by Max Barry
“Your brothers?” Beanfield asked.
He clambered over rock. “Yeah. Two of them, anyway. Eddie tried, but didn’t pass the physical.” Eddie was already pretty far gone into drugs and alcohol. It was hard for him; he got frustrated in social settings, when he couldn’t keep up with the conversation. He had trouble making himself understood. Each year since Anders had hit him with the wrench, Eddie had disappeared a little further into himself.
“Tell me about that, then,” Beanfield said. “What it was like when they were in Service and you weren’t.”
“It wasn’t like anything. I was just a kid, partying. Wasting my life.” The world had gone insane, all at once. All anyone wanted to talk about were the aliens. And everyone had a different opinion, even then: The aliens were coming to kill us, or were harmless animals, or God’s final plague. There were vigils for Coral Beach as well as rallies and protests about the military response, the hasty convening of several branches of the armed forces as well as a host of government agencies into a single, all-powerful Service, and you couldn’t escape it. Anders was tending bar at the time, and every night the place heaved with hope and fear. People were having sex in the bathroom stalls, getting married, quitting their jobs. It was crazy, because the aliens were so far away, and no one knew anything.
Service sent out drones, a lot of them. Over the next eighteen months, they found aliens in five places, including two that had been mapped before. Which meant they were expanding. By then the term salamander had stuck, even though it became a political thing, with people saying the term was demeaning, or derogatory, or something. He dropped it once to a girl he’d brought back to his crappy apartment and she got steamed and told him they weren’t animals, they were an intelligent species. We’re being taught to want to kill them, she said. Like a cult. This was a thing, this theory that everyone was being manipulated by Service, or by the companies that supplied them, the military contractors like Surplex and Freco, into sucking the government dry in order to finance war spending. Anders even marched in an antiwar rally—not because he believed in it; he was trying to sleep with a girl. She was a pacifist and when she talked, her cheeks flushed and her jaw stood out. He carried one of her placards, which read, THE UNIVERSE IS BIG ENOUGH TO SHARE, and walked beside her, chanting No war and Sonata Six, what do they know, which was a reference to a conspiracy theory that some people had discovered evidence of Service doctoring videos before getting themselves arrested. When Anders arrived at the monument, he listened to a bunch of coat-wearing college students shout about corruption and convenient enemies and how in the age of media manipulation, democracy had become a sham.
His brothers returned home for Thanksgiving, just before shipping out. It meant Anders had to go home, too, which he’d sworn he would never do. But it was either that or miss them, and everyone put on their best face and the game was a good distraction. Toward the end, their father put a hand on his brothers’ shoulders and said, “These are good boys. The bravest boys,” and Anders had found that impressive, how they didn’t flinch at all when their father touched them. They had gotten out, he realized. They’d found an exit. He shook their hands but they didn’t hug, of course, and he watched them drive away with a mix of emotions he couldn’t untangle. He wasn’t sure if he was glad they were going or wanted to join them.
They died two years later, in the worst defeat of the war, when salamanders appeared out of nowhere and tore apart a military convoy outside of Fornina Sirius. They were in sleep. Almost everyone on board was. He was told what had happened by two uniformed Service personnel who knocked on his door early one morning, but he didn’t feel anything until he saw the video: the hives spewing salamanders, the ships turning to gouting flame and debris and death. Only then did his feelings resolve into a hot flare of loss. He’d both loved and hated his brothers and their absence hollowed him out.
“After Fornina Sirius, then,” Beanfield said. “That’s what changed your mind?”
He exhaled. “Pretty much. Do you remember what it was like about a month after that?”
“What was it like?”
“Like everyone got used to it. They still talked about it. But not like it was a tragedy. It was . . .” He couldn’t find the word. “It was something people used when they wanted to make a point.”
He especially couldn’t stand the pacifists anymore. What they rallied against, what he’d marched against, once—the profiteering, the secrecy, the hints and whispers of war under false pretenses—even if they were right, it didn’t matter. It was irrelevant against the fact that there were salamanders out there killing people. He sat drinking beer at a party while a guy told them how much money Surplex made from every ship, how they had a secret plan to put their own AI inside them, how they were so deep inside Service that you couldn’t tell the difference anymore, and Anders imagined him on a transport, the alarms going off, the salamander huks falling. His eyes going wide. No longer so idealistic as the hull peeled open and sucked him into nothingness. But Anders didn’t have the words to explain this, or anything that was happening inside him. He put down his beer and left the party and the next day he enlisted.
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t like that.”
* * *
—
Every time Jackson spotted salamanders, there were at least two. Eventually Anders wriggled up the side of a fissure and lay beside her on a sloping slab of rock to check for himself. The fractured orange landscape ran flat and barren and across its dinner-plate surface crawled two fuzzy black dots. After a minute, one disappeared. “There you go,” he said.
“They go into the fissures,” Jackson said. “Just wait.” The dot reappeared. Then two more.
“Shit,” he said.
“Yeah. We need to be careful.”
“They’re heading away from the volcano.” The mountain, or whatever it was, still hung in the distance, hazy and inscrutable, refusing to draw closer no matter how much ground they covered. “Maybe they know something about it that we don’t.”
Jackson was silent for so long, he began to get the feeling she knew something about it that he didn’t, too. Then she shrugged. “We’re not going to find power anywhere else.”
He guessed that was true. He shifted, trying to move blood that wanted to pool in his legs, and coughed into his helmet. He wasn’t getting used to the smell of this planet. The air contained sulfur trioxide, which meant it would generate sulfuric acid on contact with moisture. Nevertheless, he’d started trying to figure out how long he could remove his helmet before it would kill him, just to experience the glorious sensation of being free from it. The film would protect his eyes, but he would have to hold his breath, to keep the sulfur trioxide out of his throat and lungs.
Jackson’s hand came down on his. “See that?”
He squinted. At the apex of the mountain hung a dark curl of something like smoke. “Shit, it is a volcano.”
“Could be,” Jackson said.
“Then maybe it lets us get at something below the surface. Some mineral we can use in the converter.”
They watched awhile longer. The smoke twisted and curled but seemed anchored in place. Its movement defied good sense in a way he couldn’t quite figure. Maybe it was the gravity.
“You know what?” he said. “It kind of looks like a tornado. Like it’s spinning.” But as he watched, it faded away. Within a minute, it was gone. He looked at Jackson, who was still studying the horizon. “What do you think?”
“I think we should get moving,” she said, and began to slide down the rock.
12
[Gilly]
THE BENEATH
He cranked the manual release to Eng-1 and, as soon as the door opened wide enough, squeezed through. There were eight core housings, each drenched in soft green light that turned black as the warning glowlights strobed. He moved to the closest. “I’m in,” he said. “I have
a board.”
Jackson: “You have ninety seconds. If what you’re doing isn’t working by then, you leave.”
“Understood.”
What he was doing was trying to exert manual control over the ship’s combat systems. Which was precisely what he’d said they should never do, because a human being couldn’t match the capabilities of an AI. But there was no AI; the AI was recovering from a coma state into which Jackson had plunged it with the kill switch. What they had was Gilly.
“Intel, how are you looking?”
“Good. The AI cold restart is almost complete. It should be fully functional within three or four minutes. I haven’t looked at Weapons yet, but I think I can run Armor.”
“We enter huk range in sixty seconds. You need to be back here before they start landing.”
He could see that wasn’t going to happen. It would take him at least that long to get to grips with the Armor subsystems, then he would need to run them for the few remaining minutes until the AI could take over. But he said, “I understand.”
Armor was primarily a network of interlocking electrostatic fields, which, when sufficiently charged, would seize anything that passed through and tear it into tiny, inert, directionless particles. The challenging part was maintaining that charge, since powering the entire network at once would require more energy than the ship could generate. Instead, the ship normally made it work by charging precise sections right before something hit them, based on its assessment of incoming projectiles. Gilly would need to track every incoming huk and key power to an appropriate segment of Armor at the right moment.
It seemed impossible, but as he worked, he felt the stirrings of excitement. He had always enjoyed a challenge, and right now he could set aside any thought of whether this might actually work and simply do the best he could. As he bundled up Armor segments, tying them to commands he could trigger at will, it even began to feel doable. Maybe Anders had been right all along, and they could run this ship like an old-fashioned stagecoach, blasting shotguns out the side.
He deployed a quick test and manually triggered a section of armor. Nothing happened.
“Shit,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Minor problem. It’s fine.” He saw his mistake. The electrostatic field didn’t appear from nowhere; it had to flow from generators on particular points on the ship’s hull. If he wanted to light up a segment, he needed to create a path to it.
“Hostiles firing. Gilly, you need to come back now.”
“It didn’t work. I missed something. But I can fix it.”
“If we don’t move, we’ll still be here when the huks start hitting.”
“You should detach. You can separate from the ship until it’s over. You’ll be safe.”
“Negative. Not leaving you there.”
He got two words into a reply and something far away went thump. He turned. The door to Eng-1 was not closed. He’d been in such a hurry, he’d neglected it. He moved to the door. He hesitated and stuck his head out into the corridor.
The warning glowlights were cycling, turning the corridor into a rushing train of shadow. In this strobing chaos, something large and alien moved toward him.
He fell back into Eng-1 and worked the manual release. The door hitched closed one maddening inch at a time. There was scrabbling in the corridor and then the golem face of the creature appeared in the gap, blocky and irregular and thick with translucent resin, and the resin split to reveal jaws and lipless teeth, and he yelled and threw his weight against the crank and the door slid closed.
He stood still, breathing.
Jackson was in his ear. He returned to his board. The salamander in the corridor was silent and he could imagine it probing around. Preparing to huk. “You should detach,” he said. Jackson began to protest, but he ignored her, studying the board. Sometimes when he was deep in a puzzle, it wasn’t until he took a break that he saw the answer, and it had been obvious all along. There was something about the act of stepping back that was revealing. It was immediately clear to him: There were thousands of incoming huks and they were going to strike the ship at the same time. He would be lucky to stop half a dozen of them.
“I’ve messed this up,” he said. “I shouldn’t have tried to run systems manually. It can’t be done.”
“Gilly, come back.”
“I should have prioritized getting the AI back. I’m clearing out some subsystem caches. That might help.”
“Gilly.”
“I can’t reach you anyway,” he said. “There’s a salamander in the corridor. Detach so you don’t get hit. I’ll stay here and do the best I can.”
A calmness stole over him. He listened to Jackson curse and finally ignite and detach the jetpod from the ship. She had a plan to circle around and pick him up from a different location, which wasn’t going to work, because the huks would arrive by then.
He worked the board, doing what he should have done in the first place: clear as many obstacles out of the way of the AI as he could, so it could take over as quickly as possible. At last, the display washed clean. “Got it!” he said. “AI is up!”
A section of the door flew inward. He was tossed across the room and landed sprawled on the floor, and when he raised his head, everything was different. Two core housings were shattered. Their boards were in pieces. The air was full of tiny particles of ash like snow. A low wind pulled at him. There was a hole in the door.
The salamander pushed its snout into the hole. It grunted. The door squealed. The salamander forced its way inside, resin falling from its face in chunks, the door bending. Gilly couldn’t find his sense of balance. Around the room, the glowlights went out one after another. There was a solid jolt, and then another, a parade of them. The huks were landing.
“Pak,” the salamander said. “Pak.”
The ship began to growl, a deep, bone-shaking sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. The door broke. The salamander entered. The floor tipped and Gilly began to slide across it, toward the salamander, helpless to stop. The ceiling burst in a dozen places.
The floor vanished. The salamander staggered, its legs going out, reaching for purchase that wasn’t there. It was fantastic and funny but everything was breaking apart. His ears popped. The world filled with tearing metal. The salamander’s black eyes fixed on him and its mouth opened and everything disintegrated.
* * *
—
An annoying noise assailed his ears: blaat blaat blaat. A dark purple ball hung in his face. When he swiped at it, his arms went everywhere. He swallowed but couldn’t get his stomach out of his throat. He was floating. These were problems.
He closed his eyes and swallowed a few times, fighting nausea. His hands were gloved, he could feel that. His breath was loud in his ears. He felt no gravity. This meant his survival core had deployed.
He opened his eyes. He could identify the purple ball now. It was a planet.
There was glittering in the darkness. Stars, but also pieces of ship, everything from dust and debris to a gigantic section he recognized as almost the entire aft quarter, torn and peppered with holes. No way to reach it; he couldn’t propel himself. He was, he thought, slowly falling toward the planet. Nothing he could feel. But that would be what was happening.
He closed his eyes again until the urge to vomit passed. When he opened them, the planet was still there. It was hazy at the edges. He was actually looking at atmosphere, he figured. A planet wreathed in cloud. Dark purple cloud.
Some time passed. He had nothing to do but think and so he assessed his situation methodically, checking his logic at each step.
His survival core could keep him alive for roughly five days.
After that, he would asphyxiate.
He probably wouldn’t be killed by flying debris: It shared a common origin point with him, and they would move farthe
r apart over time.
He didn’t think he would fall to his death, as it would take longer than five days.
He might be rescued. This would depend on what had become of Jackson, Beanfield, and Anders. His ping had a short range; if they were able to, they would search for its signal from the jet. This was a long shot, because it relied on them not only surviving the attack but also managing to return to the same area—as opposed to doing what a jetpod was designed for, which was aiming homeward and accelerating.
If they were able to return, he figured, it would happen soon. They might delay to let the salamanders disperse, or conduct repairs, and it might take a little while to find him. But after forty hours, he would have to face the likelihood that no one was coming.
He shut down everything nonessential. Broadcasting distress on ping: yes. Scanning for pings: tempting, but no. It wasn’t necessary to know rescue was coming a few minutes in advance. He turned down his thermals as far they would go.
He hung in space and watched the cloud planet. It was dark and unfathomable, an arc of light to its left side. He might get to watch a sunrise.
It was a bad situation. But it could have been worse. He had expected to die, and now he had five days and he felt relatively okay about this. It was almost peaceful. Before he’d made crew, a Service psych had told him, “If you’re chosen, you will be as far away from the rest of the human race as anyone in history,” and peered into his eyes to gauge his reaction. He had been okay with it. She had also asked, “What do you think you’re going to find out there?” This one he struggled with, because he didn’t know. But that was the point, he realized. “Answers,” he said. “I like finding the answers to questions like that.” Her expression had remained carefully neutral, but after the interview was over, she shook his hand and said, “I hope you find your answers.”