by Max Barry
“Go,” Jackson said.
Anders had been written up twice for untidy quarters in his first month at Camp Zero, which meant that during a room inspection, a floor sergeant with nothing better to do had discovered a crease in Anders’s bedsheet, which existed because another floor sergeant had called an assembly drill at four in the morning. Service, Anders had quickly figured out, was a bunch of assholes who claimed to be family but acted like they hated you. And that was okay; that was actually very true to his own family experience. But he’d joined for the opportunity to hold the whip handle for a change, not realizing how much whipping he would have to undergo himself first. He was thinking of quitting and this untidy-quarters bullshit felt like it might be the final straw. Because no one else was being written up: They’d all figured out they should sleep beneath their beds, leaving the sheet undisturbed, in a tight little space you could create under there by pulling out the storage tubs. Anders did not do this, because that small, dark place was far too much like a toolbox. But faced with crashing out of Service, he realized he wanted to stay. Even with the bullshit, there was nothing better for him out there, just a father he didn’t visit anymore, a string of mistakes, and three gravesites, the most recent, barely a year old, being the one into which Eddie had put himself. So Anders made himself crawl under the bunk. The funny part was how there was a kind of comfort in its familiarity. It was bad, but in a way he recognized. It was the closest he’d felt to his brothers for a while.
The point of all this was that you could do anything. You could suck it up and do the worst thing you could imagine, if you had to. He nodded to Jackson. He dropped the lightning gun and the smoke swallowed it silently. He heaved Beanfield after it. This time there was a sound of wet acceptance. He jumped.
* * *
—
There were layers. At first he swam through muck, thrashing his legs and pulling with one arm, tugging Beanfield. Then they came to a place of clear amber light full of tiny bubbles. It was harder to swim, the liquid offering him less purchase with which to fight the gravity. His mind volunteered a terrible idea: At a certain point, he would reach a place of equilibrium, where he couldn’t rise any farther, not unless he let go of Beanfield. He decided that wasn’t going to happen. He swam. Eventually he broke some kind of surface and droplets began to spatter his faceplate.
He swung his head left and right. The light on his helmet illuminated only a few yards, and even that barely at all, but there were thick, undulating waves, which were furry. The water had hairs on it. He waited until he’d developed a sense of the direction of the waves and then began to swim. He could barely move his arms. But there was a current and he went with it.
At some point, his hand scraped rock. He couldn’t feel his arms, but he dragged Beanfield up the shore and fell onto his back. The gravity was terrible. He was beginning to understand how unrelenting it was. It would be everywhere forever. It hurt to breathe.
“We made it, Beanfield,” he said.
That might turn out not to be exactly right. But it was true for now. Before his body could surrender, he fought to his feet and pulled Beanfield from the water, dragging her until they reached a hollow, something like a cave. Then he slept.
* * *
—
He woke to something scrabbling on his faceplate, trying to get into his helmet. “The fuck!” he said, but it was only his own hand, his fingers digging at the plastic. For a second he was too disoriented to recall which was the bad one: removing the helmet, or leaving it on. When he remembered, he jammed his hands under his armpits to keep them still.
Beanfield’s EV suit was dusted light orange, the same color as the rock. The sky was a dark soup of boiling orange-purple clouds. It looked like the most furious storm he’d ever seen, but it was silent, with no rain.
He crawled out from the shallow cave. In all directions lay cracked orange rock. No vegetation. No sand on the beach. Only thick black water, bulging and withdrawing without sound. His breathing was loud in his own ears. How toxic is this air? he wondered. Pretty toxic, probably. He still wanted to take off the helmet.
“Jackson,” he said.
“Anders,” she said in his ear. “Are you out in the open?”
“Yes.”
“Hide.”
He looked around. Nothing moving as far as he could see. Nothing at all but rock and black water and bruised sky.
“You still have the gun?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
* * *
—
He hunched in the cave with Beanfield. Occasionally their suits exhaled waste like the gasps of drowning children. Whenever he moved, his suit fabric crunched and crinkled; as he sat against the rock, his survival core dug into his back. He hated it even though it was keeping him alive; even though it was sucking in whatever toxic mix of gases passed for atmosphere on this planet and making it breathable, as well as regulating his temperature and monitoring his vitals via an array of tiny pins he couldn’t feel. Once he became dehydrated or malnourished, one of those pins would become significantly more feelable, opening up a line that could feed him intravenously. He’d spent thirty-six hours in one of these suits during a training exercise, and when they let’d him out and asked him how it was, he’d said, “It sucked.” The supply officer said, “Better than the alternative, though.”
Yeah. That was right. “Better than the alternative,” he told Beanfield. Beanfield didn’t respond. He checked Jackson’s location on ping, which was about all his film was good for now. She was a white dot surrounded by emptiness, as if she were moving through space, with none of the usual complementary information the ship provided. He felt a pang at that, a weird twisting in his guts. The ship had been a prison for two years but he missed it, too.
Thirty minutes later, Jackson clambered into the cave, her suit and helmet dusted orange. “Stop pinging me,” she said. She forced her way alongside Beanfield, who squashed against him. “It uses power.”
He’d been thinking about that. “You still have a matter converter?”
She nodded and unslung the metal box from her shoulder. His understanding was that you could feed just about anything into a matter converter and it would accumulate juice, which could be used to charge their suits and the lightning gun. “How’s Beanfield?”
“Hasn’t woken up yet.”
Jackson peered into Beanfield’s faceplate. “The rock is inert. Same with the ocean. The atmosphere contains oxygen but also sulfur trioxide. The whole place is chemically depleted. Like they stripped it.”
“Who? Salamanders?”
She nodded. “I’ve seen fliers. Not many, but we have to keep out of sight.”
“They followed us down?”
“I think they got here first. This could be what a planet looks like once they’re done with it.”
He rubbed his thumb along the gun. “Any solar?”
“Not enough.”
“Maybe the clouds will clear.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe. How much charge on that?”
“It switches between zero and one.” He shook it. The readout flipped. “Right now, one.”
“If we want our cores to keep running longer than a few days, we need to find something to feed to the converter.”
He nodded. There was silence. He went ahead and said it. “Any chance of a rescue?”
She said nothing. He couldn’t see her face clearly.
“If there’s not,” he said, “just tell me.”
“There’s not.”
He felt surprised, even though he didn’t know what else she might have said. He shifted on the rock, his suit tugging against his skin. “So, what? We’re going to die here?”
“Well,” said Jackson. “Not today.”
“Shit,” he said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Shit.”
Jackson wriggled, trying to get comfortable. “You know what I’ve been thinking? How they kept at us until they got us. They shouldn’t have been able to take us down, but they found a way. Maybe we can do that.”
He thought about this. “Yeah, but millions of them died.”
Jackson was silent. Then she snickered. “True.”
“I mean, we really annihilated them.” His suit was sticking to his arm, and he plucked at it with plastic fingers. He thought he knew what Jackson meant, though. Even when it seemed hopeless, there could be a way out. If you kept fighting, sooner or later you could break open the lock. He said, “I’m sorry about Gilly.”
“Yeah,” Jackson said. “Me too.”
They watched Beanfield awhile.
“Can you carry her?” Jackson asked.
“I think so.”
“Then let’s move,” she said, “and see what we’ve got here.”
* * *
—
Orange rock extended to a hazy horizon, flat and featureless but cracked with fissures, gullies through which they could pick their way to avoid detection. Anders carried Beanfield on his shoulders; she felt as if she were made of stone, so that every step in the high gravity wanted to break his ankle. He had to move slowly and stop often, and when he did, Jackson climbed the side of the gully and eased her head over the lip, slowly, as if a salamander might be crouching there. He watched this with sweat trickling down into places he couldn’t reach. He wondered how much power he was burning through, working so hard physically; how many hours he was shaving off his life expectancy.
Jackson slid down the rock on her ass, using her feet to brake, exhibiting what Anders felt was a pretty impressive mastery of the conditions. “Anything?”
“Rock,” she said. “Lots of rock.”
They moved on. The next time Jackson climbed the rock, she stayed there for a long time. Eventually, he called, “What are you looking at?”
“Salamanders. Far off. Half a dozen.”
“Do we need to move?”
“Not yet.” There was silence. “They’re all heading in the same direction.”
“So we go the other way?”
Jackson came sliding down, boots first. “Or we head them off.”
“Why would we do that?”
“There’s nothing out here that’s rich enough for the matter converter,” she said, “except them.”
“Oh, damn,” he said. “Yes. Yes.”
“We have one shot. If we make it count, we can feed the converter. Recharge the suits, charge the gun.”
“It’s more like half a shot.” He pulled the gun around in front of him and peered at its display. He shook it until the gauge flipped to one.
“I’ll keep my eyes open for an alternative,” Jackson said, “but let’s angle in their direction. Work for you?”
It did. It did work for him. It was amazing how much better he felt now that he might get to shoot something. He crouched and scooped up Beanfield and she seemed lighter than before. “I sure don’t want to die with a charge left on the gun.”
“Me neither,” said Jackson.
* * *
—
They pushed on beneath a bubbling stew of purple and orange cloud. The storm still hadn’t broken and he was beginning to think it never would. What a piece of crap world, he thought. Orange rock and ugly cloud and water that had hairs.
They spied a small hill that was utterly featureless but still the most interesting thing he’d seen that day. Jackson studied it with intensity. Reaching it would have meant crossing a lot of open ground, so they decided to move on. They couldn’t keep pace with the salamanders Jackson had spotted, they discovered, so they began to angle farther inland, hoping to cross paths with others coming from the same direction. When the light began to die, they found a flat space beneath a rocky outcrop. He set Beanfield down and her eyes opened.
“Hey,” he said. He gestured to Jackson. They helped Beanfield into a sitting position, because upright was better. When Anders had lain down earlier, he had felt like his brain was trying to drain out through his eye sockets. “Can you talk?”
“I feel sick,” Beanfield said.
“You were banged up pretty bad. I don’t know how much the medbag was able to do.”
“Try not to vomit inside your suit,” Jackson said.
Beanfield looked at her.
He bent Beanfield forward and checked her suit over. When he levered her back, she said, “What happened?”
“We lost Gilly,” Jackson said. “And the ship.” Beanfield didn’t react, so Anders suspected she had been conscious for a while and reached this conclusion on her own. “We’re stuck with no resources and no chance of rescue.”
Beanfield nodded and looked away.
“But we’re not dead yet,” Jackson said.
Beanfield didn’t turn. “Yes, we are,” she said softly.
He glanced at Jackson. But Jackson shook her head. Things were pretty grim if Jackson was allowing that kind of bullshit to stand, he figured. He exhaled. “Well, I’m turning in,” he said. “Wake me if anything interesting happens.”
* * *
—
Beanfield cried out in the night and he woke in confusion. The gun was in his arms and there was a yellow flicker ahead and dark movement like the curve of a salamander’s head. He swung the lightning gun up and Jackson heaved herself on top of him. “It’s a storm,” she said. “It’s nothing.” He realized she was right. The cloud was boiling, silent lightning flicking around its edges. He had been about to waste the only hope they had.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m okay.” Jackson released him. He hunkered back down. He put the gun on the rock beside him and then shifted it a little farther away. Then he brought it closer again. He closed his eyes but didn’t sleep.
* * *
—
They rose at first light. During the night, Anders’s survival core had apparently opened up a line to feed him, and every step he felt something rubbing against the back of his ribs. He wondered how much it would feed him. He was pretty hungry.
Beanfield moved slowly, needing assistance and unable to put weight on her ankle. Despite this, they made good progress, and the fissures were numerous enough to allow them to choose their direction more often than not. After half a day of this, Jackson slid down from a wall and announced that they were within range of two salamanders.
“All right,” said Anders, hefting the gun.
Jackson shook her head. “We can’t take two. We need one by itself.”
He supposed this was true. Beanfield said, “What if we can’t find one by itself?”
“Then things will get exciting,” Jackson said. They moved on.
* * *
—
On the third day, a smudge appeared on the horizon. It was indistinct but put Anders in mind of a volcano: a single sharp mountain, surrounded by flatlands. He lay against the rocky lip of the wall alongside Jackson and squinted at it.
“Most of them are moving away from it,” Jackson said. “Just about all the salamanders we’ve seen are headed the other way.”
“Maybe we should keep our distance, too.”
“Mmm,” said Jackson. “But it may contain something we can feed to the converter.”
He nodded. They moved on. The fissures became larger, which made travel easier, and Beanfield was able to hobble along by his side. When they needed to rest, Jackson would scout ahead a short distance while Anders and Beanfield waited. During one of these periods, Beanfield said, “Did it say anything?”
“What?” he said.
“The ship. Before it died.”
“Did it say anything?” She nodded. “What would it say, Beanfield?”
“I don’t know.”
He was silent
.
“It said hello when we boarded,” she said. “I thought it might say good-bye.”
“No,” he said.
Beanfield was silent, then: “Why are we walking?”
“To find something to feed the matter converter. So we can charge the suits.” He was sure she knew this.
“Then what?”
“Then we do it again,” he said, “for as long as we can.” She didn’t respond. “Hey,” he said. “It’s better than the alternative.” Jackson reappeared at the far end of the fissure. He waved and wearily rose to his feet. Beanfield did not. “Come on, Beanfield.”
She stood, took a hitching step, and began to cry. He offered her his hand, not knowing what else to say. She took it. “Talk to me,” she said.
“About what?”
“I don’t care. I just need to hear your voice.”
He tried to think. Most of his thoughts were about food.
“Tell me why you enlisted.”
“Aw,” he said. “Who knows.”
“You would have been about nineteen for Coral Beach. That’s when a lot of people signed up.”
He shook his head. “Not me. I didn’t give a shit.”
He remembered the moment, though. He’d been downtown, lounging with a friend, the sun on his face, doing nothing but watching human traffic pass by. And then it slowed. A few people at first, like they’d remembered something they had to do, then more, until the sidewalks stood still and mute. He saw a man reach out to a woman threading her way between them and touch her arm, and she stopped, too. Paul, said his friend. She was looking at her phone; there was a video.