We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  Park looked again—she could not keep track of what to look at—and she saw that Natalya was at the controls, hitting something with the butt of her gun. Park dove at her, and they both rolled—the ship was going into a nosedive now, something in the panel had been broken, the Deucalion was spinning downward like a poorly made paper airplane and Park bashed into Natalya and barely avoided breaking her neck. Both of them were holding their guns but could not get a proper aim for fear of striking one of the others—or something vital in the ship, something combustible—in the maelstrom of sound and motion. Natalya turned her head and hissed at Park like a cat, baring her teeth. They tussled together, stupidly, uselessly, and Park thought, She’s sabotaged the controls. We’re going to crash. They’re prepared to take us all down, even if it means they die too.

  Across the room she saw Taban lunging forward now, using his six metal limbs for stability even as the other synthetics toppled over and skidded around; he leapt onto Boone’s back and wrenched him off of Fulbreech, who surfaced with a great gulp of air, a thick red stripe appearing across his neck as if it had been slashed there by a knife. Fulbreech staggered forward, rasping, and Taban continued to pry Boone backward, using his mechanical strength against the big augmented soldier; Boone gave a thunderous curse, fumbling to shoot back over his shoulder with his gun. His bad leg impeded him; Taban twisted him this way and that. Sagara leapt across the room then and plunged a glowing energy blade hilt-deep into Boone’s heart. Park saw it emerge out his back—narrowly avoiding Taban—and then hang there like a splinter of light. There was the smell of smoke and cordite and burning meat. Boone said nothing, did nothing; his body vanished silently under the other control panel.

  The ship tipped again, throwing all of them off their feet. Park would have snapped her wrist if Dylanex hadn’t caught her. We need to do something, she thought through the lurching and shrieking protests of the ship. Something grabbed her throat, and a dark thing—a gun—flashed past the corner of her eye, headed to her temple, and she sank her teeth into that hand before it could do more; Natalya screamed. Something snapped under Park’s teeth like a popsicle stick. Salt and heat filled her mouth. The surveyor was grabbing her head, kneeing her stomach, but Park’s mind felt so jumbled that she hardly felt it. The Deucalion is out of control.

  On the screens, Eos loomed closer and closer. Park’s ears popped as her feet lifted off the ground. Someone was yelling, or praying—Jimex hurtled into her body, as light as a child—

  Stop, Park thought, reaching for the golden simmering in the corner of her head. This time there was no nausea: only a strange shifting in her brain, the tensing of that hidden sinew she had never noticed before. A kind of tightness as she held the whole of the ship in her mind.

  The Deucalion flopped back upright again.

  Fulbreech yelled again. At first Park thought it was because he’d landed on his face, but when she looked up, she saw that he was pointing at something, holding his half-strangled throat with his other hand. Boone, still alive, dragging his body toward something in the corner—Sagara, rising grimly and limping after him—

  Light exploded across Park’s vision. Natalya was rising, clutching her mangled hand protectively to her chest; she’d kicked Park in the head. The synthetics were righting themselves, turning to swarm her; Natalya gave a futile scream as they closed in. Her gun fell to the floor with a clatter.

  Then some of them were pulling Park away, pulling her to safety, and she looked back and saw Natalya’s bloody, broken fingers; and for a moment she thought of Antarctica, that moment by the Earthmover when she thought she’d lose her own fingers, reaching into its guts, but the memory was drowned out as Natalya screamed and screamed. Jimex was diving toward the surveyor, perhaps intent on doing the same thing he’d done to Chanur—but then he recoiled in surprise, and the smell of alcohol filled Park’s nose: the strongest odor she’d smelled on the ship in a year. Wetness splashed across her face. Natalya’s hip flask glinted in her one good hand.

  Then fire. Heat and flame—Natalya had doused them in alcohol and lit a plasma torch! Park scrambled backwards, out of the way, but the synthetics were unharmed, merely confused as fire licked up their bodies. Jimex’s reddened shirt was being devoured by golden light. Fulbreech lunged past her, shouting, holding a fire extinguisher: Park caught his stray thought as he dove past. If the fire took the bridge, there was no hope left. They would all crash into Eos and die.

  Sagara was running forward too, Boone nowhere in sight, the synthetics all clamoring, rushing to the stations that would activate METIS’s dousing protocols. But in the commotion, Park saw Natalya staggering to her feet. She watched as the surveyor ran out of the bridge.

  Unbidden, a fierce, stormlike energy leapt through Park, as if a solar wind had kicked up howling in her body; she found herself surging to her feet and staggering after the surveyor. I’ll kill you, she thought—but the thought was absurd, far-off, as if it had been thought by someone else in another life. The METIS part of her screamed in outrage as it felt the fire, sensed the damage to its own system. You’re the cause of all of this: all this betrayal, all this destruction. Fire, blood—all because of you. I’ll end you.

  Jimex was coming after her, the flames on him now snuffed out, and Taban; Jimex had a gun in his hand, but he seemed loath to risk damaging the ship any further. The Deucalion was still tilting wildly; it was in freefall again, and Park could not hold it upright, could not concentrate on it while she was running after Natalya. Taban shouted something at Natalya about surrendering. She ignored him, rushing off down the hall without a glance back; Park tore after her and thought again, I’ll find you. There’s nowhere on this ship you can hide from me. Her head was buzzing; she was swarming with anger, aching with it—it rushed to the top of her throat like bile.

  Doors flew open as Natalya fled past them; pipes let out sudden hisses of steam, and metal screamed in protest. The depths of the ship seemed to Park like the dark-gleaming arteries of an enormous mechanical heart. It was if an army of ghosts was pursuing the surveyor, possessing things around her, causing them to revolt—or as if the ship itself was coming alive. Had Taban been wrong? Park wondered. Was this the end of the season, the final culmination of the unity rain? Or was it all her? Her and METIS’s rage?

  Jimex, beside her, said, “She means to kill us all.” Natalya had already vanished down the corner ahead; Park was falling behind fast, even though that fierce energy still filled her, propelled her on. She felt as if she were in a dream, one of those strange affairs where you couldn’t move fast enough no matter how hard you tried. Her arms pumped uselessly at her sides; she had never thought her own limbs so unnecessary before.

  “She sabotaged the ship,” Park rasped. “So that none of us could fly it. She wants to die, too.”

  But that didn’t seem right—and as she ran, suddenly Natalya’s true intention struck her, full-force, as if the surveyor had lobbed it at her. No, Natalya wasn’t running away to hide, to die somewhere alone when the ship crashed—she was running to the escape pod. She was going to leave the ship altogether. She’d damaged the Deucalion with the intention of killing everyone aboard it while she got away!

  “You need to help the ship,” Taban said then, keeping pace with Park. “Use the unity rain—we’re all going to die if you don’t.”

  “I will,” Park gritted out. “After I catch her.”

  “She’s too far away. You’re not going to. You need to pull the ship out of freefall.”

  “I will!”

  And then she felt it again, the contraction in her brain, the feeling of time and space accordioning, the sensation of folding into herself. Her field of vision shifted, sliding to the right, though her eyes or head didn’t move. She felt as if she’d partially woken from a flying dream.

  Then she blinked, and found that she was at the door of the escape pod, Jimex and Taban far behind her. The door to the
escape pod had just slammed shut, the little porthole in it hazy with condensation—and Natalya was inside, slamming things together, rasping and screaming like an animal.

  Park looked at her hand. The fierce golden glow had filled her vision again, and she felt the hard-edged knowledge that she could lift her hand and command the door to open for her, as she had with the freezer, with Taban’s cell. No, more than that: she could crush Natalya’s pod in her fist, tell METIS to blow the whole thing up and suck the debris into the vacuum of space. The powerful part of her, the cold thing, the vengeful thing, urged her to do it. Behind her somewhere, Taban was yelling. Park felt parts of the ship breaking off in Eos’s atmosphere, tearing back into space like scales from a thrashing fish; they were going down too fast, they were burning up. She didn’t care.

  But then Natalya looked up, her eyes panicky and gray, and Park had the feeling of double-vision again—of déjà vu. Of herself, looking in at Taban in his cell; of Natalya, looking in at her in her own.

  And then she returned to herself a little, again, and the clamoring insistence of the ship, its demand and its pull, faded and loosened. She could hear things better in the space it left behind. It came to her then what Natalya really wanted, in a trickle of data and intention and thought. What she was trying to get back to. Home. Family. Love. Freedom.

  What the synthetics wanted.

  What anyone wanted.

  She took a breath and thought—

  No. Let her go.

  She felt the shuttle detaching from the ship as a slackening in her brain. A relaxing of the hidden muscle there. Had the structure of her brain, too, become machine-like? Was she tied, physically and inextricably, always to the ship? And to the things and people in it? Were they all a part of her, and she them?

  Natalya had disappeared from the porthole. Jimex came running up, wall-eyed, taut. He looked questioningly at Park and said, “She’s getting away.”

  “So are we,” Park told him. She wiped the blood from her mouth. “And she won’t come back. There’s nothing for her here.”

  In her mind, she had wiser words to say to him, some great lesson about humanity or empathy or mercy or . . . something. But in the end she did not need to say anything. Jimex looked into her, into the core of what she was, and understood.

  They watched as the shuttle finished its undocking procedures and navigated away. There was no pause, no brief glance of gratitude, of remorse. The escape pod simply spun away into space; and with a swoop of Park’s heart, the Deucalion slowed its descent and arced back down towards Eos.

  25.

  I don’t understand,” Sagara said later, as they made their slow and ponderous descent back to the planet’s surface. He had rolled up Boone’s corpse in a sheet of canvas. “Why are we going back?”

  “The androids—no, the synthetics can’t come home with us,” Park heard herself saying. The golden glow had faded in her head, but only a little. “They want to stay here.”

  Fulbreech made an incredulous noise, then winced and rubbed his throat. His voice was hoarse and gravelly, destroyed by Boone’s assault, but otherwise he and Sagara were both still intact. “Why?”

  She looked at Jimex, who was helping to readjust the arm of one of the injured synthetics. He smiled at her, and Park said, “They’ll be happier here.”

  Sagara made a face, but Fulbreech looked between her and Jimex with almost wonder. “You’re one of them now,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, only an epiphany—as if he had finally uncovered a secret of Park’s that she had always hinted at, but he had always missed.

  The ship purred and whirred around them. Park felt the awareness of METIS and ARGUS pressing against her like watching spirits. “Maybe I always have been,” she said.

  Outside, the sky was a riot of color and light: a dance so fierce and searing that it seemed almost harmful to look at. Above, the escape pod had disappeared into a dark, ragged fissure in the sky.

  Park told Sagara that Natalya had simply gotten away—that Park had not been able to catch up to her in time. He grunted and said, “She’ll die in space anyway, or go to prison. That escape pod only has a month of rations, and who is she going to call for help? The ISF? Even if she manages to land at Corvus without starving, the Security team will be waiting there to arrest her. And being charged with murder, mutiny, and conspiracy by the very entity she was trying to escape from—the one whose mission she torpedoed? They will not be kind. I’d rather eject myself into space.”

  Then at least she’ll have done it herself, Park thought, and made that choice on her own. She was glad that she had not taken that away from Natalya, whatever happened. It was more complicated than not wanting blood on her hands; there was something more there, but what it was, Park could not exactly say. The METIS part of her muttered in a tiny stream of rebellion, though—and so at least Park knew that the choice had been hers alone. That the part that had spared Natalya was still her, and only her. That seemed important, somehow. She wanted to tell the synthetics about it, but didn’t know how to articulate it. Maybe they already knew.

  They landed, and Park felt the settling of the ship like it was the concluding piece of a vast and complex puzzle. Fulbreech helped her to the airlock while Sagara stayed on the ship to send his own message to ISF and rest his leg. Taban watched them don their exo-armor suits with some hidden amusement. The synthetics had all reconvened again, claiming that Keller and Reimi needed three hours to complete their reawakening. They all crowded eagerly at the door, like schoolchildren waiting to go to recess. They did not line up in formation, as they used to.

  Park opened the airlock. The synthetics all spilled out, and Fulbreech helped Park through the door. It was easy enough to climb down the little ladder that led down under the hatch, but once she hit the ground, Park nearly collapsed. There was an unutterable pressure in her head, the howling and rushing of a sound so vast that for a moment her vision went dark. Briefly she thought that they were being attacked, that some enormous and hideous monster was about to consume them—or that the unity rain was coming again—but then Fulbreech clapped a hand to her shoulder and held her as she swayed. “It’s the wind!” he shouted through his helmet. Out here, his voice sounded utterly transformed, unrecognizable—like it belonged to a different man, a stranger and not a stranger. “It’s just the wind!”

  Of course, Park thought in a daze. Nearly a year in space, aboard a sealed, pressurized ship—she had forgotten the sound of wind.

  After a moment the two of them managed to stagger upright. Despite herself, Park had to cling to Fulbreech, trembling, before she managed to stand on her own and open her eyes. Through her sparking vision Eos seemed to swim and shimmer like a mirage. She felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs. There was nothing out there but ice: a frozen tundra that stretched out in a flat, razor-sharp horizon, so white that it nearly cut the eye. And there were the two suns, weak and watery with pale light. And the sky—the sky was a deep green, a kind of color that made Park feel rich and full. It was the first time she had seen natural light since she’d left Earth. It was almost unbearable to look at.

  “Are you all right?” Fulbreech shouted through his helmet.

  After a moment, Park straightened and nodded. The synthetics were looking around, some with hesitation, others with wonder. A kind of chanting rose from them after a while, or singing, though Park couldn’t make out the words. They’re taking it in, Park thought. They were reveling in it, all of this, Eos, their new home. What that meant.

  She was almost afraid to study it too closely. What would it all look like, ten years from now? One hundred years from now? Was she looking at the birthplace of synthetic civilization? Would they live forever, procreate, and share their enlightenment with their machine offspring, cannibalized from parts of the ship, until they one day reached the solution mankind had never been able to uncover? Could they really make this p
lace a home for themselves?

  We could do it, she thought then. We did it with Mars and Phobos and Titan. They can do things we never dreamed of.

  Fulbreech had put his arm around her shoulders. He felt solid and warm and heavy with life. Off in the distance, a line of rose was beginning to rim the horizon. Daybreak, Park thought, turning the word over in her head. The marker of passing time. But did it mean anything on a planet where time was not a steady march, more a scattered melody that no one knew or could hear, and the planet’s surface was populated by androids who did not age?

  Someone was tramping up to her, through the ice; for a moment Park couldn’t make out his figure, shadowed as it was by the brilliant dawn. Then the figure resolved: it was Jimex. His eyes were spangled with gold in the light.

  “You don’t need your helmet,” he told her. “This place is yours, too.”

  Fulbreech made a noise of disbelief, but Park shrugged off his arm and began to take off her helmet.

  “No—” Fulbreech began, startled.

  The helmet disengaged from the suit with a rush of frigid air; Park took a deep breath. Then another.

  She smiled.

  “Where will you make your home?” she asked Jimex. She looked to the mountains in the distance: silvery-gray structures that seemed to crease the horizon. No, she thought, catching herself. Not mountains. Folds. “Are you happy to finally be here?”

  “Yes and no,” Jimex answered, as serious as ever. “In a way, we have always been here.”