by Kali Wallace
“What can you do?” I said. “What can you do to stop Homestead if they don’t stop themselves? Can you—can you fire something at it, or board it, or—what can you do?”
“Captain,” Jas said. “You have to listen to her. She knows these people.”
“I am listening, Mr. Bhattacharya,” Chavannes said. “Ms. Dove Lago, despite what rumors would have you believe, SPEC does not actually have the ability to shoot down a passenger vessel at this orbit. We do, however, have a number of potential actions that can be adapted for a situation like this.”
“Like what?” Jas said.
“We have been considering a boarding party since we first realized the nature of Homestead’s flight. We also have a number of industrial vessels in the vicinity that we can deploy as a deterrent.”
“What kind of deterrent?” I asked. Putting other ships in danger would not deter Adam. It would only give him another chance to prove to the family that SPEC wanted to hurt them.
Chavannes looked as though she was considering her answer, but Jas spoke first. “You mean the ice-breaking fleet. The one at Tereshkova Shipyard.”
“We are considering all resources and all actions,” Chavannes said. “Including evacuating portions of the station. Do you know what manner of small vessels Homestead has aboard?”
“I—I don’t know. I don’t know if they have any,” I said. “They are armed. Heavily armed. If you try to board—”
“I see. And emergency evacuation suits?”
“They have—I don’t know. There will be some, but I don’t know how many. There are more people aboard than the ship is rated for. There are more than a hundred children. They’re only kids. They aren’t—”
“We understand. In the meantime, I want both of you to stay put until we can retrieve you. We cannot spare the ships to chase after you and your friends at the same time. Is that clear, Mr. Bhattacharya?”
Jas answered, “We’ll stay here.”
“Thank you,” said Captain Chavannes. “Please stand by, House of Wisdom. Keep your communications open. Pangong out.”
Jas cut the radio connection from our end. He gripped the arms of his chair to push himself into the seat and looked at me. “What are their names? Your brother and sister?”
“Nadra and Anwar.” It didn’t seem like enough, names that meant so much to me but sounded so small compared to the void between us. “They’re twins. They’re fifteen. We were supposed to . . . we were supposed to be together here.”
He didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t say he understood. I neither needed nor wanted his pity. I only wanted him to know that there were lives aboard that ship that did not deserve to be snuffed out. They had never deserved anything that happened to them. They were not at fault for the fear and desperation and unfairness that pushed them into Adam’s orbit.
“Will they be able to do anything?” I asked.
“I don’t know. A passenger ship like Homestead should have a proximity buffer built into its navigation system, to keep it from getting too close to any other ship or station when it’s not docking. Probably the first thing they’ll try is to restart that remotely.”
“Will they warn the station? Even if they don’t believe us?”
“Yes, but they’ll never be able to evacuate it,” Jas said. “There are too many people. And there’s the debris from the collision. The ice-breaking ships are supposed to be able to limit that, it’s part of what they’re designed to do, but they’re not finished. They’re not supposed to launch until later this year. Salvatore was going to work on them for his fellowship.” A quick glance at me. “The man you shot on the shuttle.”
I said nothing. He still carried the weapon I had handed over at his belt. I wondered if he had forgotten about it.
“I don’t know what else they can do,” he said. “There are no other ships nearby. Pangong is still too far.”
We both looked at the navigation display. House of Wisdom and Homestead were as twins in a binary star, alone in a blank space amid all the lines and vectors and racing symbols. The isolation of House of Wisdom’s corner of space had been our security, when we made our plan. Now it was a terrible gulf too vast to cross.
I tried Homestead again. No answer.
“Every ship in orbit would be in danger, every orbital station, every spaceport, every space elevator and tether. Anything that eventually fell to Earth . . .” Jas rubbed his hand across his mouth and looked at the display again. “It would be the Collapse all over again, that much debris coming down. Exactly what we’re trying to stop this fucking parasite from doing.”
I tried again. Homestead remained silent.
“All ships have safeguards against that kind of thing,” Jas went on. “Collision deterrence, proximity buffers, gravity-well avoidance.”
“Adam will have disabled those.”
“I know, I know. That’s what I mean.”
“You think SPEC will be able to stop Homestead after all?”
“No,” he said.
Then he was quiet for a long, long time. On the radio, Orbital Control asked for another course and position verification from Homestead. They received no reply. The station master at Providence was requesting any and all vessels within the vicinity to report their position and capacity immediately. They had listened to my warning. It wouldn’t be enough.
Jas said, “But I think we could.”
I felt, for a second, my heart stop. “How?”
Jas looked at me, and he smiled an awful, bleak smile. “All we have to do is get in their way. We’ve got a ship big enough. We’ve got the only ship big enough.”
* * *
• • •
Homestead’s new course bent its trajectory inward so that it would miss House of Wisdom by a mere few thousand kilometers—a great span on Earth, but considered an unsafe distance by both Orbital Control, who were still pleading for an answer with growing alarm, and the ship’s navigation computer. The display highlighted this close pass with a circle of red, a bloodshot eye in the center of the field of moving spheres, changing numbers, and shifting lines. The image was difficult to read, but Jas talked it through—not to explain it to me, I realized after an indignant moment, but to work it out for himself. He was more comfortable aboard a ship than I was, but he had no more experience piloting one. Our only chance of success lay in the fact that House of Wisdom had been designed to execute the commands of its crew smoothly and seamlessly, with as little room for human error as possible.
“We need to know where Homestead is going to be.” Jas tapped at the navigation terminal, then tried something else. The display changed: numbers dropped out, orbital arcs faded, lines blinked away. “Oh. Okay. It’s calculating the position automatically. Now for our potential courses, from orbital velocity . . . okay.”
I made a guess at the new red numbers on the display. “That’s the possible overlap zone?”
“Yeah, exactly. On a ship this size, with so much onboard computing power, it’s designed to extrapolate potential collisions while it’s in orbit. And lucky for us, right now that computing power isn’t being used for anything else.”
“So we aim for where it’s telling us to avoid.” I heard a hollow note in my own voice, an echo of faint disbelief. We were talking about crashing the ships together as though it were any other task, as simple as turning on the heat, changing the air pressure, using the radio.
As simple as replacing nitrogen and oxygen with hydrogen. Sparking a fire. The ship was primed and ready for that, but we had to deal with Homestead before we set that plan in motion.
“There’s a range of possible collision points,” Jas said. “Here. See that?”
On the screen the line that represented Homestead’s path toward Providence Station was highlighted in bright blue, and intersecting it was a narrow, pale green wedge with its point anchored at
House of Wisdom.
“It’s not a lot of room for error,” I said. “Can we get there in time?”
“I hope so,” he said, frowning in thought before sending a query to the ship’s computer. “Mum designed the engines to be able to accelerate quickly, and we don’t need to worry about conserving fuel or avoiding structural stresses. We can burn everything on board to get moving. Homestead might try to course correct once they realize what we’re doing, so we’ll have to watch it until—” It was the slightest hitch, that catch in his voice. “Until the end.”
“Are we really going to . . .” Something almost like laughter burbled in my throat. I tried to swallow it down, but the wild edge of a giggle escaped as tears stung my eyes. “Are we really going to make them hit us? Are we really doing that?”
He sat back in the navigation chair and looked at me. “I’m kind of hoping that somebody notices and takes control of the ship before it happens. How likely is that?”
Every trace of hysterical laughter was snuffed out. I started to answer, stopped, tried again: “Adam isn’t bluffing.”
“We aren’t either.”
“But will it work?” I asked. “Are we really sure it will work? It’s not going to mean two ships crashing into Providence instead of one?”
“Homestead is aiming toward the Earthside docking structure on the external face of the ring. I imagine that course is a feint, and they’re really aiming for the outer edge of the ring. In any case, Providence is only seven hundred meters wide, so we only need to knock Homestead’s course downward by about half that. Force equals mass times acceleration, and we have several times the mass as Homestead, and much more powerful engines. We’re not trying to stop them, just change their vector by about, I don’t know, a degree.”
“You sound like your mother,” I said without thinking.
He gave me such a look of surprise that I almost laughed.
“From what I’ve seen,” I said quickly. “In interviews.”
“I . . . nobody has ever said that before,” he said. “Mostly people tell me I’m not as smart as she was. And I’m not. I don’t know for sure it will work. But even if we can get Homestead to scrape by Providence rather than a solid impact, it will save lives.”
That, in the end, was all that mattered. But it did not change the fact that we were discussing Homestead as though it were a wrecking ball, when in fact it was a passenger vessel, one loaded past capacity and carrying innocent people. My people. All that was left of my families, both the one I was born into and the one I had chosen.
“Are you ready?” Jas said.
We could not stall any longer. I was ready.
“It’s a big ship but it’s going to be a huge kick of acceleration.” Jas ran his finger along the edge of the console, a curiously sad smile on his face. “Mum always hated that nobody wanted to travel at more than 1 g. She wanted to show off what it could do. You might want to sit down.”
I slid into one of the bridge chairs.
The sensation was slight at first, a subtle pressure from the chair beneath me pressing upward—then abrupt, marked by the loud thump of the corpses in the officers’ room striking the floor all at once. Then I could feel it all over, the acceleration exerting its apparent gravity on every part of my body. It seemed to me impossible that I could have forgotten how it felt to carry weight on my shoulders, on my spine, with every limb and muscle.
After ten years of silence, House of Wisdom was under way.
* * *
• • •
I wished, with a sharpness that surprised me, there were windows on the ship’s bridge. A view to the outside that was not filtered through computations and systems. A look at what was around us, and all that was not, stripped clean of the vectors and arrows, calculations and probabilities. I wanted to see Earth. I wanted to see the stars. I yearned for what I had imagined a thousand times: me and Anwar and Nadra, safe and warm, cuddled together as we watched the universe through the window. We would have seen in that darkness not death, not emptiness, not cruelty and fear, but possibilities. We would have been happy. I was sure of that. We could have been happy.
Jas said suddenly, “Where did the ship come from, anyway? Homestead?”
I was surprised by the question, but I replied, “They launched from Valle de México Spaceport.”
“No, I mean, where did you get the ship? How did a bunch of North American separatists get their hands on a large passenger transport? How did you even get through the border checkpoints?”
There was no sense prevaricating now. “We have sympathizers in the Councils. I don’t know who they are. There are ways through the borders if you have help on the other side and aren’t trying to live as a Councils citizen. And one of the sympathizers maintains old SPEC ships for training use. It flew the Earth-Moon route for years, I think. Under a different name.”
“And this person just . . . gave it to you,” Jas said.
“Adam said—”
Adam had said a great many things, and most of them had been lies.
“I don’t know who he was working with,” I admitted. “Or why they helped.”
Jas thought for a second, then said, “Adam doesn’t sound North American. His accent. He’s from somewhere in the Councils. Northern European, would be my guess.”
“He left years ago.” His own revelation, the first of many, he liked to say. I knew so little of Adam’s past. He had never wanted it to matter. He had never wanted us to know.
“And he found somebody to provide a ship. And managed to get three hundred people to Valle de México, which is hundreds of kilometers from the border, without anybody noticing.”
Adam had made it clear we were not to ask too many questions, lest we endanger our allies within the Councils. So I hadn’t—but it was obvious now just how flimsy his explanations had been. How weak our plan had been. How many times we should have failed, if only somebody hadn’t wanted us to succeed.
“Malachi said that someone in SPEC wanted us to come here,” I said. “He didn’t even know if his mission had been officially approved. He only knew what his superiors had told him.”
“Who are his superiors?”
“I have no idea. Does it matter? He’s dead. They spent ten years lying about what happened here, and Malachi is dead because of it.”
“He was your friend?” Jas asked softly.
He was my friend. He was family. So was Panya. Dag. Boudicca. Even Henke and Nico and Bao, in their way. But Malachi was the one I had brought into the family. None of this would have happened if he had not found the right crack in our defenses and slipped through. I had no energy left to be angry. Malachi was dead. I could not even look at him anymore, because there was nothing left to see but the ruined neck that no longer supported a head.
“Do you know what happened to my father?” I asked.
“I know what’s in the Councils investigation records,” Jas said, after a brief hesitation. “They don’t say anything different from what’s public. A security officer approached him at Presidio Station, and he died by suicide before he could be arrested.”
“Do you believe that? Even knowing he wasn’t responsible for the massacre?”
“I don’t think the Councils assassinated him, if that’s what you’re asking. And he—he may have felt responsible.”
I looked away, wishing I had not asked, and knowing I could not have avoided it. I didn’t know how I had expected him to answer—how I had wanted him to answer. I didn’t know what he could have said that would satisfy me. For ten years I had been thinking, after they killed my father, that terrible night as the dividing line between before and after, between the old life and the new.
“I remember him,” Jas said. “Dr. Lago. I liked him. He was always laughing.”
“Yes. He was.” I stood up, feeling suddenly restless. The ship was tra
veling at 2 g or higher, and I wondered if the human body could feel every increasing tenth of a g, or if it was only my imagination that my limbs were becoming leaden weights as the minutes passed. “Everybody who knew him liked him. But they blamed him anyway.”
Jas started to say something, then stopped, and said, “They’ll know what happened now, with the data Baqir and Xiomara have. With my mum’s message. They’ll know he wasn’t responsible.”
“Do you think that will matter? You think the Councils will admit they lied? When have they ever admitted their lies? They claim to be better than the warlords and oligarchs from before the Collapse, but they’re all the same. They only care about protecting themselves. They don’t care—” I stopped. My voice was rising to a shout, echoing dully across the bridge. The anger, it seemed, had not burned itself out after all. “They don’t care,” I said quietly. “And you can’t see that. You lied for them.”
I turned away from him to pace around the bridge. It felt strange under increasing acceleration. Strange, but not impossible. I could have learned this, I thought, if we had made this ship our home. I could have learned to live when the engines were proving what Amita Bhattacharya had wanted them to prove. I could have grown used to the rapid changes from gravity to none, from being weighted to floating free.
A small black object on the floor caught my eye. It was a suppression weapon, the one Panya had tossed away in favor of her gun. I stepped over it to walk to the end of the curve of workstations, and turned to walk back.
“You’re right,” Jas said, after a long silence. “I did. At first because I was doing what they told me to do and I couldn’t see anything but the walls of my hospital room, but later because . . . it was easier to let them speak for me. I kept hoping that if I just refused to ever talk about it, it would fade away.” There was that quick, wry smile again. “It didn’t exactly work out like that. Instead I’ve spent ten years thinking about little else.”