ship.
She could still vividly remember the first time she had flown in an airplane along with her parents. Nestled in the middle seat, her father next to the window and her mother along the aisle, she had gasped when they flew through their first cloud. Her infant brain had been certain their craft would blow apart. That was what Calimor’s atmosphere felt like, only the dust clouds were so thick that they blotted out everything else.
At last, their ship ripped through the other side of the dust clouds. Nadia pulled herself up to look out the sides of the Exemplar’s viewscreen, getting a view of the planet for the first time. Boyd had told her that dust storms were fairly common, but it was a completely different experience seeing huge walls of dust and sand shifting across the planet like gigantic vertical waves.
And then there were the mountains.
Part of Nadia’s fascination with the mountains of Afghanistan was how different its landscape was from anything she had grown up with. The biggest elevation changes from her childhood came in the form of gently rolling hills. On Calimor, massive spires of rock were everywhere.
They had only just gotten planetside, and they were already flying over a canyon system taller and longer than anything she thought even existed back on Earth. Almost everything was coated in a layer of red dust, but most of the rock looked like sandstone. The bigger mountains had basalt caps.
It was utterly transcendental: the kind of landscape, she imagined, that her ancestors thousands of years ago couldn’t have seen as anything other than the handiwork of God.
But just like the planet’s orbit, the landscape bore the scars of a decade-old war. Warship scrap was strewn across the red desert, with Nadia spotting an intact hull every so often. It was a confusing landscape: one that felt full of blissful opportunity, and also one that screamed danger at every turn.
Home, she reminded herself. All thoughts of adventure and danger evaporated as she refocused herself on the task at hand. She had to find a way to make Calimor livable for millions.
The Exemplar descended slowly. “Looks like the autopilot is locking in on our destination,” she whispered, her voice still hushed in awe of the planet.
Boyd’s face seemed less awed and more calm. For him, Nadia figured, it was like going home. She briefly pictured how she and Boyd might have reacted if they were flying back down to Earth, back to the farmstead where she grew up. Maybe he would be just as awestruck, and she’d have Boyd’s look of almost childlike relaxation.
They were coming up on their destination now: a conglomerate of abandoned spice plantations known, collectively, as Arcena. The settlement used to be the largest plantation hub, and was therefore their best start.
Most of the outlying facilities looked intact, albeit powered down. The debris had missed vital buildings and tube tunnels, minus one connecting corridor that a large sheet of hull metal had severed in two.
The Exemplar’s autopilot function guided the ship to the Arcena docking bay. Nadia felt the engines swivel beneath her chair. They approached a cavernous opening in the largest hangar, slowing down until the vessel came to res
t on the floor. Normally, a metal docking clamp would have held them in place, and an energy field would have shot up to cover the opening and keep the interior pressurized. But they were about ten years too late for such amenities.
Nadia’s head felt buoyant in her own exhilaration as she followed Boyd down to the aft airlock. “How do you feel?” he asked her as they descended the staircase. “This is the first time any of your people have set foot on a Natonese world. Someday, they’ll be hanging up paintings about this moment.”
Nadia wrinkled her nose. As much as she had loved the wide open spaces of her youth, she had learned in school exactly why they were as empty as they appeared. And who was responsible. It always tended to be the people who appeared on huge murals hundreds of years later. She refused to be some old-world conqueror.
They met Mason and Gage at the mouth of the ship’s airlock. There were four personal lockers, two on either side of the inner airlock door, plus a handful of gear footlockers and storage cabinets.
Nadia pulled her enviro-suit out of her locker. The outer shell was mostly charcoal-grey plastic, with a teal mesh underlay visible around the midriff and along her arms. After donning the rest of her outfit, she finished by putting on her boots, outfitted with enough foam cushioning for running and grooved lugs for traction.
She checked to make sure oxygen was flowing from her pack and then headed over to the weapons locker, withdrawing a sidearm. She paused, considering offering Boyd a weapon. It was unlikely that they’d run into anyone hostile, but the reports had mentioned that Horde-Junta skirmishes across the planet had been increasing for the past two years. Deciding she was tired of dealing with Russ’s paranoia while he was millions of miles away, she took out an extra weapon.
“Hey Boyd,” she said. The other man had mostly finished putting his own suit on. “You’re not secretly planning on shooting me in the back, yeah?” she asked, hoping he could see the lopsided grin behind her helmet.
“What?” he asked, taken aback. “I would never—”
“—just what I thought. Here you go,” she chuckled, disabling Russ’ security protections on the weapon and passing it to Boyd. “Just in case we run into trouble.”
Nadia knew Boyd could handle himself with a firearm. “When you grew up on Calimor,” he had told her during the journey, “you were basically auto-enlisted into the local militia once you were old enough to fight. There were always pirates, or smugglers, or raiders we had to deal with. We couldn’t afford not to learn how to shoot, even as kids.”
Her military detail clearly seemed uncomfortable with her giving Boyd a weapon, however. “Ma’am,” Mason blurted out, “I really don’t think—”
“—Russ said I was in charge, right?” she said. Both of the two soldiers nodded grudgingly. “I think we’ll be in more danger if Boyd is unarmed. That’s my decision.”
Mason and Gage looked at each other skeptically, but neither protested.
“Ready?” she asked the other three, placing both her hands on the airlock latch. She pulled the door open, letting both of them into the airlock, and then opened the outer door…
...and stepped out into the hangar bay. The first footfall of her people on a Natonese world. Just like that, the moment was over.
The hangar bay was mostly empty, although an odd tool or pipeline lay scattered across the floor. A few of the docking clamps and catwalks had crashed to the bottom level, while the others still looked pristine. Of course, she thought. No oxygen in the atmosphere means no rust.
Even emergency lights would have gone off many years ago. The entire bay was dark, minus the light streaming in from outside. She used the suit’s built-in wrister to activate the twin headlamps along her temples.
She looked over to see Boyd pacing around the ruined hangar bay while Mason and Gage went ahead to scout out the corridor ahead of them. Her heart welled for Boyd briefly. It must be hard for him to come back and see all this. “Are you okay?” she said into the comm device embedded in her helmet.
“Being back here...it’s just a lot,” he said.
“I get that.”
“We should get moving though. What do you want to see first? We could inspect the hydroponics bays, or do a damage report for the whole facility, or check out the power supply, or—”
“—Boyd,” she interrupted with a slight shake of her head and a grin. “It’s okay. Not everything has to go at breakneck speed.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled more loudly than Nadia might have liked. The static of their comm channel, coupled with his breath, was harsh right next to her eardrum. “You’re right. Maybe getting to work is my way of not having to actually reckon with any of this.”
The resulting moment of silence was all the more noticeable, given how quiet everything was planetside. “It’s weird, right?” Nadia said at last.
“Real weird.”
The two laughed in unison. “All right then. So...how about that power supply?” Nadia asked.
“Right. Power supply.” Boyd led the way into the heart of the facility. Mason and Gage reported that they hadn’t found any signs of activity, but they still stayed ahead of Nadia and Boyd. The first few corridors they walked through seemed mostly like the hangar: empty, lifeless, silent. A small trail of debris lined the edges where the floor met the wall, but besides that everything else was intact.
They arrived at a defunct turbolift. “No way this thing has power,” Nadia said.
“Should be a maintenance tube nearby,” Boyd said. “Hope you don’t mind heights.”
They found an access corridor leading to a caged ladder that spanned the length of the turbolift shaft. Nadia aimed her headlamps down the ladder, noting with dismay that the bottom half of the ladder had snapped off. “Looks like the tube’s a no-go,” she said. She then eyed over her enviro-suit. “Actually...these things should have a propulsion system, yeah?”
“Yep,” Boyd confirmed. “Use one before?”
“I watched a vid on the flight from the Preserver. That ought to count, right?” She pressed a button on her wrister and the miniature thrusters embedded on the back of her suit fired.
Then she stepped into thin air. She fell the length of the intact ladder in a split second, hurtling toward the ground. Cursing, she increased the burn of her thrusters. As the ground came racing toward her, she finally lost speed.
Nadia leveled out, hovering just above the bottom of the shaft, and killed her thrusters. Boyd joined her elegantly seconds later. “I guess I should’ve tried that out first,” Nadia said.
“I’m having the feeling we might get more practice…” Boyd said.
Mason and Gage joined them, and all four moved over to an exit door and wrestled it open. They emerged into a massive subterranean tunnel that extended far off into the distance, well beyond the length of Nadia’s light beams.
“We quickly learned that we had to keep our power lines underground, thanks to all the dust storms,” Boyd explained. “And then we started networking plantation domes together. These power tunnels were the bedrock of our communities.”
The planet had already blown Nadia away twice within the last half-hour. She had to add a third time now. The tunnels had twisting cables and wires all tangled together running along the side walls. Larger energy tubes ran along the ceiling.
As they walked down the tunnel, her light beams illuminated a multitude of T-intersections. Trying to recreate a mental picture of the colony from their descent, she wondered if the power grid connected every single building.
The silence of the dead colony had become so normalized for her that the faintest thudding coming from an adjacent tunnel caught her attention immediately. She turned her light beams to the approaching sound.
The thudding got louder. Footsteps! she thought. And fast ones at that. She exchanged glances with Boyd.
“Let us check this out, ma’am,” Gage said. The two moved to the mouth of the next T-intersection.
The next few seconds were a b
lur. Both Mason and Gage raised their sidearms as a man in an onyx black enviro-suit sprinted into view. He brought himself to a stop as soon as he saw the two of them and raised his hands in the air. His face was barely visible through his suit’s visor, but Nadia saw his eyes go wide.
Nadia and Boyd ran up to join the other three. “Who are—” Nadia started. But the flash of plasma bolts coming from further down the tunnel cut her off. Two bolts struck Mason and Gage in their torsos, sending their limp bodies to the ground immediately. The third whizzed right by the new arrival.
Nadia screamed as the two men went down, and ran over to Gage’s body, who was closest.
As the footsteps got louder, Boyd ran over and pulled Nadia to her feet. “We have to run!” he shouted. Her heart protested, but another salvo of plasma fire from deeper down the adjacent tunnel sent her into a sprint.
CHAPTER 8
* * *
The lack of sleep and the mild claustrophobia were finally getting to Isadora. She had never been one to complain about getting too little sleep—after eight hours, she tended to wake up lethargic and clammy—but she had barely managed four hours a night max since being woken up by the Preserver’s computer almost two months ago.
What was worse was how the walls felt like they were pressing in around her.
Isadora spent the majority of her days either in her cabin or the meeting room. There wasn’t much of a need to go anywhere else. She could read reports in her room, and could make decisions or examine data in the conference room.
She had enlisted a few of the other crew they had thawed out to help move a treadmill from the Preserver’s rec room to her cabin so she could at least try to stay active on the job. She’d tell the computer to read reports to her while she walked at a comfortable pace on the machine.
She didn’t dare run. Their food supply aboard the Preserver consisted entirely of the nutra she had traded for during her initial meeting with Tricia Favan. And if she kept her exercise to something as moderate as a few miles of walking, that meant she didn’t have to consume any extra nutra bars.
