Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  It was not until he was fully awake that he found his answer: Stratos must have activated the marlin battery. Turning it on by just a tiny fraction of its strength was enough to induce an artificial gravity. The battery harnessed between the launches now had the weight of an asteroid hundreds of miles in diameter, and Stratos was harnessing that gravitational force to propel the ship. Stratos was probably desperate to meet the frigate floating at the rendezvous point.

  Slowly, Nash stood up on trembling feet. The pain from the fight with Stratos still overwhelmed him – the ghosts of Stratos’ punches were still playing out across his body. But the gravity was rich soil, and Nash grew tall from it. His arms were still tied behind him, useless. He had to find something to cut the bindings, and quick. He had to believe that he still had time left, but he wasn’t sure how much time there was.

  Getting down on his knees, Nash awkwardly stumbled around the hold, trying to find something sharp. He lowered himself and swept the floor with the broom of his arm. The room was still the color of pitch – the illuminate sign his only light – and he had to see by touch. After about twenty or thirty seconds of searching, Nash winced as he felt something scratch his arm. By instinct, he leaned back, but only for a moment. Then, his mind took over and he turned and grasped for the object with his bound hands.

  As he felt his sharp salvation between his fingers, Nash wondered where the knife could have come from. What he didn’t realize was that he was onboard the same launch from earlier, when the miners were threatening him with execution. Canto had actually used the knife to cut a length of rope for hanging Nash. It was perhaps for the best for that Nash did not know this. If he did, then the memories of the interrogation would have come back to him, and Stratos’ words would have mocked him. The colonists he was fighting to save were animals after all, and the interrogation was proof of that.

  But even if Nash had remembered this, it wouldn’t have converted him to Stratos’ twisted religion. After all, Nash was guilty of his own sins over the years, culminating in his allowing Pere to die, and so he was an animal too. He had spent a lifetime thinking that he was standing at the edge of the abyss, looking down at the trapped souls. He never thought that he was trapped in the well with them all along. He had to climb first before he could help them up. If Nash had thought of this, he would have laughed a little that life was finally making sense, although it was on the last page of his story. But there was no time.

  Gripping the knife, Nash sawed away at the coil of wires as best as he could. After about a minute, the wires broke apart and fell to the ground like the leaves of autumn. Rubbing the feeling back into his hands, Nash wondered what his next step was going to be. A terrible vision crept into his mind: him sneaking up behind Stratos and shoveling the blood out of him with the knife. But he knew that he wouldn’t be able to do that, for a few reasons. One, he would never forgive himself for literally stabbing his friend in the back. Two, even if he could fall so low, he wouldn’t be able to sneak up on him, not in the terrible condition he was in. Nash had to outsmart him, somehow.

  But first, Nash had to orient himself. He stumbled over to the port window and looked out. He could see the black hole far still – although it was far off in the distance, Nash was relieved that they were still in the same star system. It meant that he hadn’t been unconscious for too long, and that there was still time to save the colony. He could still save the colony he loved as much as Stratos loved the marlin battery…

  And that was when he was struck by the lightning of an idea. He even gasped a little as the wave of the thought rushed over him. He knew how he was going to destroy Stratos, and all without laying a single finger on him.

  First, he had to turn on the light. He fumbled in the darkness for what felt like an eternity before he felt the light button. He pressed the button, and the hold immediately lit up like an angel’s smile. Nash looked around, making mental notes about what weapons he had at his disposal.

  In the cargo hold of the launch, there were two airlocks: there was the large hatch at the rear of the ship, where equipment could be loaded and unloaded, and a well-like hatch dug into the floor of the ship. The floor airlock was just a few feet away, looking like a bell jar that was half-sunk into the floor. Nash ran his hand over the bell jar, satisfied that it would work.

  The spacesuits were kept in the cargo hold of the bay, given the nearby airlocks into the hell outside. Nash rushed over to one of the compartments and pulled out a suit. He rushed back to the bell jar and stuffed the suit into the glass tube. His heart was racing as he did this, and he took a few precious seconds to slow his breath, a lullaby to his own heart. He needed to think clearly through every step of his plan, every inch of his blueprint. If he made one wrong move, the whole scheme would fall down around him like concrete rain.

  And it was a good thing that he took the time to slow down – otherwise, he would have forgotten a step. Nash grabbed one of the radio headsets anchored into a shelf and put it on. He flipped the frequency to the same as the launch. Satisfied, he returned to the bell jar and typed on a control panel connected to the hatch. The jar snapped shut, and there was an eerie scarlet light glowing from the base of the hatch. A few seconds later, the floor of the jar opened, and the spacesuit inside of the jar was sucked out into space.

  As this was happening, Nash found his hiding place: a locker near the cabin door. He squeezed himself into the cabinet just as the spacesuit was being ejected. It was only then that he dared speak into the microphone.

  “Marc, do I have your attention now?”

  There was an echo of silence, and Nash knew what that meant. Right now, Stratos was hearing the voice of a man he thought was out cold and bound in the cargo hold. Not only that, but he would have also seen a blinking light on his control pad, indicating that the hatch had just opened. Then, Stratos’ voice screamed over the headset, so sudden that Nash winced and grasped his head in his hands from the injection of the headache.

  “David! What are you doing?” Stratos demanded.

  Recovering, Nash said, “If I can’t have the battery, I’m not going to let you have it either. It can be that simple.”

  No more than four seconds had passed before the door next to the locker slid open. Through a crack in the locker door, Nash watched as Stratos rushed into the room, frantically looking around. Then, seeing that one of the spacesuits was gone and the bell jar hatch had truly been activated, Stratos hurried in putting another of the spacesuits on. Nash thought that he would feel a sense of satisfaction, watching as Stratos helped him in his plan. But with the plan going as predicted, he knew what was going to come next.

  As Stratos fitted the helmet over his head, he snapped into the radio, “Don’t make me regret saving you!”

  “You want to keep me alive as a slave. You should have killed me and set me free,” Nash said with a lump in his throat. He wished more than anything else that Stratos would turn and see Nash hiding in the locker. Nash had to remind himself that Stratos wasn’t human, not in the slightest sense.

  Stratos squeezed himself into the bell jar and activated the controls on the inside of the glass. The red light glowed again, and Stratos was ejected. Although Nash couldn’t see what was unfolding outside of the launch, he was acting out the scene on the stage of his mind. Normally, an astronaut would have required a jetpack, at the very least a tether, before making the jump. Otherwise, there was nothing stopping them from floating away. But both Nash and Stratos knew that, with the marlin battery idling between the fused launches, there was enough artificial gravity to keep an astronaut in place. Right about now, Stratos would be walking on the outside of the hull, looking around for Nash who wasn’t there.

  Nash suddenly realized that he was late for the next step of the plan. Swearing to himself, he jumped out of the locker and entered the cabin. Looking around wildly, he prayed to gods he didn’t even believe in that the transmitter was still there. He sighed with relief as he spotted the transmitter for t
he battery, lying on top of the control pad. In his haste to stop Nash from sabotaging the battery, Stratos had forgotten the transmitter.

  Nash cradled the device in his hands, amazed that so much depended on something so little. Then, speaking into the microphone on his headset, Nash said, “You asked me if I made the right choice. When you die – and you will – the charter will write you off as an embarrassment. But the colonists will remember you forever, because they think you love them. I’m going to give you some time to think about that. Goodbye, Marc.”

  With that, Nash turned the dial counterclockwise, shutting off the battery. Nash suddenly found himself floating in the cabin, the gravity dying away immediately. Over the earpiece, he could hear the anguished cries of Stratos – it was a jungle of howls that would haunt Nash for the rest of his short life. Nash couldn’t bear to hear his friend – and Stratos was still his friend – and so he ripped the headset free and broke it apart in his hands.

  The second he broke the headset, it was as Stratos had already died. A funeral silence filled the cabin, but Nash knew that Stratos was not gone, not yet. Outside of the launch itself, Stratos had struggled to grasp onto the ship, but his suit’s clumsy gloves slipped on the smooth metal. And so Stratos drifted away, begging for help, not realizing that Nash had already turned away. There was over thirty minutes of oxygen left in Stratos’ tank. Stratos had to live thirty minutes of exile, alone in the open sea of space, waiting for his tank to give out and for him to drown. Nash had to tell himself that this was the only way that Stratos could die.

  Still, Nash was sobbing as he sat down in the pilot seat and dipped his hands into the water panels. He turned the ship away from its rendezvous coordinates with the frigate, instead aiming the arrow at the heart of the black hole.

  He tried to forget what had just happened by remembering what Avis had taught him the day before. She had only provided him with an hour’s worth of instruction, insisting that he knew everything he needed to help Stratos. But now, Stratos was gone, and Nash was flying the ship alone. He made more than a few mistakes in his flying. At one point, he somehow managed to throw the launch into reverse. When that happened, the hull around him grinded – Nash panicked, thinking that he had somehow snapped the ship in half.

  But every time Nash stumbled, the memory of his mother was there to pick him up. Nash had a flashback, years back to when he was a child just as naïve as he was now. He remembered skipping stones across the bay. He insisted to his mother that he was going to reach the city of Dauphin with one of his throws. Nash was going to catch a citizen’s attention and make them look across the bay, at the forgotten ruins that Nash and his mother and the other poor lived in. That citizen would see the sadness that he had been avoiding, and somehow all would be right then. Only then would Nash have a purpose.

  Nash would stay out for hours, until well after the sun had set and the constellation of the city’s lights burned against the night. Years later, he would wonder why his mother never told him to give up, that the bay was just too wide for anyone to skip a stone across.

  Nash had always felt like a fool when he remembered that story. But now, as the launch swayed and shuddered, he was beginning to understand his mother. She never wanted him to try and bridge the bay with a stone’s throw – she just wanted him to try. Growing up, she had seen too many people get bullied and broken for trying to be better. She saw the courage in her son’s eyes, the little spark pushing against the crowd of wind, and she didn’t have the heart to extinguish it.

  As he realized this, the ship began to steady. After five minutes, the ship was a javelin flying straight. After ten minutes, he felt the phenomenon of being one with a machine. After years of trying, the skipping stone was going to reach the other shore. He was going to crack the prison open like an eggshell and free his fellow captives. Nash chanted this hope to himself over and over – that he was about to have a purpose – and the pain and agony from earlier cleared away. He could barely feel the bruises from Stratos’ fists now. He was turning strong like marble, a monument to what he stood for.

  As fast as the launch was going, Nash was growing impatient with it. Although Nash had been knocked out for only a few hours, Stratos had activated the battery during that time, hurtling the ship forward at unfathomable speeds. If he was going to make up for lost time, he couldn’t do it by sailing on the photons from distance stars. He had to turn the marlin battery on.

  Nash picked up the little transmitter for the battery. He pressed the emerald button on the right side of the transmitter. The button glowed, indicating that there was a signal between the device and the battery. Next, Nash held down the failsafe button with his left thumb while slowly turning the dial. He knew that if he turned the dial too far to the right, the battery’s gravity would instantly kill him. And so he twisted the dial just a breath – to the casual eye, it looked as if he didn’t even adjust it.

  But four seconds later, the battery received the transmission and something happened. Like in Khunrath’s workshop back at the colony, Nash could feel the sudden gravity pulling on his bones. For a mad moment, he actually thought that he was sinking into the floor. But after just a second, the battery stopped throttling and eased into an idle. The gravity followed suit, easing back until it felt almost as good as a drink. The gravity tricked Nash’s mind, and he almost thought that he was back at the colony. He had to remind himself that he would never feel that joy again.

  At least he was making much better time now. Khunrath was right when he said that turning on the battery was like throwing a mountain into an ocean. The sudden gravity had punched a hole through the water of space, and Nash was being propelled on the shockwaves from that break. The speed indicator on the console wasn’t designed to understand the battery’s potential – otherwise, it would have said that the launch was flying just faster than the speed of light.

  Now, Nash was just minutes away from Hellmouth. He was close enough that the black hole filled every inch of the window. He noticed that there was something different about the monster, something that wasn’t there before. And that’s when he realized it – the black hole was wearing a ring that was a twist of aquamarine and topaz. The black hole was standing between him and a distant nebula that was shooting fireworks of embers into outer space. The gravity from Hellmouth was so intense that it was causing the nebula’s light to twist and refract around the black hole.

  While Nash feared the black hole, he couldn’t help but admire its art. But as beautiful as it was, Nash had seen wonders elsewhere in his life that were more awe-inspiring. He did not realize how fortunate he was to think that.

  As he approached the black hole, the minefield of debris began to thicken. While the gravity beams on the front of the launch were able to deflect all incoming rock, there was something that Nash had not anticipated. When the countless pieces of rock had been ensnared by the black hole, they began to orbit it as if they were moons. And while Nash could evade the sideways rocks, the closer he got to the black hole, the stronger the current became. Nash shuddered at the thought of a meteoroid slamming into the side of his launch at the speed of light.

  Nash, preparing for the worst, shut down the battery – the journey ahead was dangerous enough without the battery’s gravity attracting every piece of floating rock. As he did this, he opened the intakes for the ship’s own engine. Light from the tapestry of stars around him was being absorbed by the black hole, and he was about to sail on the churning storm of their light.

  He also tried a trick that Avis had taught him. She instructed him what to do to avoid side impacts. And so, making sure that the launch was still flying straight, Nash applied the rudder, causing the launch to yaw until it was almost flying sideways. This way, the gravity beams would deflect the swirl of meteoroids, and Nash would not have to worry about a breach in the hull. Avis had taught him this strategy, forgetting to mention that the last time she tried it, she had accidentally flown the side of the ship into a large and unfor
giving piece of rock.

  But Nash had a different kind of luck. He was able to dodge the meteoroids, but he was doing it so that he could die the worst of deaths. He didn’t know much about what happened after he stepped through the gates of the black hole – in his defense, no one else did either. The going theory was that after passing through the event horizon, the black hole would stretch him out into infinity while swords of gravity would break him down into his basic chemicals. A man sinking feet-first into a black hole would have to watch as his body beneath him was slowly torn apart, and he himself would be stretched out so far that he would have to wait for an eternity until the gravity’s blade pierced his heart. It was far from a beautiful death, and certainly not something that people would want to remember. Nash had to remind himself that the colonists would remember it.

  He was now in the caution zone of the black hole – where he could still escape the gravitational pull as long as he was careful. Here, the rocks had smashed against one another, to the point that Nash was flying through a field of dust. The launch skimmed sideways against the current of dust, like a sidewinder in the desert. Nash flew like this, forgetting about the intake valves on his launch. But he remembered them a few seconds later, when the control panel in front of him started beeping and flashing.

  Nash swore as he realized that he just clogged up the valves with dust that stuck like tar. He could no longer fly on photons, which was a shame. After all, light from the ceiling of stars was being drawn towards the black hole, and he could have had a hurricane pushing on his sails. He had no choice now but to switch the battery back on and hope for the best. He winced as he turned on the battery. He felt the squeeze on his stomach that was starting to become familiar, and still he had to fight down the urge to throw up. There was nothing natural in the veins of that battery, and the sooner Nash destroyed both it and the black hole, the better. As he hurtled through space, a whiplash of dirt and dust followed behind him, attracted by the battery’s gravity.