by James Welsh
Stratos, who was busy flying the launch, turned and looked at Nash curiously. “What are you talking about?” Stratos asked. “What are you accusing me of?”
“You’re the one who poisoned the star. You’re why it collapsed into that damn black hole.”
For a second, Stratos’ mouth dropped, and Nash wondered if he was shocked by the accusation or the accuser. But Stratos recovered almost immediately and said, “If you think I’m the monster responsible, you’re an even bigger idiot than I thought. Don’t you remember – we already found the mastermind, and he killed himself.”
“And that was convenient, wasn’t it? Alexander framing himself for the crime?” Nash demanded. “You have a lot of luck, and you need every drop of it. Otherwise, every thread in this horror story finds its way back to you. We can start with Vita’s death on the journey to the colony. You told me that he died from inhaling too much hydrogen sulfide, and I believed you. I mean, I didn’t have much of a choice, because you wouldn’t let me see the body. I didn’t start to pay attention until I paid a visit to Bends, and he slipped that Vita’s lungs showed no signs of fluid accumulation during the autopsy. But how is that possible, if he allegedly died from pulmonary edema? You just happened to be the only person to witness Vita’s death, so you tell me.”
Stratos turned his head just slightly, injecting Nash with a look of pure hatred. “I punched him in the windpipe. He did choke to death – I didn’t lie about that.”
“And he had to die, right?” Nash pressed on. “You had to have a good reason for doing the deed. Did he know something he shouldn’t have? Did he see something he shouldn’t have?” Stratos was silent, and so Nash continued. “He saw something, didn’t he? He woke up to catch you in the act, and you had to silence him. That at least explains why you were healthy and alive when Pere and I stumbled out of cryostasis – you already had time to recover.”
“He wasn’t supposed to wake up,” Stratos insisted, defending his self. “The computer accidentally woke him when it woke me. The plan was supposed to be smoother than that.”
“You’re perfect when it comes to making mistakes,” Nash said, laughing bitterly. “Even with that, though, I wasn’t sure that you were the mastermind. But what about the night of the assault? When the miners and I were walking through the colony, and a brute jumps out of the shadows and knocks us down? We both know that left-handedness is extinct in the colony, and yet the criminal was a southpaw. They say that the last colonist who was left-handed was Khunrath himself.”
“The colonists say a lot of things.”
“That’s very true – they do talk a lot. For example, they would say that Latch not only knew that Khunrath was still alive, but that she knew where he was hiding. How long did it take for her to break down when you overwhelmed her with the evidence? What was the look on her face when she thought that she was sheltering a madman? You broke her down into thinking that her friend was a monster, but it’s not like you had a choice. You had to get to Latch so that you could get to Khunrath. And whatever the scientist is sick with, it’s been hard on him. He couldn’t have been the one who attacked us – he was in no condition to. And since he couldn’t cooperate, you had to step in for him.”
“And what makes you think that I was the man who knocked you down?” Stratos asked.
“Even with that, though, I wasn’t sure if you were the mastermind. But then I realized something: while the attacker had thrown a solid left punch, they weren’t left-handed,” Nash explained. “I grew up rough and poor, and so I know what a punch feels like. That was the left hook of a man whose right hand was broken. It took me the longest time to make the connection, but then I realized that I haven’t seen you use your right hand once the whole time we’ve been at the colony. Every time I see it, you keep it wrapped away in that glove of yours. I’ve never see you even lift that hand. But not even that glove could hide the truth. I knew what that glove was meant for, ever since I saw its partner in Bends’ office. That’s an epione glove, something you only wear if your hand is seriously injured. What I want to know is how you injured it.”
Nash said this, suspecting that Stratos must have broken his hand when fighting with Vita to the death. But Stratos said nothing. Instead, he continued looking straight – with his left hand, he twisted the launch around a patch of debris. Nash continued, “But even with the evidence building, I needed something deeper to damn you as the monster. And I found the last evidence just a little over an hour ago, when you volunteered to fly the launch into the black hole. You, who talk about the colonists like they live in the dirt at your feet, want to save them. Then, I was sure that you were the mastermind. Now, I want you to tell me why you’re really flying this launch – I figure you owe me that, at least.”
Nash said all of this, not knowing how Stratos was going to act, being branded as the mastermind responsible for the black hole. Part of him expected Stratos to deny it. Even part of him hoped that Stratos would try to kill him – at least that would prove Stratos’ guilt beyond a doubt.
But while Nash was looking to start a fight, Stratos was looking for a way out. Stratos sighed. “You’re right – you do deserve to know. If you don’t understand what I’m about to say, know it’s only because the truth is bigger than you or I could ever imagine. You see, ever since this colony first started mining its star, the charter back home has been receiving that energy. What the charter has never admitted to was that it has been secretly storing vast amounts of that energy in batteries across Earth. The charter has been saving all of that energy for the day when the quantum mining suddenly stopped – noticed that I said when and not if. The charter started mining knowing that day would come.”
“Why would the charter destroy itself like that?” Nash wondered.
“Don’t you see? With the power turned off, all of Earth would be thrown into chaos. The rival charters would regret having to depend on us for their electricity. And with their cities cast in darkness, we will persist, all thanks to the energy we have already stored. The Phoenix Charter may destroy itself, but it will rise up from its ashes and live up to its name.”
“But why destroy the colony, after it has done so much for the charter?”
“There was no other way,” Stratos admitted. “The charter needed the entire colony silenced, and they needed that to happen in a big and bold way. The other charters would go to war if we just outright flipped the switch on them. But what could they do if we showed proof that the colony had been devoured by a black hole? That’s not to mention the fact that the charter can’t afford to have any rogue radio messages coming from the colony, airing out the truth to the world.”
Stratos said this, not knowing that they had already sent a radio message to Earth earlier, a broadcast that anyone on the planet with a receiver would hear in just a few years. Nash smiled a little to himself, but he decided not to say anything about this. He wanted Stratos to continue to live the fantasy that the plan would not be discovered back home.
“And so what will happen in a few years? What happens when the batteries die out and the charter finally loses its power?” Nash asked, already knowing the answer – he just wanted to hear Stratos say it.
“In a few days, I’ll be back on Earth with this battery. And this battery will be enough to power the charter for centuries to come. And we will unite the world under one future – our future,” Stratos said with a sick pride.
The evil was elegant, so much so that Nash couldn’t bring himself to face it. He couldn’t believe that someone would engineer the end of the world to rule it. Instead, Nash said, “You’re expecting to be back on Earth in just a few days?”
Stratos nodded. “The frigate that brought us to the colony is currently drifting in space, just out of range of the colony’s tracking buoys. Once I intercept it, I’ll install the battery into the frigate, and I can sail home on that. The scientists back on Earth repeatedly assured me that the frigate can withstand the battery’s strength.”
“Why a
re you not defending yourself against this? Why admit to it?”
“Think of it as being a gesture of good will – I want you to believe me when I say that I didn’t agree with the plan, at least not at first. Like you, I didn’t think this was right, sacrificing people like pawns. Even when the charter told me how subhuman and degenerate the colonists had become over the years, isolated from the rest of humanity, I couldn’t believe that they were less than human.
“But then I stepped foot on the colony, and I realized that everything the charter ever said was true, and I felt guilty for doubting them all along. These colonists, they’ve oppressed themselves through decades of routine, eating the same food every day, wearing the same uniform every day, waking up at the same time to go to the same job every day.”
“And whose fault is that?” Nash spat.
“It’s too late to point fingers,” Stratos shrugged. “What’s done is done. The colonists are less than human – they’re robots living underground to hide the shame of their existence. They’ve served their purpose, and to keep them on as obsolete machinery is cruel.”
“You honestly think that killing them is mercy?” Nash asked, incredulous.
“I do,” Stratos said, more honest than he had ever been in his life.
Nash shook his head. “You’re insane for doing this.”
“And you’re the idiot who sided with them,” Stratos said evenly. “No one’s perfect, but at least I don’t celebrate it. I stood there and watched you shake hands with them when we first arrived. I watched you shake hands with those lepers and smear their sick over your face like it was war paint. I held my breath since the second I stepped foot on that rock. But that’s how the underworld looks from where I sit. I’m sure the colony makes sense to you – after all, the only muscle the weak have is in numbers. The hive mentality is the only way for you to survive.”
“Why don’t you join us?” Nash asked, turning his words on him. “Join us, and you’ll finally know what it’s like to be a part of something worthwhile.”
“I was just about to ask you the same question,” Stratos said, looking Nash in the eye. “I want to make a deal with you. If you stand by and let me take this battery back to the frigate, you’ll live the rest of your days happy and smiling. They’ll worship us as kings back on Earth, as doormen who opened the future for humanity. You’ll never have another need again – all of your wishes would be answered before you even asked them. David, I know how hard of a life you’ve had – after all of that pain, don’t you think you deserve laughter?”
Nash couldn’t admit it, especially not to Stratos, but he was right. The thought of being finally rewarded for a life of pain was tempting, and it took all Nash had not to surrender to win, but fight to be defeated. He had lived among the colonists for only a few short days, and he was already willing to die for them. He knew that either he or the colonists had to die, and the other was damned to a lifetime of being haunted by the ghosts of their memory. If Nash died, the colonists would always feel obligated towards their savior. And if the colonists died, Nash would be scarred by the screams he never heard, because he had abandoned his friends when they needed him most.
“You’re wasting our oxygen if you think you can talk me off the ledge,” Nash said. “I’m going to die for them, because that’s what you do for family.” Nash’s words were forged with truth. He may have been adopted into the family of colonists, but the love was as thick as blood. After all, they shared something in common: the rattling sigh their chains made as they shuffled along.
Stratos shook his head. “I guess you belong to the colonists after all – you sound just as stupid as they do. But as much as you’re the same as them, you’re still different. That’s why I’m giving you one more chance to make the right choice.”
“I’ve already made the right choice,” Nash said, the venom bubbling in his voice. “So why won’t you let me die for it?” Nash had never been more prepared to die. For Stratos to sit there – just looking him sadly in the eye, refusing to fight –gave Nash a shot of frustration in the arm. He raised a hand and pointed it like a pistol at Stratos. He pressed the trigger. “Alexander let himself die because he was tired of humanity eating itself. I’m going to fight you, and I’m going to make sure you won’t forget him.” Nash said all of this, knowing that he was about to drown in the shadows that Stratos could cast.
And the tides of night were coming in. Stratos pressed a dance of buttons on the console in front of him, turning off the engine. With the engine turned off, the launch should have still been careening through space, with no friction to slow down its momentum. But her engineers had thought of everything, designing a failsafe where an engine shutdown triggered the launch’s gravity beams. Usually the beams served as a counterbalance to the intense g-forces, which would otherwise destroy a human body when traveling at sub-light speeds. The engine’s last gasp was flooding the gravity beams, slowing the ship to a halt without either man noticing it.
“I’m afraid you don’t understand the gravity of my situation,” Stratos snapped, frustrated. He suddenly pulled the glove off his right hand, and Nash almost threw up at the sight. The hand was severely frostbitten, as black as blindness and ripe for falling apart. The skin itself was as hard as marble, a statue to the pain a human hand can write. Stratos held it up for Nash to see in all of its twisted glory. “Don’t you see? This is what happens when you mishandle what you all call the cold shot. If I don’t get back to Earth within the next week, I’m going to lose my hand and possibly my life. Is that what you want to have happen to me?”
Nash recoiled from the sight of the ruined hand. In that moment, he almost felt a splash of pity for Stratos. But then he remembered himself and said in a cold voice, “Do you want me to be the one who says it?”
“What, that I got what I deserve?” Stratos said. “Maybe I do deserve it, or maybe I don’t. Regardless, it gives me another reason to get back home, as if I didn’t have enough reasons.”
As Stratos said this, he slipped the glove back onto his hand. He winced as the painkillers from the glove were injected in his hand once more. Stratos closed his eyes for a moment as he let the anesthetic soak in, and said quietly, “Do you really want to stop me?”
“More than anything else,” Nash said.
“Well then…” Stratos began, before suddenly twisting the palm of his hand in the water panel. The launch immediately throttled up and went into a violent roll. At the same time, Stratos lunged forward and unbuckled Nash’s seat harness. Nash tried to grab hold of the seat, but he was too slow, and he was sent tumbling through the zero gravity of the cockpit. Nash connected hard with the wall, the electric pain in his arm causing him to go both conscious and unconscious.
The ship righted itself, and Nash felt himself floating through a fog of pain. He struggled to anchor himself to something, anything, but he couldn’t. But then a hand shot out of the fog and grabbed Nash by the ankle. Nash felt himself get dragged forward through the air, and an angry fist smashed his face.
“I don’t want to fight you!” Stratos roared, grabbing Nash by the collar and shaking him.
“Then why are you hurting me?” Nash asked thickly.
“I’m not hurting you. You’re hurting yourself, for every second you think you’re doing the right thing!”
Nash coughed, spraying a cloud of blood into Stratos’ eyes. Stratos yelped and tried madly to wipe the smear of blood out of his eyes. Nash shook away the rattle of pain in his head and punched Stratos in the only weak spot he knew: his frostbitten right hand.
Stratos screamed as he experienced a deep pain he had never felt before, and Nash thought for a second that he had him broken. But Nash immediately regretted his punch a second later. Before, Stratos was fighting him as a man. But now, from the blinding pain, Stratos had devolved into a monster.
Nash felt a wind of punches against every inch of his body. He couldn’t even cry out in pain – the air he needed to scream was deflated
out of his lungs with every punch, to the point where he was almost drowning. Then, Nash felt an incredible kick in his chest, one that launched him across the cockpit, stopping only when his back cracked against the hull. He had flown so fast that his breath took a few seconds to catch up with him. He tried to yell out the pain, but his lungs were raw and his lips were swollen and bloody and his throat felt squeezed. He was little more than a collapse of a man.
There was a dark silence for a few moments, and then Nash could feel Stratos’ hot breath. Stratos snarled, “Do you still want to stop me? Can you?”
Nash tried to say something, but he couldn’t. And so Stratos continued. “I should kill you right now. But you know what? I’m going to let you live. I want you to learn a lesson from this. I’m going to teach you to think right, even if it’s the last thing I do.”
And that was when Nash blacked out.
***
When Nash woke up, he couldn’t tell how much time had passed. It felt like he had been out for either seconds or days. Through the dawn of his waking, he wondered if he was too late, if the colony had already been devoured by the black hole. Nash realized that he couldn’t think like that – he refused to believe that he had made a horrible mistake in facing Stratos alone.
He opened his eyes.
The first thing he realized was that, even with his eyes open, he was still plunged in dark. But after a few moments, his eyes adjusted, and he saw a soft blur in the distance, the color of a cherry sunset. His eyes sharpened more on the whetstone of the darkness, and he saw that it was an illuminated sign reading OXYGEN ON. It was then that he realized he was in the cargo hold at the back of the launch.
As he struggled to get up, he learned more. First, he realized that his hands were behind his back, lashed together with a snake of wires. Second, he was not floating – there was a carpet of gravity beneath him. His first thought was that they were back on Earth. But, as he looked out the sole window in the cargo hold, he saw the jet of space outside. They were still in outer space, but where was the gravity coming from?