Salvation Day

by Kali Wallace

  She had died sitting at the navigation terminal. Beside her was a man I recognized as one of the ship’s food scientists. I couldn’t remember his name. He had worked with my father sometimes, tweaking breeds of tomato and spinach, arguing over the viability of carrots. He had no more business being on the bridge than Jessamyn.

  “They shouldn’t be here,” I said. “They’re not bridge crew.”

  Baqir understood immediately. “So they are infected. And this is . . .”

  “What it wanted them to do,” I finished. “Come here. Fly the ship.”

  If it could make Ariana attack a man twice her size, steal his weapon, kill him; draw her through a ship she had never been aboard before as though she knew it by heart; open doors, open hatches, evade capture; store and communicate memories from ten years ago and movements from now; isolate the ship during the initial outbreak; disrupt the data transfers—if it could do all that, if it could learn all of that from its hosts—flying the ship was not so different.

  “What’s that?” Xiomara said. She and Ariana had moved to the other side of the bridge. They approached a long glass wall.

  “The officers’ meeting room,” I said, my attention still on Jessamyn and the others. The parasite was a small thing, small enough to pass through a pinprick of broken skin, small enough to operate on the level of neurons and electrical impulses. It needed hosts to interact with the larger world.

  “There’s somebody in here,” Ariana said.

  “There are two of them.” Xiomara paused, then said, in a very different voice, “Jas.”

  I pulled my way chair by chair across the bridge. The faces of the dead blurred together. I felt as though the cold had seeped so far into my limbs that my bones were turning to ice, and if I moved too quickly, if I moved carelessly, they would shatter again as I had long feared they would. I could not turn away. Xiomara’s and Ariana’s breath had clouded the glass wall of the officers’ room. Xiomara wiped the fog away.

  Captain Ngahere had died in her seat at the head of the table. There was a tablet before her, floating just out of reach of her desiccated fingertips.

  And beside her, in the chair normally reserved for the first officer, was my mother.

  INTERNAL COMMUNICATION ARCHIVE REF. [UNKNOWN/CORRUPTED]

  Source: HOUSE OF WISDOM, SPEC RESEARCH

  TimeDate: 11:01:37 01.04.393

  BRIDGE: It’s been quiet for some time now. They’ve gone quiet. They were making a lot of noise earlier. Not the screams, but words. They were saying—it sounded like—

  ENGINEERING 12-009: The words of the dead.

  BRIDGE: Who is that? Where are you?

  ENGINEERING 12-009: It’s me, Lilian. It’s Amita.

  BRIDGE: For fuck’s sake. Where are you? Are you—it really is you?

  ENGINEERING 12-009: I haven’t been infected. There’s nothing inside of me.

  BRIDGE: Thank fuck for that. Is Vinod with you?

  ENGINEERING 12-009: He’s dead.

  BRIDGE: And your little boy? Is he—

  ENGINEERING 12-009: I think I may have just killed him.

  BRIDGE: Amita? What do you mean?

  ENGINEERING 12-009: I had to get him away, get him out as fast as I could. He wouldn’t leave until I promised to come after. The evac system is locked down, so I sent him away on TIGER. We haven’t properly damped its acceleration system. I might have killed him.

  BRIDGE: You’re in your dry dock? You have access to your vessels? You have to get away. You have to tell them what’s happened here.

  ENGINEERING 12-009: What has happened here, Captain? Whatever would I tell them? Have we achieved the greatest dream of humankind, that hope that stretches all the way to before the Collapse?

  BRIDGE: You have to warn—

  ENGINEERING 12-009: Or have we walked right up to that dream only to find it was only ever a mirage all along? Do they seem intelligent to you? Can you see them?

  BRIDGE: I’m looking at them right now. They’ve overtaken the bridge. Josef’s little girl is there. Jessamyn. She’s at the navigation control.

  ENGINEERING 12-009: We’re under thrust. I can feel it.

  BRIDGE: Yes. They’ve altered the course. I don’t think they’re very good at flying. Give it a few hours and this won’t be a sustainable orbit.

  ENGINEERING 12-009: Have they also seized the environmental control system?

  BRIDGE: No. They haven’t touched it. All they care about is propulsion and navigation.

  ENGINEERING 12-009: Calculate a course for an indefinite stable orbit.

  BRIDGE: I don’t have control of the ship, Amita.

  ENGINEERING 12-009: I know. I know. Calculate it anyway.

  BRIDGE: Why? What good will that do?

  ENGINEERING 12-009: I’m coming to you. I’ll explain when I get there.

  [ARCHIVED BY AUTOMATED COMMUNICATION PRESERVATION SYSTEM]

  ZAHRA

  We breathed in the darkness, Malachi and I.

  The alarm still blared on the other side of the hatch, but it was muffled now. The cold, stale air was the sweetest I had ever tasted. Malachi made a sound like the beginning of a word, then broke into a long coughing fit. I squeezed his hand, offering silent reassurance, though not yet daring to speak. His cough was terrible but familiar—the same sound he had made on the day we met, the day he came out of the desert, a stranger in the winter twilight, asking for help as though he already knew what my answer would be. The uncertainty had come later, after we had walked the hard-packed path from the perimeter to the heart of the homestead. The stammering, the averted eyes, the hesitation before every decision, that had only come when he faced Adam for the first time and began to tell his story. How hard he had worked to learn, to excel, to become useful. How many times he had tried to convince the Councils to grant him citizenship. How every rejection was another wound, until he bore so many he had layers of scars around his heart. He had been ashamed until he realized we did not blame him for the fickle cruelty of the Councils. Adam wanted the wretches and wanderers the Councils had no use for: there had been no doubt he would take Malachi in.

  I remembered all of this, and more, as we recovered in the darkness. He had been with us so long I had forgotten how easily he had slipped into the homestead and the family. Malachi threatened nobody, least of all Adam. The only person he had ever frightened was me, in that cold purple twilight, when my doubts and my gun were no match for his smile.

  “We need light,” Malachi said. His breath was warm on my cheek. “Can I just—I need to reach around you.”

  I pressed myself against the metal ladder. He reached past me, accidentally bumped my face with his elbow, whispered a quiet apology. I heard the wheeze in his lungs, the creak of the ladder. I imagined, even, that I could hear his heartbeat.

  “Ah. Here we go.”

  A blue glow pierced the darkness. Malachi had found a control panel.

  “You could have gone with them,” I said.

  The words were a rasp of air, but loud enough to startle him into looking at me. Although his skin was soft brown in sunlight, now he looked sickly and pale. His curly brown hair was damp and plastered to his head. His lips were chapped and cracked.

  “What?” he said.

  “You should have gone with them. You could have convinced them. They need you.”

  “Zahra,” Malachi said. He took in a breath, let it out slowly. “They tried to kill us.”

  “They’re only doing what they think is right. What they think Adam would want.”

  “Which is it?”

  “Which is what?”

  “Are they doing what they think is right, or are they doing what they think Adam would want? Do you really think they’re the same thing?”

  “They’re only thinking of
the mission.”

  “Why the fuck are you defending them? After what they just did? They tried to kill you.”

  I stared at Malachi, stunned by his manner as much as by his words. In profile, half-illuminated by the light from the control panel, his mouth was twisted into a scowl, his jaw tight, his neck rigid.

  “I’m not—”

  I closed my mouth. Took a breath. Let it out. I had a thousand answers, and none. They were family. We were meant to work toward a common goal, a shared future of peace and strength. I had broken that covenant with my failure—

  Or they had, with their betrayal.

  “I’m only—I don’t know. I need to think,” I said.

  Malachi scowled at the control panel for a couple of seconds, then jabbed his finger. The maintenance shaft filled with low red light. I wondered if that awful red would ever bleed from my eyes, or if it would forever stain the rest of my life.

  “We need to get out of here.” Malachi pushed away from me and moved down the ladder, past the larger rollers that would move the floor of the chamber above. Dark tunnels stretched in three directions, each lined with tubes and ducts and pipes in a tangle of junctions and bends; the fourth was blocked by a heavy steel door labeled INTRASHIP TRANSPORT. That must have been how they brought the probe into the laboratory. Wherever it led, it was closed to us now.

  Malachi looked down the open passages. “There will be a hatch somewhere along here. It shouldn’t be far.”

  “Malachi. Stop.” I grabbed at his foot, flinched when he kicked free. “Wait.”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “I know, I know, but . . . what did you mean?”

  “About what?”

  “About Adam. About Panya and Dag and what they’re doing.”

  He turned to look at me. “What do you want me to say? You know this isn’t right, Zahra. None of this is right. They’ve gotten everything wrong from the start.”

  My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. “We haven’t gotten everything wrong,” I said, but weakly, barely a protest. “I don’t know why you’re saying that.”

  Malachi exhaled sharply. “Yes, you do. You don’t need me to explain anything. You’re perfectly capable of thinking for yourself. You don’t need Adam to tell you what to think, and you don’t need me to explain to you how fucked up it is that they’ve stuck you in this situation.”

  They. Them. He should have been saying we.

  “They haven’t stuck me anywhere,” I said. I was shivering, and my body ached with the effort of holding still. “I chose to be here. I wanted to be here. I’m not stupid. I accepted this responsibility because Adam asked it of me.”

  “Asked?” Malachi said.

  Yes, I thought, then: no.

  A wisp-gentle reversal: no.

  I could not allow the lie to blossom, not even inside the privacy of my own mind. Adam did not ask us to do as he wished: He commanded, proclaimed, decreed. He administered punishment if we could not see his wisdom. He turned his back on those who did not agree. He had not asked me to lead this mission. He had told me that I would, and smiled when I accepted with pride. His command had aligned so perfectly with what I wanted—the only way I knew to clear my father’s name—that I had ignored my doubts, dismissed the protests from older and more experienced members of the family, let Adam’s certainty wash over all the concerns like a flash flood scouring a desert arroyo. That was how it had always been. That was how it had to be, because Adam was so much more than any of us. His knowledge and his wisdom would protect us, even if we did not understand how. That was the tenet that had held the family together through so much hardship. That was the truth that had made our star-reaching dreams possible. Whatever challenges the future offered, Adam would protect us.

  But he hadn’t. He hadn’t known what danger we faced aboard House of Wisdom. He had told us time and again, at every stage of planning, in response to every doubt raised, every question asked, that he knew the Councils better than they knew themselves, and there was no secret they could hide from him. But they had hidden the truth of what Bhattacharya had witnessed. They had hidden the truth of how closely House of Wisdom was watched. They had hidden the truth of what the virus did to its victims.

  I had been silent too long. Malachi sighed. “I don’t think you’re stupid, and I don’t think this is all your fault.”

  My heart fluttered painfully. “But it is. I didn’t know SPEC was going to attack the shuttle. I should have. Boudicca and Nico and Bao would still be alive if only I had realized the danger.”

  Malachi looked at me for a long moment, his eyes dark and tired. “Do you really think SPEC would do that?”

  “But—you said it wasn’t the security net. Was it? Did you—”

  “The security system let us through. It wasn’t the drones.” Malachi touched my arm. I looked down at his hand. His fingers were barely warm, but compared to the aching cold around us, his touch felt like a flame. “Zahra. Think about it. Take a breath and really think about it.”

  I did as he said, and I tried, oh, I tried, but my mind was too full. I heard the screams of the woman who had died before she could cross to the ship. The quick red pop of a man’s head vanishing at the pull of a trigger. Boudicca’s laugh when she knew she was going into space again. Nico’s screams as the terrible, voracious fire roiled from Pilgrim 3. My back and ribs had been hurting for so long the pain had become a part of me, inseparable from my skin and my blood.

  The man I killed was devoured by the explosion. What a dirty thing it was, to feel relief that another crime had covered my own.

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said. I was so tired. “Tell me what you mean.”

  “SPEC does not have missiles and—”

  “We don’t know that,” I said. “They have secret weapons. The security grid was secret until they had to reveal it.”

  “Okay, but even if they do, your first instinct was that the explosion had come from inside the shuttle. Inside, not outside. That’s what you said before Dag argued otherwise. You were the only one who saw it. You know what you saw.” Malachi spoke patiently, like a teacher guiding a reluctant student. “Do you think SPEC would sabotage a passenger shuttle? If they wanted to stop us, why not do it at Civita? Do you really think they would endanger the passengers? A group of researchers? Including a famous man with a powerful aunt absolutely guaranteed to launch a thorough investigation into anything that happens? Why would SPEC or the Councils do that?”

  I knew what I should say: There is no limit to the violence they will inflict upon the world. One of Adam’s favorite ways to close a meeting was to drop his voice to a low and ominous level, force us to lean in to hear him murmur, They will sacrifice their own children. Their own mothers. Their own freedom. Do not underestimate them. Do not ever forget, not once, not ever, that they will trade blood for power. I had believed him absolutely. They had destroyed my father and my family, and they had gotten away with it for ten years. My mother had died never seeing my father’s name cleared. And mine was only one family—what had happened to us could happen to anybody, any time the Councils wished, for there were no checks on their power. That was why we had to leave. That was why we needed House of Wisdom. The force of Adam’s certainty, the righteous fire shining from behind his eyes, the anger he felt toward those who had done us wrong, did not leave room for doubt.

  Malachi was watching me intently. If Adam were asking the question, I would know it was a test, a way of rooting out weakness before the doubts and fears spread like gangrene. But I didn’t know how Malachi wanted me to answer. If SPEC had not attacked the shuttle—

  Nico had prepared some of our cargo and was trying to wrangle the frightened woman onto the ladder. They fought. He had threatened her with his weapon—and he had fired, at least twice. Perhaps more. I couldn’t remember how many shots I h
ad heard. Boudicca had shouted at him, but her admonition had been cut short by the explosion. Fire had rolled from the hatch. Nico. The woman. The cargo.

  “There were no explosives in our cargo,” I said, but it was a question, not an answer.

  “There weren’t supposed to be. But you didn’t load the crates, and neither did I. Neither did Nico and Bao. Dag and Henke did that.”

  Dag would have loaded anything Adam told him to load, and Henke would have been happy to include more weapons. Nico wouldn’t have known. He had always been careless, but even so he wouldn’t have fired a projectile explosive into our cargo if he had known it would be deadly. Dag and Henke could not have meant to risk the precious lives of our family. We needed Boudicca. We needed Nico and Bao. Nobody was expendable. It had to have been an accident.

  “But why?” I said. “We don’t need explosives. We need—needed supplies. And why hasn’t Dag said anything?”

  “I don’t think the explosives were for us.”

  I thought we were going to kill them, Henke had said.

  “Adam never intended to release the hostages,” Malachi said.

  I shook my head, wanting to deny it. But it was all too easy to see Adam’s plan. He would have sent the shuttle away. He would have invited SPEC to fetch their students. He would have smiled when the rescue ship was close enough, and he would have smiled when the explosion consumed both vessels. He would have called it a lesson more merciful than what they deserved.

  “But the woman who killed Henke,” I said desperately. “How could she do that? She’s supposed to be a student, but she—she could be . . .”

  “I think Bhattacharya was telling the truth. I think she was infected somehow, when she tore her suit and scraped herself. It made her delusional, made her lash out. She got lucky with Henke. He was careless.”