The holo-map reoriented to my left-hand side to indicate we were heading back to Neon.
Jerry continued; “To have come so far; I thought we’d left all this selfishness behind…”
Baines slumped forward, head in hands, and I put a hand on his shoulder. “You should just listen to me,” he whispered.
“If you were that serious you’d have swung a club at me and knocked me out, but you want to go back. I know that, too,” I said quietly. “Someone has to pay.”
We rode in silence for a while, nothing but the rumble of the tires tearing up dust. Then Jerry said “I love you.” They were soft words, but they moulded an anger inside me. I repeated the words and saying them out loud, inside the closed space of the cockpit, failed to do justice to the sentiment. Were inadequate. Did nothing to portray how I really felt. Neon had taken those words from me and destroyed what we had. Franghorn; his deputies and whoever else who knew what they were up to.
“Do you know how they managed it?” asked Baines.
“Undercover operative, most likely, jury-rigging a series of earths that could be remotely activated. After the latest report of solar activity showing how imminent disaster was – which was shared between all the settlements – the power failures began. It was chaos in Ops – there was nothing we could do.”
Baines punched a support strut with the side of his fist. “It had to have been recent otherwise it would’ve been picked up. I bet whoever did it made their escape under the guise of compassionate extradition. Have you checked emigration rosters?”
“No time,” said Jerry. “And what would be the point? Whoever it was was under orders, and long gone.”
“And they probably used a false name,” I added. “I don’t suppose the latest readings have changed the anticipated destruction?”
“No.” That was short and devastating from Jerry – I waited for a conjunction but none came. He always had something more to say. Always. This was the worst of all.
“Don’t lose hope,” I told him.
“You have to be real,” he said. “But your optimism is one of the things I love you for. Never change.”
“I’m not sure that’s something I can promise, all things considered.”
We continued our journey back and Jerry and I reminisced the good times while Baines checked readouts and chambered bullets in guns. It felt so wrong; going in the opposite direction to the voice that I had pinned my entire future on – one that existed only in the past now. I drove on through tears and dust.
CME
Jax stared at his child; placed his hand on the slightly warm glass. Suspended, she looked peaceful curled up in the stereotypical foetus pose, skin smooth. At first he’d felt no patriarchal connection – had actively fought against it as each time he returned her face became more developed. He hadn’t considered the effect of seeing features slowly come to the fore, rendering a personality to be, a face to love. How in the simplicity of a jutting nose and filling lips you could see everything that person might be, potential manifest.
When the first solar warning signs appeared his immediate thought had been about the experiment, and not about the demise of his future home. Which surprised him. Caught him in the gut until he felt about to keel over and puke.
And then he thought about rescuing her and all anxiety and nauseousness disappeared.
Right up until a minute ago he still hadn’t been sure about the rescue, but seeing her changed all that. Changed everything.
He’d need the twins’ help if he was to get her out safely.
He retreated back a room and stood in the doorway shouting the girls’ names.
“What is it?” one of them called back.
“I need your help!” He panted; his body could withstand the atmosphere better than most but genetic alteration had done nothing to combat nerves. His heart pounded as he heard them climb up through the ship, giggling.
“What is it?” said Lani, pulling herself up.
“I’ll show you both at the same time.” He waited for Scarlett and then continued. “For the next however long it takes I need you to be focused, and calm, and just do as I say. You’ll have questions and I’ll answer them but first we have to complete a task. A very delicate task.”
“Told you,” said Scarlett. “He’s been building an army of robot slaves in there.”
“Sex slaves.”
“Quiet!” he shouted, “and listen to me. We don’t have much time.”
“Geez, Captain Dickwad, much,” said Lani.
Jax felt bad for shouting, but he could apologise later. “Follow me.” He stepped up into the lab and went down the other side, and they followed.
He scanned the room for what he would need while listening to the girls’ exclamations of wonder. He heard the uplilting assonance of their sentences, no doubt questions he would have to answer soon. He’d left the child covered, for a great reveal, he told himself. The great magician. The magnificent Moreau! The truth was he was afraid of their reaction and wanted to have at least some control over the situation.
He wheeled a trolley across the lab to the table with the artificial womb, and turned to Scarlett and Lani. This was it, they could feel it; he could see their curiosity burning in their eyes.
“I told you I was running experiments in here. I even told you that some people might not approve. You might not approve. Well, this was one – now before you get bent out of shape, if I’d have known how things would have developed, I wouldn’t have done it. It was stupid. I was an idiot to think of myself as some God. Solar fucktivity be damned!” He lifted the sheet and the girls gasped.
“And now it’s gone this far I can’t just leave her here to get vaporised, so will you help me?”
They each shook their heads in sync; Jax fleetingly thought how creepy this was and mentally noted it as yet another twin phenomena, and then they spoke.
“We joked…”
“… but we never really thought…”
“… that you would actually grow a live person…”
“… in here.”
“Are you crazy?”
“What were you going to do?”
“Keep her here?”
“Move here and raise her?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Jax. He’d acted on impulse, as he was prone to do, just a few months prior, and kind of just let the experiment run, expecting it to fail at some point and when at first it didn’t, he’d actively tried to keep it running.
“Who are the parents?” asked Lani, face suddenly looking very grown up.
The one question he didn’t want to answer. “I don’t know… some cryo-frozen specimens I found.” He pulled the trolley in close. “Help me. We’re going to need to safely get her to the bottom of the ship and from there, we can use one of the motorised trolleys all the way back to Arcadia.”
“She’s too heavy, surely?” said Lani.
“She’s not!” he sounded desperate now, and took a deep breath. “We just need something to lower her and the equipment down in. I can take the weight at the top, and you can take the weight at the bottom. Pass the parcel, just like when we were kids.”
“We are kids…”
“… some of us.”
“Will you help me or not?” He looked from one twin to the next; their blue eyes flicking from him to the burgeoning embryo that would share those eyes. Scarlett stepped up and seemed impossibly large suddenly, as she placed her hand on the glass. Lani joined her, and in unison they shared a glance and said “We can’t just let her die.”
“She’s beautiful,” added Lani.
“Then we’re agreed.”
They each punched him on an arm. “You know this makes you look like some kind of mad scientist right?”
“I am what they made me.” He was getting impatient now and they had no time to ponder this statement, though it would percolate there at the back of his mind for when he did have time.
The ship shook.
The wall-that-was-a-floor trembled and knocked them over. “Not now, not now,” moaned Jax.
A roar loud enough to be heard within the closed confines and thick hull of the ship blasted them. “What was that?” It could have been either of the twins speaking; Jax was too shaken to concentrate.
He jumped to his feet and ran towards the exit. In the adjacent room he climbed up into the cockpit, pulling up on rungs designed to be used in zero gravity. When he reached the forward chair he slumped back into it, facing the sky. Darkness reigned beyond the view screen. He powered up the dashboard and waited for the boot sequence to light the controls. It was a blend of analogue switches and buttons that were mostly manual overrides of digital inputs; he liked to imagine it a graveyard, each switch a tombstone. Luckily they did not all mark the dead. He flicked the manual virtual control switch and pulled down a headset from the compartment ‘above’ his head. Once it was on his head he depressed a button in the side and he viewed the outside of the ship.
Nothing.
He switched on the outside lights.
Slightly more than nothing. A swirling dervish of brown dirt roiled, thick; too thick for light to penetrate.
His heart hammered but his hands remained still as he brushed them before the headset, pulling and pushing at virtual controls.
Either Lani or Scarlett called up to him but he ignored them.
He commanded the terrain scan to activate. His vision switched from camera to heat-vision as electromagnetic waves painted a pattern of destruction around him. He turned his head left and right as yellow, orange and red rock formations burned into his retina, made him wince, but he could not look away. He manoeuvred the scan towards the cave formations and the only exit, and where there should have been only the darkness of open air, there was the fiery crimson of recently dislodged rock.
“Not now,” he repeated, wanting to scream, wanting to swear his voice hoarse, but he knew it would do no good.
Think.
What caused it?
He ripped the headset from his head and it fell down, hitting the ‘floor’ with a clang.
“Jax?” shouted Lani. “Come on, what’s happening? You’re scaring us!”
“I need to think!” he shouted back. Lying down like this was not good for the brain. He felt the heat of all that blood rushing to it in his face. He had to check one more thing first.
He dialled up the atmospheric hologrammetry. Twin projectors at the end of each armrest painted an image of the sky in his lap; of an ionosphere luminescent with lightning and charged plasma particles from the latest coronal mass ejection. Purples and greens pulsed; a billion paintbrushes of electromagnetic radiation dying an aurora of the planet’s shroud. Jax half-wished he was standing on the cliff above to witness it firsthand, but then noticed the temperature: 61-degrees-Celsius.
It’s here.
And we’re trapped.
He rubbed his fingers together, a nervous tick, and felt his palms become increasingly clammy. He made a mental note to grip the ladder rungs tight. His fingers combed through waves of hologrammetic violet sky, without effect. He laughed; if ever there was a more fitting analogy of Man’s impotence to Nature, he was yet to see it. The laugh startled him, and he pondered if that would be his final laugh. His goodbye song.
How much time do we have?
He instructed the ship scanners to penetrate beyond the atmosphere, as he had done many times before now, watching for Junkyard Sally or Pretorius to come strolling by the viewfinder: just two of many derelict satellites or ships they’d left in orbit.
Immediately, across the hologram, in red, and flashing, was the word WARNING!
An analysis of that warning sign indicated that a catastrophic CME had been ejected; a strength beyond the X classification which was probably what had just hit them. He envisaged the discharged plasma on its collision course of destruction. The stupid thing was it would miss them if only they could stop this planet from moving inexorably onwards.
No more close-calls. Time’s up.
He opened up one more screen. ‘Impact in 44 minutes, 32 seconds.’ That 32 became 31, became 30, became 21 before he finally closed it. He could forget getting back to Arcadia; forget the experiment and the twins: he had just one goal. Survive.
The twins are here because of you. You knew you’d need their help.
His conscience battered the paperweight of his mind, as thin as it was. The desert hadn’t hardened him at all.
He pulled himself out of the seat and descended monkey-like to the room below where Lani and Scarlett sat huddled on the steps, holding each other. They didn’t jump when they saw him. Instead they searched his face for answers, and they found all they needed, it seemed, to start crying.
He knelt before them, placing his hands on their knees. “We have forty-three minutes, and right now, I really do need your help.”
Journal of Lance Corporal Edmonds
4th March (ext), 2234… cont…
The ground shook and the SatLink went dead at exactly the same time. For the briefest of moments it was daytime and then the world went blind. I had to blink my way back to existence and I found my hand independently trying to reconnect the link. Jerry’s voice had dropped out mid-sentence. It only took seconds to realise I would never hear his voice again, and yet my hand kept trying until Baines placed his hand on mine.
I eased off the gas, staring out at the patterns in the clear, dark-blue sky, slithering purple and blue and green like snakes above the approaching dome. The temperature warning gauge flashed red which meant it must be hot as hell out there. The air-con churned within.
“Was that it?” I asked.
“A little taste of what’s to come. A category X perhaps. Probably knocked the satellite out.”
I looked across at him; he’d grabbed a rifle and was busy loading its clip with .45s.
“Rifle or grenade launcher?” he asked, deadpan.
“Grenade launcher sounds tasty. Why not both?”
“Oh, I’m taking both.”
Above, the sky continued to ripple rainbows; it had a texture and a volume like never before, not merely a multi-layered atmosphere giving life and protecting the planet, but something with a surface that could be defaced, poked, torn apart. I recalled something Jerry had said: “When the radiation and plasma hits the atmosphere will do its upmost to protect us, as it does on a day-to-day basis. Just that sometimes, that’s not enough.”
I hoped he was watching.
“Do those things even work?” I asked.
“Last I tried.”
“And when was that?”
“Last month, down the firing range.”
“The firing range?”
“Where else?”
“I can’t even remember the last time I fired a gun.”
Baines laid a rifle in my lap and a full clip on top of that. “I can’t recall zero-G but I could still shit in a pan if I had to.”
“Nice.” The weight of it on my legs felt good. Too good. Just stay seated, it said. “So what’s the plan?”
“You tell me, boss.”
“I guess we knock, politely, and ask to be let back in.”
Baines leaned in towards a co-pilot monitor and then forward, looking out the window. “I don’t think that’s an option – evasive manoeuvres!”
I followed his gaze and saw a streak of yellow flame splitting the sky in two, getting larger, and falling; heading straight for us. I punched left and was thrown right, straight into Baines, whose seatbeat clicked into place just in time. He pushed me back while grabbing the wheel.
“Belt!”
After securing myself in I retook the wheel, just as the round landed where we had been. The explosion rocked us sideways but the Grounder forged on.
“That was a warning,” said Baines.
“Fuck them.” I began zigging left and right, aiming for inconsistency. We bounced over terrain that had not been flattened by years of trucking. From the top of the
dome, now visibly growing as we got nearer, four more streaks of flame shot out. Like fireworks on Landing Day. I directed the Grounder to the right, turning tightly in a pattern they could not have predicted. I watched them cascade to my left – couldn’t keep my eyes off them.
“You make sure they miss,” said Baines, quietly.
“I’ll do my best.” The fact the first one missed filled me with hope – that they weren’t laser guided and may not have been just a warning shot.
Down they came.
As I watched them, I realised I’d never really stared death in the face before – not properly. It was agony; they took forever and I ended up wishing they would hurry up and land already and finish it one way or another. Just too much time to think.
Of course I’m writing this, so they missed – not by much though. The Grounder flew into the air from the quadruple blasts around us and we almost tipped over. Gravity pushed Baines and I to the right, the seatbelts cutting into our neck and shoulder, and then we slammed back into the ground. The roar of the explosion palpable in our bones. Rocks and stones clattered the hull and pinged from the reinforced windscreen, and beyond swirled a dustbowl of embers, smoke and dirt.
“Ram the bastards,” said Baines. “They haven’t got time to fire another volley. Ram the entrance.”
I said nothing. I just steered into the cloud until the night and Neon reappeared, and then hit the gas, hard. The glacial entrance looked inviting, clear as glass on a sunny day, the tunnel beyond cutting through the Agridome to the inner sanctum.
“Open the hatch.” Baines unbuckled his belt and stood, grabbing the grenade launcher from the side console.
I opened the hatch and hot air blasted inside. It was crazy hot out there. I could only imagine how it was on the sunny side of town. Baines volleyed his own expletives as he pressed his head up through the hatch to the outside, pulling the grenade launcher out.
We couldn’t have been more than four hundred metres out when the entrance began to lift open.
Neon Sands Trilogy Boxset: The Neon Series Season One Page 60