The Money Star

by Jon Lymon

  “What the hell could be happening down there to cause this many people to leave?” Haalange asked.

  “Face it, Haalange,” said Aurora, “your dream is over. You can’t stop people travelling to and from Mars, bringing back alien bacteria. Our race will have to adapt, like it’s always had to adapt.”

  “Oh no.” Remnant pointed to the dashboard on which five lights were flashing red, with a sixth thinking about it.

  “What does all that mean?” Aurora asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” said Remnant. “Haalange, do you know anything about ships?”

  “Of course not, my trade is diamonds, but I think my guard might. Where is he?”

  “He’s er… out there somewhere.”

  An alarm started pulsing in the cockpit.

  “Now things sound as bad as they look,” said Remnant.

  “Are we going down?” Haalange asked, looking genuinely worried.

  “There’s nothing to go down to,” Remnant told him. “I don’t know much about ships, but I’d guess this one hasn’t got a lot of life left in it.”

  “Right,” said Haalange standing. “I believe I saw an escape hatch back there.”

  Aurora looked at Remnant who nodded.

  Haalange smiled. “Well, it’s been nice meeting you,” he said, edging his way out of the cockpit, backwards.

  “It’s a two-man pod, Haalange. You not taking the lady with you?”

  Aurora looked at Remnant like she couldn’t believe what he was saying.

  “Sorry, I like my own space,” said Haalange. “Happy dying.”

  He slammed the cockpit door shut. Remnant waited five seconds then chased after him.

  By the time Remnant reached the hatch, Haalange had scrambled through it and was into the short tunnel that led to the pod.

  “Here, let me give you a hand,” said Remnant, pushing Haalange’s feet and legs further along the tunnel. Haalange struggled to get back, but in vain. He didn’t have time to yell. He was sucked out of the ship and across the rear of the vessel, cartwheeling in the same direction as the flotilla of ships that were fleeing Earth.

  Remnant shut the hatch and rushed back to the cockpit where the flashing red lights on the dash now far outnumbered the dormant ones.

  “What do we do?” Aurora asked, handing Remnant an oxygen mask. “Once they find out Haalange is no longer on board, they’ll shoot us down.”

  “I think it’s time to bail out.”

  Aurora knew the enormity of what he’d just told her. She glanced out of the cockpit window, as another ship fleeing Earth narrowly avoided a head-on collision with them.

  “I always wanted to go skydiving,” she told him.

  “Did you?”

  “No. Not really. You?”

  “Before this mission I’d never even flown before.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded.

  “Could be an interesting few minutes ahead then.”

  They looked at each other for a second, then Remnant pulled her towards him and kissed her. What did it matter now if she wanted to or not? This was the last kiss of his life, and like the first, it was a little desperate, very liquidy and a long time coming.

  After a few seconds, they both pulled away. A crack had appeared in the ship’s windscreen. And not for the first time on the mission, strange noises were emanating from the bathroom. But these were the sounds of genuine destruction. The sink imploding. The toilet cracking. The shower collapsing.

  “This is it then,” Remnant said calmly. Aurora nodded. The crack in the screen developed into a chasm. A lump of diamond fell from the co-pilot’s seat and slid across the tilting floor, settling beside the second lump. Remnant watched the diamond fall away, then turned back to Aurora.

  They ran into the hold, hurdling his orange luggage bag and jumping onto the platform as the ship lolled violently from side to side. The last remaining can of Gates, the one Remnant had been saving for their triumphant homecoming, rolled out of the bag towards him. Remnant looked down at the can as the platform slowly rose.

  He looked up at the rising perspex tube and beyond into space. Each pulled the other’s oxygen mask over their face. Remnant looked down again at the floor of the hold, disintegrating now, dust spitting up and out of the faults, the blanketed bodies of Bettis and the strangled guard sliding from their brief resting places and floating out into space.

  The platform reached the roof of the ship, but there was little left of the Baton Uric below them. As the perspex tube lowered itself, it found it had nothing to lower itself into and fell away, clashing momentarily with the can of Gates which exploded on impact.

  Remnant and Aurora gripped each other, neither willing to let anything separate them now. Both had their eyes clasped shut, not wanting to see the end, but both sensing an amazing freedom on a scale neither had experienced before.

  A gust from a passing ship blew them rapidly away from the drifting remains of the Baton Uric. Remnant couldn’t resist opening his eyes, and caught a glimpse of the Earth, now as big as a full moon, the pure blue Atlantic untouched, the land masses of Africa and South America shrouded in black cloud. The two lumps of diamond floated in front of them, catching the sun’s rays that were reflecting off the Earth and glowing with a warm evanescence. He reached out for a lump with one hand, a move that caused Aurora to drift away from him. He quickly pulled his arm back and around her. Behind his mask, Remnant smiled as the gems floated away, out of reach and in amongst the ships that were fleeing the Earth. When they had drifted out of sight, he shut his eyes and gripped Aurora tightly.

  53

  Waking up in a strange bed was something Remnant hadn’t done for a long time. He sat up with a start and immediately felt his face for a reason he couldn’t explain. It was all still there. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Teeth. The room he was lying in was lit by a low-wattage bedside table lamp. And wherever this room was, it was moving.

  Something else was moving, beside him in the bed. His tired mind tried to piece together its last memories. Haalange. A man sucked out of a trash chute. An exploding can of Gates. Oxygen masks. Kissing Aurora.

  “Where are we?” It was Aurora’s familiar, welcome voice. She was sitting upright beside him.

  “I don’t know,” said Remnant, looking around the small room and seriously contemplating the possibility that they were both dead. The room wasn’t his idea of heaven or hell, more a standard hotel room that was dominated by a widescreen television on the far wall.

  Remnant rolled to his left and opened the top drawer of the bedside table. Nothing in there, save the Gideons. But the next drawer down yielded something way more interesting. In with small black and whites of a pair of red setters was a small, colour photograph of a smiling woman standing on a shoreline next to a smiling man.

  The man was Errol Haygue.

  Remnant leapt out of bed.

  “What’s the matter?” Aurora asked. Remnant threw her the photo. “Oh, my… where are we?” she asked.

  “Hell?”

  He ripped open the room’s red curtains and saw a view he was all too familiar with. Black sky punctuated by distant white stars.

  “Can you remember how we got here?” he asked Aurora. She rubbed her sore temple and shook her head. Remnant searched the wardrobe and found three suits of various shades of dullness, a trio of shirts of creaseless white and five predominantly black ties, three of which carried the SEC logo. On the floor, a pole lay flat with a creased stars and stripes flag at its tip.

  “What are you looking for?” Aurora asked.

  “A weapon. Anything.”

  The only suitable weapon he could find was a razor in the ultra-white en-suite, blunt with a few shorn greys between the quadruple blades. It wouldn’t take anyone out, but might work as a deterrent.

  Aurora found nothing but gruesome pants and silk socks in the chest of drawers on her side of the bed, but armed herself with a coat hanger that she’d moulded to form a hoo
k.

  Remnant pointed to the room door. “You open it” he said, “and I’ll take a look outside.”

  She nodded and moved into position. Remnant crouched, the razor held out in front of him. He breathed deeply and nodded to Aurora who yanked open the door.

  Remnant was ready for anything but there was nothing. He peered out into an empty hallway, looking first left then right then left again to a door which, from the noise had to be the ship’s engine room. He beckoned Aurora to follow as he slowly crouch-crept out, heading right. He tried the first door on the left. Locked. The next on the right was also locked. Then they reached the galley, which was twice the size of the Baton Uric’s and sported double integral microwave ovens. Someone had recently prepared a meal, for there was the stench of heated freeze-dried meat in the air.

  Remnant pointed to the door at the end of the corridor.

  “You want me to open that one as well?” Aurora whispered. Remnant shook his head and counted to three before kicking open the door.

  His dramatic entrance caused the guy who was sitting on the rear cockpit recliner with an iPad to fall off his seat. The pilot dealt with the shock of the entrance by yelling something nondescript.

  “What the fuck is going on here?” Remnant shouted. He was in no mood for niceties and was holding the razor in front of him for all to see.

  “Who’ah, easy there,” said the guy with the iPad, recoiling from the brandished razor.

  “Who are you?” Remnant asked the him, his thick jet black hair cut to a low fringe making him look like a college student.

  “I’m John Stock, international blogger.”

  Remnant frowned.

  “What are you doing on board a SEC ship?” Aurora asked.

  “Going home,” he said.

  “What are we doing on board a SEC ship?” Remnant asked.

  “Coming with us. We picked you up.”

  “This is not an alien abduction, right?” Aurora asked.

  “Do we look like aliens?”

  Remnant frowned. “Where did you pick us up? Why?”

  “Well, it’s not every day you see a kissing couple floating in space.”

  Memories of the embrace flooded back to Remnant and Aurora. “Our ship was destroyed,” he said.

  “We figured that,” Stock said. “Welcome aboard the Prospector III.” Stock could see from their reactions that the name resonated with them. He looked at Aurora. “You OK?”

  “You did say Prospector III, right?”

  “I sure did.”

  The next hour started with Remnant and Aurora lowering their crude weapons and ended with Stock asking if he could put what they’d told him about Prospector II and Haygue and the diamond and Haalange on his blog.

  “I’ve got close on 80 million followers now,” he told them. “Although I’ve got a feeling that’s an error, so I’m keen to get home and verify the numbers.”

  He lost Remnant a little with that comment, but regained his interest when he started talking of his narrow escape from Mars. “Haygue left me for dead, the bastard. He just upped and left everyone to die. I never trusted the guy, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. A few of us managed to get the hell out before the second bomb hit. We lost a lot of guys, though. Good guys. Really good guys. Clever guys, you know?”

  Aurora and Remnant nodded in unison.

  “So how was that kiss?” Stock asked, trying to lighten the mood. “I gotta say it looked something special.”

  They both glanced at each other and smiled, a little embarrassed at the attention it was drawing to them.

  “You sure know how to treat a lady.” Remnant shifted uncomfortably and Stock sensed this. “I’m surprised Haygue never mentioned Haalange to me,” he said, moving on.

  “He probably felt Haalange was his inferior,” said Aurora.

  “Was the diamond a fake?” Remnant asked.

  “Oh, no way,” said Stock. “SEC had experts testing it while I was at the facility, and I could tell from the expressions on their faces and the level of security surrounding it that the rock was the real deal.”

  “And all Haalange wanted to do was stop any of it getting back to Earth,” said Aurora.

  “Blowing it up ought to do that,” said Stock, who excused himself to go and talk to the pilot.

  Remnant looked at Aurora. “I’m sorry for dragging you all this way for nothing,” he said.

  “Hey, it’s been interesting. I don’t think I could ever call you boring.”

  “I could arrange to get you flown back to Mars. I don’t know how I’d do it. But it seems a popular place to be going.”

  “I never wanted to stay on Mars, Sye. I was just testing you. Checking to see if you were interested.”

  “Why would you care if someone like me was interested?”

  She shrugged. “You never judged me. When I left my kids on Mars, you never criticised or anything.”

  “I could hardly criticise with what I’d done to Chloe, could I?”

  “Reckon you’ll make it up with her?”

  Remnant couldn’t answer that.

  “At least you have a chance. You should take that chance.”

  Stock returned to inform them the ship was preparing to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere.

  “Crew seats for landing, is it?” Remnant said.

  “We’ve no spare seats, I’m afraid,” Stock said. “It’s an overcrowded ship. But I’m happy to surrender mine to the lady.”

  Remnant nodded his respect and helped Aurora strap herself in.

  The ship started to shake as re-entry began and Remnant was forced to quickly seek the nearest source of support which happened to be a thin rim of rubber that surrounded one of the cockpit’s starboard windows. Peering through it, Remnant could see the ship glowing red. What started as a low hum, escalated to a roar as the glow intensified and the ship descended at precisely thirty-two degrees through the harsh, invisible outer layers of the Earth’s atmosphere. He glanced to the pilot’s seat and smiled as he envisaged Bettis sitting there, wrestling with the control stick, bravely flying them home, DT next to him, concerned about the impending arrival of vomit in his mouth.

  The welcome home might not have been friendly, but it was certainly warm. The pilot struggled to keep grip of the control wheel. Stock shot Remnant an unconvincing thumbs up as he too gripped to a slender surface to stop himself from flying across the cockpit. Aurora sat, unmoved and emotionless as the turquoise and charcoal grey glow from the Earth slowly replaced the red in their windscreen. It offered a welcome touch of variety to the black and yellow and dusty brown they’d experienced over the last nine months.

  The ship shuddered, much like Remnant, who was nervous more than ever now he was on the home straight. There were groans and creaks as they continued to lose altitude. Everything and everyone aboard was tired, the ship’s underside scorched and scarred. But the Prospector III held together, and the pilot slowly levelled it out as they reached aircraft cruising altitude. Thirty-two thousand feet over a planet they’d all missed but were all afraid of, wondering just how much it had changed in their absence.

  “We’re over the north Atlantic,” the pilot announced. If he expected spontaneous applause to follow, he was to be disappointed. Aurora, Remnant and Stock all strained to look outside. Greenland still looked like Greenland – white. The Atlantic still looked like the Atlantic, its deep grey waves peaking in small lines of creamy froth that reminded Remnant of Gates.

  But the pilot was concerned. He hadn’t heard from or managed to make contact with any air traffic controllers.

  Thick clouds of grey smoke passed below them, reminding Remnant and Aurora of their disturbing return to Mars. They looked at each other, neither smiling. They sensed something in the air out there, other than the smoke. A foreboding that ached their guts.

  Aurora’s thoughts turned briefly to her sons. She always dreamed of bringing them back here. Starting over on the planet where it all started for her and Roscoe.
She wondered how, if, whether they would have adapted. But she dismissed the thoughts almost as soon as they arrived. She had to deal with the facts as they were. And the fact remained that all that was important in her life now was on the ship with her.

  She wondered if all Remnant wanted was to see his daughter, to try and make it up to her. Hear about her big day. ‘How did it go? Can I see the pictures? Were the speeches funny? Who walked you down the aisle? Let’s see the ring. An expensive one. Hatton Garden’s finest. The biggest rock on the block.’ She had to know where, if, she fitted into his future plans. Would they land and drift apart?

  Remnant was no geographer but he recognised the mess of islands that form the west coast of Scotland as the descent continued. All was green and grey with not a hint of danger nor a sign of life below. It looked cold, wintry. It was hard to tell the season from up here and he wasn’t sure if they had anything but winter this far north. He wanted to open a window, to breath unaided. Inhale real oxygen. But the air was thin. Even this close to home, his own planet was an unwelcoming place, as uninviting as outer space. Remnant considered how narrow man’s comfort zone in his own solar system was. The area in which a man could survive and breathe unaided was incredibly small. Go just a few hundred feet above sea level and things started to get tricky for the lungs. Go a few feet below sea level and they drowned. The human being wasn’t designed to rise up or dive down, he concluded. It was built to trundle along, stay on a level. Don’t aim too high or stoop too low. Keep your feet on the ground and your head out of the clouds.

  A few moments later, conditions outside the ship changed for the worse. Grey clouds made way for black, with debris and ash and paper swirling in, below and around them.

  “You dropping us off in London?” Remnant asked Stock.

  He nodded. “I’ve never been before, so I’m really looking forward to seeing the sights.”

  The Prospector III negotiated a bank of air turbulence, and was now low enough for the crew to make out details on the surface. England, Remnant’s England was smoking below them. Its green and pleasant all pitted bomb crater brown and flattened grey with sporadic cigarette tips of tangerine fire. It looked like war had ended life on Earth.