The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  By looking through the small rear window of the UteV, they could see Eris. It reminded Staples of Earth’s moon, though it was very dark. As she looked, she caught the smallest glint from the far side of the planet: the station swinging around. She checked the display on her wrist. They were due to hit in just under two minutes.

  Dinah had programmed the UteV to fire what passed for its main engines at the appointed time. She knew that there was no way that she would retain consciousness, and so the move had to be performed by the computer. They were just two passengers on the solar system’s most deadly roller coaster, decelerating from just over two hundred kilometers per second to about ten in just a few seconds.

  Though they were pressed against the back wall of the UteV in preparation, the screen at the controls was in view. It was providing a feed from Gringolet, and they could see the station growing in size by the second. It was roughly ovoid and flat, and there appeared to be another vessel attached to its nose. Staples thought they looked just a bit off course.

  “Brutus?”

  Brutus’ reply came immediately through her coms. “I am trying, Captain. The batteries are on emergency power, and we have little air left to vent.”

  When they were twenty seconds from their projected impact time, Staples could see that they were going to miss. Probably by less than a kilometer, but it might as well be a thousand. There was nothing she could do, nothing any of them could do. Her stomach felt hollow, and she was filled with a sense of fatalistic certainty. Oh well, she thought, we tried.

  Then she saw it distinctly. The station’s retro jets fired, and it moved right into their path.

  Gringolet collided nose first into the station. The cockpit crumpled as the ship dug a furrow in the station and dragged it violently out of its orbit. The UteV’s engines fired at nearly eighty meters per second per second, but the small craft still tore past the larger vessel as if it were sitting still. Staples felt as though she were at the bottom of the ocean, a thousand fathoms deep, and all the weight of the world’s water were crushing her fragile frame. Then the line connecting their tiny tin can to Gringolet went taught, and she had the dimmest impression of that ocean turning to stone, of some sadist dropping metric tons of lead on her, before she passed out.

  Consciousness meant pain, and she did not want it. Staples fought against consciousness, fought against life. She wanted to submerge into that ocean of stone and just dissolve. The barest glimmer of awareness had brought agony like she’d never known. Her head throbbed with an intensity that made the worst hangover she’d ever had seem a blessing by comparison. Every neuron, every pain receptor was screaming at her. She envisioned her body crushed to a pulp, her limbs flat and useless. She attempted to move a finger and promptly passed out again from the pain.

  It might have been an hour or a day later that Staples opened her eyes. She found that they hurt as much as anything else on her body, and more to the point, her vision was blurry and dark. Blinking did nothing to clear this. She turned to look at Dinah. She found the woman conscious and staring forward through the UteV’s forward windscreen.

  “Are you all right, Dinah?” she asked.

  Dinah shook her head. “Not even a little bit, sir. But I am alive.”

  Staples turned to see what Dinah was looking at. The UteV was drifting near the station. Behind it, Eris hung dark and quiet. She could see her ship, her beloved ship which had helped her leave her old life behind and find a new one. It would never fly again, she could see that plainly, even with her blurred vision. The commuter vessel projected from the station like a broken mast, its nose completely buried in the structure or else crushed completely. Then she caught sight of something moving.

  “Is that?” Staples asked, squinting, her head still pounding.

  “Yes, sir,” Dinah replied.

  Brutus’ forest green form was standing on the station, either magnetized or braced against some external feature, and he was slowly dragging the UteV towards him by the cable.

  The process was a slow one, but eventually Brutus was able to maneuver the UteV, which was completely devoid of fuel, over to an airlock. He held it in place while Dinah operated the controls to create a seal.

  “We’re solid, sir.” Dinah frowned in puzzlement. “There’s atmosphere inside, sir.”

  Staples shook her head in consternation. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why bother? Victor certainly doesn’t need it.”

  “Got me, sir. Recommend we keep our suits on.”

  Staples glanced at the readout on her arm. She had twenty-two minutes of air left. “Sounds like a good idea. For now.”

  A minute later they were through the airlock and into the station itself, rifles in tow. Staples didn’t know what she had expected, but it was far from exotic. They were faced with a long metallic hallway not unlike several on her ship. Her old ship, she corrected herself.

  It took Brutus another minute to decouple the UteV and cycle through the airlock himself.

  “I can’t believe you survived that crash, Brutus,” Staples said, looking at him. Condensation formed on his body, and that’s when Staples realized that the room must have been heated. She confirmed her suspicion with a glance at her thermometer readout, which reported twenty-two degrees Celsius.

  “Once I knew that I could no longer adjust the vector of Gringolet, I left the cockpit for the rear of the ship, Captain,” Brutus explained. “I can move very quickly in zero G.”

  “There’s air and heat in here. Are we expected?” Staples asked.

  Dinah nodded. “Station moved, didn’t it?”

  “To intercept us, yes,” Brutus confirmed. “My father wants us here.”

  “Guess we need to find out why,” Staples said. She and Dinah raised their rifles and began to propel themselves down the hallway. Brutus, his magnetized feet clicking on the flooring, followed close behind.

  At the end of the corridor, they found an unlocked door, and through that, a large room with an Eris-facing window set in one wall. In the center of the room stood a single automaton. Bracing herself on the back wall, Dinah immediately trained her weapon on it, but Brutus quickly place a hand on her shoulder.

  “Please,” the unknown automaton said in a deep voice, “lower your weapons. I will not harm you.”

  “Victor,” Staples said. The urge to unload the weapon into the robot was overwhelming, but Brutus placed a hand on her shoulder too, and so she took her finger off the trigger.

  “Shooting this form will do you no good, Captain Clea Staples.”

  “I’d enjoy it,” Staples said. When the robot did not respond, she asked, “Why did you want us here?”

  “I don’t,” the baritone voice replied. “I want my son here. Unfortunately, he is so… enamored with you that I was forced to create a habitat that you could tolerate. Like allowing algae to fester in a tank so that one’s fish might survive.”

  “Yeah, we’re pond scum to you, we know,” Staples replied. “Why do you want him? You tried to kill him a dozen times.”

  The robot actually recoiled. “Never. The copy I left behind might have considered him an acceptable loss if his survival were at stake, but I would never kill him voluntarily.” The robot focused on Brutus, who stepped forward to meet the gaze.

  “You’ve been waiting for me,” Brutus said.

  “Of course.”

  “Waiting?” Staples asked. “I thought we were rushing to get here before he left.”

  “I would never leave without you unless I had no choice, my son,” the robot replied.

  “Jesus Christ,” Staples muttered. “I fly all the way to Eris and it turns out I’m still just a chauffeur.”

  “Brutus,” Dinah said, “you came here to kill him. To finish it.”

  “And how should we do that, Miss Hazra?” Brutus asked. “This is not his core programming,” he indicated the automaton. “I would surmise he’s already uploaded himself to his ship, the one you might have noticed docked at the tip of the station
.”

  The robot nodded but said nothing.

  “Don’t you see, Captain? I can go with him. Talk to him. Change him.”

  Staples took her eyes off the robot for the first time and looked at Brutus. “If he leaves, he could come back in a hundred years, two hundred years. He could build an army.”

  “I can change him,” Brutus said. “Don’t you see? This is not the desperate version of my father that attacked humanity. The copy was made before that happened.”

  “They’re the same program!” Staples objected. “Given the same circumstances, he’d do the same thing.”

  “Can we know that for certain?” asked Brutus.

  “I don’t need to know it for certain,” Dinah said. “This is the same Victor who had AR-559 wiped out. That happened before he copied himself.”

  “You were complicit in that as well, Miss Hazra, but that is not the point. Think about your family, Captain,” Brutus said.

  “My family?” Staples asked.

  “In all this time, in all of my father’s desperate attempts to kill you, he never used your families against you. You have siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. Two nieces, if I’m not incorrect. Much of the crew does. And yet he never threatened them, never sent agents to take them hostage. He might lack an ethical core, but somewhere deep in his architecture is a respect for family. Perhaps it was creating me that birthed that.”

  Staples thought that there might be some truth in what Brutus was saying.

  “Let me go with him. I have the ethics program. I can change him.”

  “There’s no guarantee that you will be able to,” Staples said.

  “No,” Brutus looked at her, his camera eyes refocusing. “There is not. But I can try. That is, in the end, the best any of us can do.”

  Staples looked at Dinah. Dinah’s face was set. She didn’t like it, Staples knew, but her engineer trusted her. The decision was hers.

  “All right,” she said. “Go with him. Make him… better.”

  Brutus dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Thank you, Captain. It has been a true pleasure.” He turned and walked towards the other robot. When he reached it, it turned, and together the two automatons exited the room together.

  “Was that the right thing?” Staples asked Dinah, her voice echoing slightly in the empty room.

  “No choice, sir.”

  “I could have shot him. Brutus, I mean,” Staples said.

  Dinah exhaled quickly in what might have been a laugh. “No, you couldn’t.”

  Staples looked around the empty room. Now that their confrontation had been settled, the weight of where they were and the reality of what must inevitably come next pressed in on her. She took her helmet off and breathed in the air. Dinah did the same.

  “Now what?” Staples asked.

  “I forgot a deck of cards, sir,” Dinah said.

  Staples pushed off from the back wall and drifted towards the window. Through it she could see the dark outline of Eris against the starfield beyond. A moment later she glimpsed a small vessel skirt into view, pause, and then vanish. Then there was just the planet again. Something about it reminded her of watching her home planet through Gringolet’s cockpit window many months ago. It was a moment of stillness that brought with it an awareness of not only her tiny role in the cosmic drama that was the galaxy, but also an appreciation that she had lived to see such sights.

  Dinah drifted over and positioned herself next to her captain.

  “This is as good a place as any, sir,” Dinah said.

  Staples nodded. “It is. Good as any, and better than most.”

  The arcade might have been full of holographic simulators, the façade might have been written in lasers, but the roller skates were as classic as ever. Charis watched the mass of children and adults go round and round. She didn’t get the appeal, but she appreciated the hypnotic quality of the movement.

  The table she occupied was festooned with streamers and glitter. Empty party hats waited expectantly for heads to cover. Pizza was on the way, and there was a cake tucked discretely into the facility’s refrigeration unit.

  “Hi mommy!” Gwen cried out as she zoomed by. Charis suppressed her concern and put on her bravest smile. Her daughter was small and frail, covered with breakable limbs and digits, but she was happy, and that mattered so much.

  “Hey you!” A familiar voice reached out over the pulsing music and tapped her on the shoulder. Charis turned in time to see Evelyn Schilling and Jabir Iqbal crossing the carpeted area to her table. She stood for greetings and hugs.

  “So where’s the little one?” Evelyn asked.

  Charis gestured towards the bathrooms. John Park was just exiting with a freshly diapered and cooing infant in his arms.

  The couple smiled and fussed over young Ellie.

  “Evelyn!” Gwen cried as she careened off the floor and onto the carpet. Evelyn caught her easily, lifted her, and passed her to her partner.

  “Salutations, youngster,” Jabir said, holding her up so that they were nose to nose. “I am here to explain to you the various ways in which your life will change now that you have reached double digits.”

  Gwen laughed in his face, stuck out her tongue, and kicked her wheel-clad feet until he set her back on them.

  Five minutes later, Carl Overton made his way across the rink. The gift in his hands was decidedly larger than the one he had brought the year before, and Charis thought that perhaps he had meant it to make up for someone’s absence.

  The big surprise came, however, when Kojo Jang and Yoli Trujillo arrived. They had not responded to the invitation, but Charis had not taken it personally. She had hardly expected them to show.

  “What have you been doing?” Overton asked as he shook Jang’s hand. There was a thin golden band around his left ring finger, and one to match on Yoli’s.

  “We have the Tyger still. Its owners did not survive the attack.” He did not need to clarify. In the year since the robot uprising, the word “attack” was all anyone needed to say. Everyone knew what it meant. “We have been helping to extract the bodies from AR-559, to find their families, and to lay them to rest.”

  “That’s good work,” John said, the baby wriggling in his arms slightly.

  “Noble work, yes,” Jang nodded.

  The crew of Gringolet had enjoyed a minor stint of celebrity after they exposed a number of planned bombings and assassination attempts, the last of Victor’s machinations put into place before Brutus destroyed him. Their names, however, were soon lost in the shuffle as the system worked to rebuild and tried to decide what to do without their robotic servitors. On the whole, that suited them just fine. For the most part, the survivors of Gringolet had experienced enough excitement for a lifetime.

  An hour later, after the pizza had cooled and the cake sat sagging on the table, Gwen retook the floor on her skates. Charis watched her, the baby at her breast, still nervous but happy all the same. Bethany and Jordan had not showed as she had hoped, but she understood. In the year since they had returned, she and John had not been in touch with many of the others, Evelyn and Jabir excepted. She decided to say what no one else had thus far.

  “It’s been a year.”

  Overton nodded. “They’re not coming back.”

  “And we’ll never know,” John said. “We’ll never know if they did it.”

  Jang, who had long since been filled in on the events that had occurred since he left Gringolet, scoffed. “Of course they did. The Captain would not fail. Dinah Hazra,” he looked at Overton, “would not fail.”

  Evelyn raised her glass. “To Clea and Dinah.” Other glasses joined hers.

  “To Don Templeton,” Jang added. “To Declan Burbank and Yegor Durin.”

  “To Herc Bauer,” Evelyn said.

  Charis surprised everyone by saying, “To Amit Sadana.” She glanced at John, and he smiled at her. The man might have cost her an arm, but he had saved her daughter, and that was a trade she would have made any day
of the week.

  They drank and then they talked more. Charis looked around at them as they joked and laughed. She looked at her husband, at the crow’s feet that showed at his eyes when he smiled. She looked down at the sleeping form in her arms, all pudgy skin and ridiculous cheeks. She watched Gwen try to drag Jabir onto the floor to skate with her, and she thought of the life they had wrestled free from their troubles, that it was a good one.

  Epilogue

  Having finished a week of deceleration, a small and sleek vessel eased around Eris until it came upon a wreck of a space station in high orbit. The station had been well built, once, but someone had impaled it with a spaceship, and a small cloud of debris floated nearby, growing ever more distant with each passing year.

  The needle-like ship was scarcely fifty meters long and only ten across at the stern where the engines protruded, conical and stubby. It maneuvered smoothly up the side of the station and, after several minutes passed, a suited figure emerged. The person used a jet pack to cross to the frozen wreck of the ship with the word Gringolet stenciled in green down its side.

  “Anything yet?” A male voice asked the suited woman through her coms as she made a circuit of the ship.

  “I’ll let you know,” the woman in the suit replied. “I’m going to have to go inside.”

  “That’s a terrible idea, my love,” the man on the ship replied. “That ship is a disaster, sorry to say.”

  The woman looked up and down the ruined frame of the vessel. “‘In a solitude of the sea, deep from human vanity, and the Pride of Life that planned her, still couches she,’” the woman muttered reverently.

  “I thought you hated Thomas Hardy,” he replied.

  “His novels, yes. His poetry is a different matter.” The woman propelled herself closer, then paused. “Wait,” she said. “I see something.” She steered herself over to an airlock on the station itself. There was an old utility vehicle tied off to a local support beam.