Salvation Day

by Kali Wallace

  The hollow feeling in my chest, it was not only from the lack of gravity. It was not only nerves. There was, pressing outward from my lungs, from my throat, from the chambers of my heart, a giddy hope I had never felt before. I would not be going back.

  * * *

  • • •

  Boudicca’s voice came over the shuttle intercom to announce our departure.

  “Good morning, passengers,” she said brightly. “Welcome aboard Pilgrim 3 for our journey to Armstrong City. We’re honored to have the recipients of the Leung Fellowship and future participants in the Second United Council traveling with us today.”

  The students were barely listening, but if they had been, they would hear a pilot who was calm and confident, trustworthy to her core. Unlike the rest of us, Boudicca was not playacting an unfamiliar role. She had been a SPEC pilot years before, briefly famous as the pilot of the first ship to attempt rescue after the transport Breton crashed on the surface of Mars. Horrified by what she had seen, Boudicca publicly criticized SPEC’s response to the disaster; they responded by limiting her flight assignments again and again, putting her on shorter and shorter routes demeaning to her skills and experience. When they finally grounded her, Boudicca had left SPEC rather than accept the insult of becoming an instructor for her replacements. She soon learned there was no room in the Councils for a pilot who was forbidden from flying, so she had given up her Councils citizenship as well, turning her back on them as they had turned their backs on her.

  But she had never given up her dream of returning to space. She had never given up her love of flying. There was excitement in her voice now, beneath the cool professionalism, and no small amount of joy.

  “Our flight is going to be a leisurely one,” Boudicca went on. “The port at Armstrong is running behind schedule, so SPEC has asked us to spread out the passenger arrivals. Normally we could make this trip in under eight hours, but I’m afraid it’ll take a bit longer than that today.”

  The port was running off schedule because of us: sympathizers to the family, the same anonymous helpers who had smuggled us across the border, had arranged for a complication in permits to slow down traffic at Valle de México Spaceport, which disrupted the flow of lunar traffic. The delay meant that the orbital Tereshkova Shipyard, along with its steady stream of transports carrying supplies for the massive asteroid-bound ice-breaking fleet, would be on the wrong side of the Moon when Pilgrim 3 was supposed to be landing. We needed the extra time. We needed the distraction.

  Boudicca finished: “So sit back, relax, and enjoy the view. If you have any questions, we’ve got four crew members in the cabin to help you. They’ll be serving lunch about halfway through the flight.”

  Me, Panya, Henke, Dag as the cabin crew. Boudicca and Malachi in the cockpit. Nico and Bao overseeing the engines and cargo. There were enough of us to control our hostages, although they didn’t yet know that’s what they were: eleven fellows, one professor.

  Pilgrim 3 was a small shuttle, with three rows of four seats, split down the middle by an aisle. M’Baga had chosen a seat in the first row on the port side, and next to him was a girl who looked far too young for university. The professor said something and pointed out the window; the girl smiled shyly. A prodigy of sorts, I guessed, and lonely for it. I remembered enough of life in Councils schools to know that if she had friends, she wouldn’t be sitting in the first row by the teacher.

  Behind M’Baga and the child were a man and a woman in their late twenties or early thirties, older than most of the fellows, holding hands and so wrapped up in each other I doubted they even knew they were in space. Behind them, two young women pointed through the window at familiar landmarks on Earth. Across the aisle, starboard front row, was a short woman with spiky, multicolored hair, and a fat woman with dreadlocks twisted into an elaborate crown. They had fastened their harnesses without having to be told and listened attentively to Panya’s safety instructions. Good citizens, obedient, they wouldn’t be any trouble. Not so the two young men behind them, who were laughing and showing off. One of them had leered at Panya and said, “I’m so happy you’re here to keep us safe.”

  In the last row on the starboard side sat Bhattacharya and another young man.

  The second man was nobody of importance, but I had looked up his history anyway, curious about who might befriend Amita Bhattacharya’s son. Baqir Nassar, twenty-one years old, was born in a North American refugee camp during an epidemic of Danzmayr’s disease. He had left the desert several years later when his four parents—a complex marriage of two men and two women—finally applied for and gained Councils citizenship, but not before three of his siblings succumbed to the plague. Nassar was permanently scarred by the disease: his left arm had been amputated and replaced by a robotic prosthetic. He did not disguise his metal arm and fingers with synthetic flesh or gloves; the silver gleam caught the light when he gestured.

  His scars were all most people would see when they looked at him. He would have to work twice as hard to prove he was worthy of citizenship, of this research fellowship, of a place alongside all the pampered children of the Councils. He would spend his entire life being blamed for the choices his parents had made, for being born in the wrong place, for being ill, for carrying the dust of the desert wasteland in his veins. The United Councils of Earth pretended to care for all of humanity, but their compassion had limits.

  I wanted to understand if Nassar felt those limits, or if he pretended he was treated as an equal. I wanted to know what he was doing here. What he hoped to prove. If he knew that it would never be enough.

  It was possible, I thought, that my mother had encountered Nassar’s family when she worked in the refugee camps during an outbreak. She had volunteered in the borderlands when I was young. That had been her first experience of the desert, the first time she saw how the Councils treated the people who chose to live outside its false security, the first time she tasted that hardship and freedom for herself. She might have held an ailing baby boy in her arms while his mother recovered from childbirth, bringing a small, insignificant life into the world while thousands died around them and the Councils offered nothing but overworked doctors and empty promises. As outbreaks raged and the camps overflowed with the sick and dying, the Councils dragged their feet, refusing to expedite the byzantine citizenship application process, refusing to open the borders, refusing to welcome desperate families, refusing, refusing, refusing. Far removed from the hardship, Councilors and commissioners argued about the risk of a global pandemic, the impact of devoting even the most meager resources to those in need, the danger of opening the gates and letting anybody pass. They may have kept their mutterings about plague-ridden criminals overwhelming their perfect clean cities to private conversations, to whispers behind closed doors, but still they muttered, and my mother heard them, and she never forgot.

  Bhattacharya had taken the seat by the window. Nassar was on the aisle. I didn’t like that. It made Bhattacharya harder to reach.

  “You’ve got a lot of crew on this flight,” M’Baga said.

  “Yes,” I said shortly. I didn’t want to talk to him, but I could not avoid it. Panya was still cajoling the flirting young men into tightening their harnesses. “It’s a full crew. We want to keep everybody safe.”

  “Including two with the engines,” M’Baga said.

  I silently cursed Nico and Bao for sticking their heads out to watch the passengers come aboard. They were supposed to have stayed hidden.

  “They’re a teacher and apprentice from the engineering corps. They’re only here for training and observation. There’s no work being done,” I said, hoping our prepared explanation would not make him suspicious. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Oh, I trust it will be a smooth ride,” M’Baga said.

  “We’ll do our best,” I said, and I smiled, and I wondered if I would have to kill him before the day was over.


  * * *

  • • •

  After we had served lunch, about five hours into our journey, I gestured for Dag to come to the front while I went to the back of the passenger cabin. I moved carefully down the short aisle, holding on to the handles on the backs of the seats and hoping nobody noticed how uneasy I was in zero gravity. I wasn’t entirely sure how much more time we had, as Boudicca had kept updates to a minimum to avoid drawing attention to our route, but I didn’t want to be in the front, far from our target, when the time came.

  The shuttle windows to my right showed the Earth, too small and too bright. To my left there was only darkness and stars. Neither view soothed my ratcheting nerves. I took my place at the back and hooked my feet into the straps behind the last row of seats. Beside me, Henke was massive, pale, and grim with menace. I did not tell him to smile now.

  I was relieved to be away from Professor M’Baga’s searching gaze and pointed questions. Dag was a better choice for the professor’s attentions. He had spent years aboard various ships, working his way up from cargo loader to pilot, before he was caught diverting goods to a smuggler and was given a choice: imprisonment or revocation of his Councils citizenship. He had chosen the freedom of the desert. The Flight Service tattoos on his hands were genuine, and he was happy to chat amiably with the professor about flying transport ships to build Halley Station, piloting a gravity slingshot around Venus on his second-ever command, stories we had all heard a dozen times before. There had never been any doubt that Dag yearned to get back into space. That was one reason Adam trusted him so much.

  I turned my attention to Bhattacharya and his friend.

  “Are you sure you’re going to have time to do all that?” Bhattacharya asked. They were talking about what they would be doing during their fellowships in Armstrong City—the same conversation most of the fellows had been having all morning. “That sounds like five projects combined in one.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it’s worth a try, right? It’s not like I can replicate a low-gravity hydrological environment on Earth. If I can do this, maybe SPEC will look at my proposal for the Jupiter project.” Nassar gestured carelessly, then stilled, looking at his hands before him, pressing the cybernetic one down to the armrest while the other floated above his legs. The contrast between his silver metal fingers on one hand and brown skin on the other was striking. “Okay, that feels weird.”

  “You get used to it,” Bhattacharya said. “It’s even weirder on the Moon, because you keep expecting there to be either Earth gravity or free fall, not somewhere in between.”

  “Besides,” Nassar went on, “at least I’m not basing my entire project on twenty hours of telescope time.”

  “Twenty-six,” Bhattacharya said. “I argued them up.”

  Nassar rolled his eyes. “So that’s what you were doing on that call. What did you do, promise you’d name a black hole after the administrator in thanks?”

  “She’s already got two black holes, three nebulae, and a galaxy named after her. No, I told her I’d ask my aunt about bringing up the improvements proposal before the end of the year.”

  I listened to Bhattacharya’s words, to the tone of his voice, searching for any waver of fear, but there was none. As far as I knew, he had not been back to space since the House of Wisdom massacre. He had never spoken publicly about the attack; his aunt had shielded him from the demands of the public and press. The official line was that he did not remember—but he had been twelve, not an infant. I was only a year older than him, and I remembered those terrifying days so vividly they could never be cleaved from my memory. The Zeffir-1 outbreak on the ship had come only two days after my father was sent away from House of Wisdom in disgrace. He had not even arrived home yet; SPEC had been questioning him about the data he was accused of stealing. I remembered it all clearly: the twins asking when Daddy was coming back, strangers charging into the house the night he died, the solemn announcement that the Zeffir-1 vaccine would be distributed globally. My mother yelling at SPEC investigators. Nadra and Anwar crying when we left for the desert. They had been only five and didn’t know what was happening. But I had been thirteen, and I understood everything. I could still hear the tiredness in my mother’s voice when she said, There’s nowhere else for us to go. They’ll never leave us alone.

  Bhattacharya had been old enough to bear witness. His decade-long silence had to be a lie.

  “Hey,” a man said. “Hey, isn’t that—”

  I looked up, a prickle of fear shivering over my skin. The unfinished question had come from one of the loud young men in the middle row. Brown hair, olive skin, lanky and tall. The one who had been clumsily flirting with Panya.

  In my ear Malachi said, “Oh, shit.”

  Boudicca’s voice was much calmer. “Relax. They were going to notice eventually. Distract them. We have time.”

  “Should I make the announcement? Give them an excuse?” Malachi asked. I could easily imagine the expression on his face: frantic and strained, his brown eyes wide with worry beneath his curly dark hair. Malachi was copilot because we needed his skills in the cockpit, but I also knew that it was better to keep him hidden, where his inability to veil his worry would not give us away.

  But it was too late now. As Boudicca had said, they were going to notice eventually.

  “What is that?” the young man asked, and his words fell into a natural lull in the surrounding conversation. Everybody heard him. My heart began to thump faster.

  “It’s a station,” his friend said, leaning over for a better view through the window. “Providence, maybe?”

  Providence Station sat at the L1 Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon. It was home to twenty thousand people and served as the origin port for ships leaving the Earth-Moon system on long-haul journeys. It was massive in size and iconic in shape: a broad ring several kilometers in diameter. It was also a good two hundred thousand kilometers away from where we were headed.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said a woman in the front row, the short one with colorful hair. “It’s too small, and it’s not a ring.”

  Panya spoke up brightly. “We can certainly ask the captain to identify it for us, if you like, but right now she’s busy following Orbital Control’s directives. They’ve got quite a mess to deal with today.”

  M’Baga glanced at her, then leaned over to the starboard as far as his harness would allow. “You’re right, Ariana. It’s not Providence. It’s a ship.”

  “It’s huge,” said the man in the middle row. “The only ships that big are the new icebreakers, but they aren’t done yet. Is it some kind of test flight? It could be an early test flight.”

  His friend nudged him. “Nobody wants to hear more about your icebreakers.”

  “I’ll pass your question along to the captain,” Panya said.

  “It’s not working,” Malachi said over the comm. “They know.”

  In the front of the cabin, Dag moved to open a storage cabinet; Henke did the same behind me.

  M’Baga’s brow furrowed. “It’s too large to be an icebreaker, even one of the new ones. It almost looks like . . .”

  The environment aboard a spacecraft is carefully controlled down to the smallest factor. The mix of oxygen and nitrogen, the permitted concentration of particulates, the temperature, the humidity, even the rate at which air cycles through the vents so that no passenger feels too warm or too cool, too stuffy or too drafty, all of it is determined by the ship’s computer, leveled and measured for perfect balance. There was no chance that any passenger aboard Pilgrim 3 would feel a chill.

  But where there were cautious small motions before, now there was stillness. Where there was conversation, silence. The women and men on the port side were leaning and stretching to see the opposite view. Those on the starboard were staring out the windows. They were all looking at the same thing. Panya said something, another soothing reassura
nce to another volley of questions.

  I unhooked my foot from the strap and grabbed a handle on the wall to pull myself down. I looked over the top of Bhattacharya’s head, past the ghostly shape of his reflection on the window. The voices flowed around me like desert wind. My chest ached. I could not breathe.

  It was so close. I could reach across space to touch it.

  House of Wisdom had been named for one of the ancient world’s great centers of learning, the name a promise of the discoveries and advances that would be made during its explorations through the solar system. Like its namesake, the ship had no equal. At the time of its launch seventeen years ago, it was the largest and fastest ship in existence, propelled by Amita Bhattacharya’s Almora engine—named for the Himalayan town where she had decades ago dreamed up the propulsion system that would secure her legacy. House of Wisdom was designed to glide through the solar system as the sail ships of ancient times had crossed Earth’s oceans, bringing the bold and curious to places they had never been before. It was meant to be a living laboratory of long-term scientific research and space exploration, an unmatched step forward in modern humankind’s reach for the stars. It was the ship that had established the research stations at Europa and Io, intercepted the probe UC33-X when it returned from its centuries in deep space, and rescued the miners of Ceres when a cascading failure had damaged the station’s water recycling system. It had traveled the solar system for seven years, and during those years there was not one person on Earth who did not gaze at the sky and imagine themselves aboard the great vessel, soaring among the planets. The day my father was invited to join House of Wisdom as part of the team studying the ancient probe UC33-X was the happiest day of his life.