Salvation Day

by Kali Wallace

  I would never have suspected the nervous young man with the curly hair and brown eyes of being a SPEC Intel agent—but if I had, he would not have made it this far. I moved over to the comm where Malachi had been working, slid into the chair, and hooked my feet to hold myself in place.

  “What are you doing?” Xiomara asked, following me.

  “Calling for help. We have to get away from here.”

  “Can we use the evacuation suits now?” Xiomara asked.

  “We need to contact SPEC first, to warn them.”

  “What was it called—Pangong?” Baqir asked, his voice thready with pain. It was hard to see how much damage Dag had done, as removing his suit for a better look might do more harm, but the jut of his shoulder beneath the space suit was all wrong, angular and seeping blood where the prosthetic ended.

  “Stop moving,” I said. “You’ll hurt yourself worse.”

  I looked over the display, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I blinked quickly and rubbed my eyes. Malachi had been telling the truth. The ship was ours. There were no more command overrides, no more quarantine protocols. The radio was functional and waiting.

  I opened a channel. “Um, Pangong, this is House of Wisdom. Can you hear us? Can anybody hear us? This is House of Wisdom.”

  The response was instantaneous. A woman in a SPEC uniform appeared on the display at the front of the room, her brown face looming larger than life. Compared to House of Wisdom, the bridge of Pangong was so clean and bright it seemed unreal, like what a child would imagine a spaceship to be. The woman had a crown of braids and captain’s star on her collar. Her uniform was crisp, her expression alert.

  “We hear you, House of Wisdom,” she said. “This is Captain Chavannes of Pangong. You’re Jaswinder Bhattacharya, aren’t you?”

  I felt sick with relief. “Yes, I am.”

  “Are you safe? What’s your status?”

  “We’re safe for now,” I said, hoping it was true. With every movement, I felt itches on my skin, tickles on the back of my neck, but I had no abrasions, no injuries, nothing crawling beneath my skin.

  “You’re not alone?” Chavannes asked.

  “There are four of us.” I hesitated, then added, “The SPEC agent is gone.”

  I could not read her face as she processed that information. “We were only recently aware of the agent’s presence with the hostile group,” she said. I could not tell if she was lying. “Do any of the hostile individuals still present a threat?”

  “No. I want to talk to my aunt.”

  “The hostiles have been neutralized?”

  “Yes. Let me talk to my aunt.”

  “You need to stay calm, Mr. Bhattacharya,” Captain Chavannes said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “I’ll tell my aunt,” I said. “I know you can contact her.”

  The captain nodded curtly. Still, I could not read her expression. “Of course. Lieutenant, locate Councilor Bhattacharya. Please tell me what you can.”

  “Have you heard from the ship called Homestead? Are they still headed here?”

  “We’ve lost communication with Homestead for the moment. We are attempting to reestablish contact, but we have reason to believe they have heard our warnings and altered their plans. The vessel has been making course adjustments for some time. As of now their rear propulsion system is still firing.”

  “Are they coming here? They’re not decelerating?” I asked.

  “They do not appear to have begun a deceleration burn yet,” Captain Chavannes said. “The new trajectory remains undetermined as long as they are making adjustments, but the changes indicate they do not intend to approach House of Wisdom. Mr. Bhattacharya, please be assured: We are going to get you out of there. We are preparing a team to bring you home. Do you understand?”

  Oh, I understood. I wanted to nod and tell her to hurry and trust that they would come, and they would listen when they did, and the rescue crew would heroically take us away. We would land in Armstrong City. We would tell our stories. We would resume our lives, our research. The quasars I was studying had burned with brilliant fire billions of years ago, and it would be easy, so easy, to once again cast my mind and my focus into that distant past again, across the darkness of space, clinging to pinpricks of light so ancient and so far away that nothing could touch them. Not memory, not pain, not fear. It would be easy.

  But others would come to House of Wisdom after our rescue. They would not be able to stay away, not with what we had learned of the parasite and where it had come from. They would be careful. They would wear protective suits and work in sealed labs and follow every protocol.

  I felt the squirming itch on the back of my neck again.

  They might keep the laboratory a few degrees too warm. They might shatter a glass vial. Slice a finger. It might be an accident.

  They might want to know what would happen.

  They might believe they could limit the danger.

  I wish there was another way, my mother had said.

  Captain Chavannes turned away from the camera, speaking to a member of her bridge crew. I heard something about a diplomatic vessel, an emergency launch. When she faced me again, she said, “We have Councilor Bhattacharya now. She is aboard a diplomatic vessel headed to Armstrong.”

  There was a blink on the screen, and there was Aunt Padmavati.

  I had seen my aunt upset before. I had seen her exhausted, unwell, uneasy in ways she had hidden from the rest of the world. But I had never seen her look so old and weary as she did now. She wore a brilliant green and gold sari, one she reserved for when she wanted to be most intimidating, and all of her jewelry was in place, but her white-streaked black hair was escaping from its braids in wild wisps, and there were dark circles under her eyes. She reached toward the camera as though we could touch across the great distance. Her hand was trembling.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” I said. My voice was shaking, and I was too tired to hide it. “Aunt Padmavati, you have to listen to me. You can’t let them come here.”

  “Captain Chavannes will prevent Homestead—”

  “Not just Homestead. Pangong. SPEC. Anybody. You can’t let them come here. You have to stop them.”

  “Jas,” said my aunt, and inside my chest my heart cracked. She never called me by my nickname. I had always assumed she thought it childish. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not a virus. It’s not a disease at all. It’s a biomechanical parasite. It can self-replicate. It infected one of us from just a scratch. It took over her—made her do things she had no control over. Mum and Captain Ngahere knew. They left a message.”

  “Amita left a message?” she said, her voice faint.

  “She did.” But not for you, and not for me, I thought, unable to say the words aloud. Mum’s message, like her work, like her life, had been for a much greater purpose. “We’ll bring it to you. There’s data, too, the data that didn’t make it into the last burst. But the rescue teams and everybody else—you have to stop them. They don’t know what they’re coming into. It’s not safe.”

  My aunt was quiet for a moment. “You know that what you’re telling me won’t dissuade SPEC. They have been wanting to return to House of Wisdom for years. There are a lot of people who have been waiting a long time for answers.”

  “I know. I know.” They would want to return even more when they found out what Dr. Lago had learned from UC33-X. “But can’t you at least get them to wait? Until we can tell them what we’ve seen? We’ll bring them answers, but it’s too dangerous to come here.”

  Another pause, then she nodded. “I will do what I can.”

  My aunt did not make promises she could not keep.

  Captain Chavannes broke into our conversation. “Homestead seems to have ceased its trajectory corrections. The latera
l thrusters haven’t fired in several minutes. The ship is now on a course for Providence Station. The crew has indicated they intend to surrender to security personnel when they arrive.”

  Quietly, so quietly there was no way it would carry over the radio, Zahra inhaled a short, sharp breath.

  “Are you able to make your way to the main docking area of House of Wisdom?” Captain Chavannes asked. “Our assessment tells us that’s the safest place for us to extend a sealed passage between the ships, but if you aren’t able to get there—”

  “No,” I said. “We’re not going to wait that long.”

  “There are evacuation suits aboard, but you would be adrift for several hours.”

  And that would only give SPEC a reason to come to us. “We’re taking my mother’s experimental small craft away from here.”

  Captain Chavannes’s eyes widened; it was the strongest reaction I had seen from her. “Absolutely not. That is not safe. You cannot—”

  “We can, and we will,” I said. “We are not waiting here any longer than we have to. And when you pick us up, you’re going to put us in full quarantine. No exposure to anybody until we’re sure we’re not infected.”

  “Mr. Bhattacharya, if that’s—”

  “It is absolutely necessary. See you soon, Aunt Padmavati. Please make them listen.”

  I ended the transmission before my aunt could see the tears in my eyes. The display changed to House of Wisdom’s location in orbit, with Pangong, Homestead, Providence Station. The Moon. Earth. It all looked so small on the screen.

  For a long moment, nobody spoke.

  Then Baqir said, “Will they listen to her?”

  I rubbed my face. “She’ll have a better chance of convincing them to stay away if we get out of here. My mother’s workshop is on Level 12. It’s not far.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There was blood smeared on the door. A handprint with a long trail: somebody had slapped a bloody hand on the wall before being dragged or pulled away. It was brown, dried nearly to dust. I avoided it carefully.

  Slowly, as though waking from a deep slumber, the lights came on. My mother’s workshop was a massive chamber on the starboard side of the ship. It spanned two levels, large enough to house three of my mother’s small experimental vessels side by side. Numerous catwalks surrounded and crossed the space, with ladders and handholds on all sides to facilitate work in zero gravity.

  The two remaining ships loomed above us, pinned like butterflies in a display, struts and braces holding them in place. They were nearly identical in outward appearance, both to each other and to Tiger, which my mother had put me on ten years ago. I couldn’t remember how they differed beneath the surface; I wasn’t sure my mother had ever told me. By the time I was twelve, she had mostly given up hope that I would follow in her footsteps.

  To the right was a corpse with her arms slashed to ribbons, her throat cut, and so much blood staining her jumpsuit that the fabric appeared brown rather than white. Linna, a fuel scientist, who had in life had a big, hearty laugh and a bawdy sense of humor. She must have had the same idea as my mother, to flee using an experimental ship, only for her it had been too late. The parasite was already inside her. She bled to death after trying to carve it out with a scrap of metal from the recycling system.

  I pushed myself to the nearest workstation and tapped the screen to pull up the ten-year-old flight schedule. Tiger was on the calendar for a drive efficiency test the day after the outbreak. Two days later, Brahmin was scheduled for a navigation test. Jackal was not on the schedule at all. It was flagged for environmental system repairs: air filters, thermometers, high-g couch positioning.

  I found the Brahmin information. The test was to have three stages: journey outward, hold and reposition, return on command. The flight path would take the ship near the radio station at the L2 Lagrange point. I pressed my fingers to my aching head; grainy, dragging exhaustion was muddling my thoughts. It had to be good enough. I didn’t know how to change the ship’s course, but they could abort the flight midway through, during the repositioning test.

  “Okay.” I took a breath; the cold burned my throat. “Xi, Baqir, you’re getting in that ship.”

  Xiomara looked toward the ship, but Baqir was watching me. “What about you?”

  “We’re going in the other one,” I said. “But I’m launching you first.”

  I kicked my way over to Brahmin and let myself inside. The small cockpit was at once breathtakingly familiar and painfully disorienting. I found the control panel and called up the preflight sequences. Turn on the lights. Raise the temperature. Filter the air. Test the reactive cushioning in the seats.

  Xiomara could make her own way, but Baqir needed help. I ducked my head under his good arm to hook it around my neck. I was careful to hold on to his waist, avoiding the damaged shoulder, but it seemed like every motion, no matter how small, caused him more pain. He no longer stifled the whimpers and gasps. I didn’t know if this would be safer for him than the evacuation suits, but I knew it would get him into a doctor’s care faster.

  Xiomara settled into the pilot’s seat; she had tucked the tablet containing Mum’s message and the storage device with the ship’s data into a secure compartment. I maneuvered Baqir into the navigator’s chair behind her. He hissed when his wrecked shoulder touched the cushion.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I’m sorry, but I have to—it’s worse if you’re not sitting right.”

  “I know,” he said through gritted teeth. “Fuck. I know. You made me look at your X-rays, remember? You fucking show-off.”

  “Shut up,” I said, laughing a little. “I was twelve. And you thought it was cool.”

  There was no way to adjust the five-point harness so that it did not pressure his broken shoulder, no way to arrange his damaged artificial arm so that it did not pull on the wounded flesh and bones. I tightened the harness as much as I dared. Baqir clenched his teeth and closed his eyes. It would be kinder, I thought, if he passed out.

  “You’re coming after us, right?” Baqir said. His eyes were still closed, his voice a ragged whisper.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I reached out to touch his face, to brush his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead. He leaned his head into my hand. His skin was clammy, far too cool. I couldn’t stop looking at him. The line of his jaw, his thick dark eyebrows, the thin scar on his chin from our first year at secondary school, when some swaggering upperclassman had shoved him down the school stairs. He had been defending me from some insult or another; all the petty cruelties had blurred together. Baqir had given himself the task of jumping between my cowering fears and the blows thrown by the world, and I had never thanked him for that, never told him how that day, when he lunged at that hulking teen and went sprawling onto the ground and jumped to his feet again with blood pouring from his nose and lips and his grin angry and fierce as he charged again, we might have been friends already, but never before had he so easily cracked through the numb cold that had enveloped me since my mother sent me away from House of Wisdom. It had been one of many ominous signs of a thunderous oncoming thaw, but I hadn’t known it then. All I had known was that this mad bleeding boy with a wasteland accent was laughing with blood on his mouth, and it felt like the first time in an eternity anybody had looked at me and smiled.

  I brushed my thumb over his temple. There was blood splattered there, softened by his sweat. His eyes were still closed, my hand still cupping the side of his face. I kissed him.

  It was barely a brush of lips. He let out a small, surprised gasp. I backed away quickly. Baqir’s eyes were open now, wide, his lips parted. I thought he might say something, so I moved out of reach. He reached up with his uninjured hand, then stopped with an abrupt hiss of pain. He dropped his head back against the seat, and without thinking I kissed him again, this time on his clammy forehead.
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  “It’s going to hurt a lot when the ship’s under acceleration,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  A beat of silence, then Baqir exhaled something like a laugh. “It already hurts a lot.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  “You’re coming right after us?”

  “Yeah. Make sure they quarantine you. Just to be sure.”

  “Promise me again.”

  There were thorns in my throat, pressing outward.

  “I promise,” I said.

  I had been lying for half of my life. By now it came naturally to me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I secured the door to Brahmin from the outside, then returned to the control room. Zahra was waiting. She could have fled, but where would she go? There was nothing in House of Wisdom except death.

  I had watched my mother launch experimental flights before, but I was only able to replicate her steps because most of the procedure was automated. The first step was to depressurize the dry dock; the second was to open the doors and maneuver the ship outside. My hand was shaking as I sent the commands. The doors slid open with a rumble I felt in my teeth, and the docking clamps began to unfold and extend, nimbly carrying Brahmin through the square opening.

  “I really hope you know what you’re doing,” Xiomara said over the radio, “because I only just realized how completely fucking insane this is.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I told her.

  The arms of the docking clamps were fully extended. Brahmin looked so small, framed by the massive open doors and the darkness of space. My heart was racing. The maneuvering thrusters fired—over the radio Xiomara relayed what the ship was telling her, all systems normal—and the clamps released. The craft moved away from the ship, so slowly at first it did not seem to be moving at all, but then it was turning, the side thrusters firing as it found its course and calculated its trajectory. It was beyond the view in moments. The doors closed.