by Kali Wallace
CHIN: In the rest of this lesson, Dr. Lago and I are going to share with you what we hope to learn about this mysterious, distant world.
ZAHRA
The impossible stench of death followed us through the ship. I had not yet taken a single breath from the interior of House of Wisdom; the space suit was sealed. But I could smell it nonetheless: the vegetable rot of the gardens, the septic stink of human decay, the acrid iron taint of blood. I could taste it on my tongue.
I had not suffered the explosion directly; the wall of the airlock and position of the shuttle meant I had absorbed only a fraction of the possible force. But my back and shoulders ached with a deep pain that spiked sharply when I moved the wrong way. My head throbbed, and when I turned I could feel the pressure of the helmet against the knots and bumps. The pain that threatened to turn to nausea with every careless move.
I had never liked Nico. He was brash and cruel and had spent his entire life in the desert. I had wanted to choose somebody steadier for the mission, somebody better able to masquerade as a Councils citizen; Adam had not let me. But Nico had not deserved to die like that, wreathed in flame that peeled the space suit from his skin, screaming. Bao, who only ever did what Nico did first. The frightened woman who could not bear to leave the shuttle. None of them deserved that. Boudicca, who had endured such tragedy before she left SPEC, who had never stopped dreaming of returning to space, she had not deserved to die like that.
I had thought I hated the Councils and SPEC as much as I could, but it was nothing compared to what I felt now. I had been naive. I knew they could murder their citizens to protect their secrets, as they had murdered my father, but I had not thought they would slaughter their own cherished young women and men.
I felt callous for letting a less tragic but more pressing concern push my anger and grief aside, but I could not ignore that all of our supplies had been lost as well. Our tools, our medical testing units, food and water, everything we had brought on the shuttle for our initial exploration of House of Wisdom, it was all destroyed. We had nothing but our weapons, our suits, and Malachi’s skeleton key.
“This is it,” Bhattacharya said. He stopped in front of a closed door: SYSTEMS CORE A-04. “But I can’t open this one.”
He had recovered from the panic that overtook him in the garden, but his cowardice had seeped into the others like a sickness. They spoke little. They had not once tried to get away, nor balked at our commands. Henke was frightened and trying to hide it; he wanted them to give him an excuse to lash out. I could hear it in the way he directed them, see it in the way he shoved a bit too hard, snarled a bit too loud, never holstered his weapon. I let him bully and bluster. I was afraid that if he stopped, the silence would overwhelm us.
Malachi tapped the door’s control panel. The now-familiar MEDICAL QUARANTINE IN EFFECT glowed red on the screen. He attached his skeleton key and got to work. He was growing more practiced at bypassing the locks, although some still defeated him. His gestures were quick and nervous. But he had not failed us. He had never failed us, not once since he walked out of the desert six years ago, so lost and alone after being turned away from the border so many times. I needed to remember that, to tamp down the impatience. He would not fail us.
The warning vanished. The door opened, and the dormancy lights filled the room beyond. I was growing to hate those lights and the bleak red stain they cast over everything.
The mainframe control center was a C-shaped room that curved around a large, cylindrical chamber about ten meters in diameter. Behind the transparent wall, the ship’s computing core stretched into the levels above and below. The machines flickered with pinprick lights of blue, white, red, and green. There was a slight hum in the air. After so much darkness, so much quiet, those signs of activity were reassuring. The ship had been waiting for us. It needed only to be awoken.
“I don’t like how cold it is,” Malachi said. “The computing core is still functional. It should be warm in here.”
“I noticed that too,” Dag said.
“The whole ship is cold,” Panya pointed out. “It’s been abandoned for ten years.”
“I know, but the machinery—”
“Don’t get distracted,” I said. “Start with the radio.”
Malachi hesitated before answering, “On it.”
There were four dead in the room. Two women, two men, all seated at computer terminals. They wore SPEC uniforms. They were, like all the others, mummified to brown husks. Like the bodies in the garden, they bore no obvious external injuries. There had been no violence here.
To Henke I said, “Get these out of the way.”
He grunted wordlessly and dragged the corpses to the far side of the room, where he pushed their faces into the wall. I watched him for a moment, then turned to the hostages. I did not draw my weapon, but I did put my hand on the holster and hoped it looked like a subtle threat rather than a nervous gesture.
“You said the virus made everybody violent,” I said to Bhattacharya. “But at this point we’ve seen more corpses who died without wounds than with them.” I had no idea if that was true; I had not been counting. But I didn’t care. He was still lying to us, and I was tired of it. I was tired of opening every door and rounding every corner to discover more lies. “Did these people suffocate too? Like the ones in the garden?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have no idea.”
“Why didn’t they evacuate? If they were still thinking clearly, why didn’t they escape?”
“I don’t know,” he said again. “Maybe they couldn’t.”
“You were here during the outbreak.” I tried to keep my voice calm, to hide the frustration and fear I was feeling, had been feeling since I first came into the ship. “Did you see anybody die like this? Without injuries?”
“No,” he said, but there was a crack in the middle of the word. He was silent for a moment. I wished I could better read his expression behind the faceplate. I could not tell if he was trying to remember or trying to lie. “But I wasn’t here at the end. I didn’t see everything. And . . .”
“What?”
“In her last transmission, Captain Ngahere said there were two stages of the infection. Panic, then calm. So it’s possible, I guess. I don’t know.”
I had listened to Captain Ngahere’s final transmission a hundred times or more, sinking into every fearful hitch in her voice, every pause, every sigh. I had carried the wail of the ship’s medical alarms into my dreams. “She didn’t say that.”
“Yes, she did. In the full transmission, she says that.”
“We’ve heard the full transmission.”
Bhattacharya shook his head. “The one released to the public was incomplete.”
“We’ve heard more than what was made public,” I said. Even as I said it, doubt wormed into my mind. “Malachi. Tell him.”
Malachi glanced up from the workstation. “We know more than the public, yes, but it’s always been possible that we don’t know everything. You know that. I warned Adam.”
Malachi had been clear from the start that if SPEC suspected even for a second that an outside hacker was mining their restricted files, the whole plan would fail. Adam had never been concerned. The coup of discovering the loophole in the security drones was our greatest triumph—that information was so carefully guarded we assumed we had stripped bare all of SPEC’s biggest lies.
But we had not known the true nature of the virus. We may not have known the full extent of Captain Ngahere’s final words. My mind spun with the dizzying possibilities of everything else we might not know.
“I don’t know what you heard, but Captain Ngahere talked about the two stages of the virus in her last transmission,” Bhattacharya said. “The same one where she said it might be Zeffir-1 and Dr. Lago was probably responsible.”
“He’s lying again,” Henke said. He was grinning. It was t
he grin of a feral dog, more threat than amusement, the same way he had grinned when Adam first brought him to the homestead and introduced him as a man devoted to a new beginning. “We don’t need to listen to this asshole.”
“Um.” Malachi cleared his throat. “The radio is functional.”
I spun to face him. “Can we contact Homestead?”
“If I can make sure it’s encrypted . . . There. Okay. Homestead, this is House of Wisdom. Do you copy?”
A noise came over the space suit radio, a click and two low beeps directly in my ear. Malachi watched incomprehensible data scroll over the screen and tapped out a few commands. He didn’t seem concerned.
“None of you are going to say a word,” Henke told the hostages. They nodded mutely, eyes on his weapon.
“I repeat: Homestead, this is House of Wisdom. Do you copy?”
Another click, another beep, and a man said, “House of Wisdom, this is Homestead. We hear you loud and clear.”
Panya let out a relieved laugh, and Malachi grinned. That was Orvar, captain of Homestead.
“Good to hear your voice, Captain,” Malachi said.
“What the hell is going on over there? We picked up a distress signal from Pilgrim 3, and Orbital Control is lit up with emergency transmissions.”
Malachi looked up at me. I leaned forward, then stopped, feeling foolish. I didn’t need to speak into the terminal. I only needed to speak.
“Pilgrim 3 is gone,” I said.
Orvar was quiet for a long moment. “Is that you, Zahra? What did you say?”
“The shuttle is gone. There was an explosion. It’s been destroyed.” I swallowed. I could not allow my voice to break. There would be time to grieve later. “We lost Boudicca, Nico, and Bao, and several hostages.”
“Fuck me,” Orvar said. “How could that—fuck. How did that happen? The security drones?”
“The drones didn’t attack. We don’t know what happened. The explosion might have come from inside the shuttle.”
“It may have been a missile,” Dag said. “We don’t know it came from inside.”
“Nobody knew that shuttle was ours until today. Nobody knew our destination,” Orvar said.
“I know, but they must have found out,” I said, trying so very hard not to sound like a child insisting the adults listen to her. “The explosion tore the . . .” I had to pause for a breath. “It took the shuttle apart, and it came from the inside.”
“A missile is still more likely,” Dag said.
I did not need Dag contradicting me in front of everybody. I had seen the explosion. He hadn’t. But now was not the time to scold him. “We haven’t had any contact with Boudicca or the others since. They’re gone.”
“Fuck.” Over the radio I could hear Orvar taking deep breaths. His voice a bit muffled, he said, “Go find Adam. He needs to hear this.” Speaking to me again, he went on, “Are the rest of you okay? Were any of you hurt?”
My head was still throbbing, and my entire body ached from the force of the impact. It would be so much easier if we had the medical supplies from the shuttle—but I couldn’t think like that. I was only bruised, not broken. I had suffered worse. It was not important.
I said, “The rest of us are unharmed. We have four hostages, including Councilor Bhattacharya’s nephew. We brought them over before the explosion.”
“Thank the ancestors for that,” Orvar said. “Better than losing all of them. How did this happen? How did they find out?”
Malachi said, “Boudicca was sure SPEC has a dark ship in orbit. We couldn’t confirm its presence or location, but you should be on watch for it until we can get our radar up and do a complete survey. If it’s there, it’s close. The security drones will keep them away for a while, but we have to shut the system down to let Homestead approach, and we have to do it soon.”
A low whistle from Orvar. “We knew the bastards might have a trick like that, but attacking the shuttle . . . fuck. Fuck. I never thought they would kill their own kids to stop us.” His voice hitched on the word kids. Orvar had children of his own, but he had not seen them in a very long time. When he left the Councils to live in the desert, his wife and children had remained behind. That was years ago, long before I was born, before the Councils had closed the border even to former citizens seeking a temporary visit, when those who left still believed they could see their families from time to time. That, like everything else the Councils did, had been a lie. Every time he had tried to return to them, whether for a visit or to stay, he was denied. Orvar’s children would be grown now. I had never asked him why he left in the first place, but it scarcely mattered. There was no reason good enough to justify the Councils denying a man the chance to watch his children grow.
“None of us thought they would do that,” I said. “We should have known better.”
“We won’t make that mistake again,” Panya said, her voice soft and shaky. “Never again.”
“There’s more. It’s about the virus,” I said.
“Just a moment—Adam is here. We’ve got House of Wisdom, sir.”
Orvar spoke quietly for a few moments, relaying to Adam what I had just told him. A shiver of nerves passed over my skin. We had lost so much, and I did not know how Adam would respond. Both profound sadness and fiery rage would be justified. I had not seen him in about a month, not since we had left the family to embed ourselves into SPEC under our false identities. I did not know how to brace for his mercurial temperament when I could not read his face and voice and whims every day.
“Zahra,” Adam said, and I tensed. He spoke my name with an exhaled breath, like the swoop of a hawk that had spotted its prey. “Listen to me. Boudicca knew the danger when she chose this mission. She would have thought it worth it, for a chance to bring our family to freedom. She knew her sacrifice would not be in vain.”
What Boudicca had wanted was to fly again, after having been forced to give it up so long ago. She had wanted to push aside the tragedies of her past and return to space. She had known this mission, our dream, was dangerous. But anticipating danger and going happily into death were two very different things. She had only wanted to fly.
Now was not the time to argue with Adam and open myself to his anger and recriminations. I said, “I have to tell you about the virus.”
“Ah, yes,” said Adam, chuckling softly. “Dr. Lago’s infamous virus. It has always fascinated you.”
He put a sly emphasis on my father’s name. I had to ignore it. I had to make him understand this wasn’t about me or my father. “It isn’t what we thought. The symptoms don’t match Zeffir-1, so we can’t trust the vaccine to work.”
“Zahra.” In Adam’s voice I heard a familiar note of exasperation, the same one I heard every time I doubted, every time I hesitated, every time I questioned the path we had set ourselves upon. It made me feel like a small child, and I cringed. “Zahra, my dear, you would have us tremble in fear like the cowards who abandoned that ship to space? You would have the memory of a single Councils-brainwashed madman keep us from our new home?”
I was glad Adam could not see my face, but I wished I could see his. I knew every cadence of his voice, from his gentlest kindness to his most towering anger, but at that moment, separated by a vast gulf of space, I could not tell what he was thinking. He had kept my family’s secret for ten years. Even when my mother died, he did not reveal to anyone that she had once been Mariah Dove, wife to Gregory Lago. But more and more as we prepared to leave Earth, Adam had brought it up in moments when we were alone, talking quietly by the fire or poring over SPEC data, or alluded to it when we were among others, his mouth twisting in a smile as he watched me squirm with discomfort. I knew he had been testing me, but I did not know why. He was testing me now.
My stomach was knotted, my jaw so tense my head began to throb anew. I took a breath before I spoke.
“Ther
e was a great deal of violence during the outbreak,” I said. “The virus drove them mad. They slaughtered each other.”
“They were cowardly and cruel in the hour of their greatest test.”
“I think it’s more than that. I think the virus drove them mad. We need to make sure it’s safe,” I insisted. “We lost our viral testing equipment in the explosion. You can’t bring anybody aboard until we know for sure.”
I knew at once it was the wrong thing to say. I knew from Panya’s sharp inhale, from Malachi’s startled glance. We all knew better than to tell Adam you can’t. But there were ten people dead, the shuttle destroyed, and SPEC stalking our presence with a ship we could not see, and House of Wisdom was nothing like the glittering ark of our dreams. It would not be safe until we banished every last reminder of the massacre.
“Adam, listen to me,” I said quickly. “I only mean we might need to keep everybody aboard Homestead for a—”
“Nothing has changed,” Adam said coldly. “You have your orders.”
“But we need more time—”
“Are you doubting us? Are you questioning the dream that has carried us this far? We have been chased like dogs from the Earth, and you allow doubt to infect you now?”
“No. No, Adam. The dream is true. The ship will be ours. I have no doubt.”
My words were a lie. I had nothing but doubts, and no clear view of the hours and days to come. Everything had changed. None of the plans we had so eagerly shaped on the ground applied anymore. If the explosion wasn’t enough, if the unknown identity of the virus wasn’t enough, I didn’t know how to make Adam understand. I looked around helplessly. Malachi’s eyes were wide and frightened, and Adam never listened to him anyway. Panya would not look at me. Dag was, as ever, placid and unreadable. Henke was still grinning at the hostages. Nobody would speak to support me and counter Adam. Even aboard House of Wisdom, there was nothing they feared more than Adam’s anger.