Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  Keldra sat in her chair next to the gravity bomb, lightly stroking the surface of the alien Sphere, just as she had the first time Jonas saw her in the garden. The Sphere was shrouded in cables that disappeared into the floor, linked to the Remembrance’s main power system. There was a large button under a clear cover built into the base of the Sphere’s cage, at the right level for Keldra’s hand. She hadn’t tried to plug the Sphere into her pilot implant’s system; there were some things that deserved the pushing of a physical button.

  ‘Not long now,’ she said softly as Jonas entered the room. He wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or to the Sphere. He sat down on the base of the Sphere’s cage, next to her. ‘I wasn’t sure you were coming,’ she said, turning to him. ‘I thought I might have to get servitors to drag you.’

  ‘I wouldn’t miss this for anything,’ he said.

  She stared at the painted clouds as if she could see through the painting and into a vast, cloud-bedecked sky. She ran her fingers along the edge of the button’s cover. ‘I want you to know, you didn’t talk me into this,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Lance Cooper talked to me, in my cell, before he released me from the Iron Dragon. He told me some things about you. He said you talk people into killing themselves.’

  He felt his heart sink. ‘That’s not true,’ he said.

  ‘He said you did it to your lover, and you might try to do it to me. I wanted you to know that you didn’t. This is my choice.’

  ‘It’s not true, Keldra.’ There was an urgency in his voice. Suddenly, it was very important to him to set the record straight for the final moment. ‘I didn’t talk Gabriel into doing what he did. I tried to talk him out of it.’

  She dismissed his pleading with an annoyed wave. ‘I don’t care whether it’s true or not. He was trying to turn me against you. True-born shit, thought he could divide us. I don’t care what happened with you and Gabriel. I just wanted you to know, this is my choice. I would have got here in the end. Maybe you gave me a push, but…’

  ‘But I didn’t know the push would lead here,’ he said. What had he said to her when she’d given him the first tour of the Remembrance, right before she’d suddenly changed the ship’s course? He’d called her an idealist, said she believed in a perfect world. A phrase he’d plucked out of Olzan’s memory, a snapshot of her personality from a more innocent time. He had been blindly trying to goad her, but it looked as if he’d set her on the course that led them to this point. ‘You would have got here eventually,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t keep on blowing up individual Worldbreakers forever. Without me it might have taken longer, but this was always how your story was going to end.’

  Keldra nodded. ‘But you could do it, though, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Talk someone into killing themselves.’

  He felt uncomfortable. Where was she going with this? ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘You’re a manipulative bastard,’ she said admiringly. ‘I bet you could talk anyone into anything if you put your mind to it.’

  ‘I’m not that good.’

  ‘Not anything, then. A lot. But you could do so much more than this.’

  ‘There isn’t any more than this. The human race is dead. Even if we could kill every last Worldbreaker, they’ve already destroyed our planets. We can eke out an existence on the rubble for a while, but on cosmic timescales, we’re finished.’

  Keldra’s hand rested on the button cover. Jonas imagined her flipping it up, exposing the button. She would rest her hand on it, and he would put his hand on hers, and then they would both push down together and the world would turn to light…

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘This is what I can do, but there are other things. You could do something else.’

  ‘Could have done, maybe,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. Why are you asking this?’

  She didn’t answer.

  Water sloshed, steaming, onto the dead plants. Somewhere around the ring there was a change in the background whine, as one more cooling fan gave up the ghost. There was the sound of a servitor’s footsteps in the corridor. A shadow passed across them, darkening the room to twilight for several seconds, and the ship groaned from the momentary change in temperature. They were getting close.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jonas,’ Keldra said suddenly. Her voice was quiet; she wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘Sorry? For what?’

  ‘For everything. For kidnapping you, killing your people, putting that implant in your head.’

  ‘My friends. Killing my friends.’

  ‘Yes. For killing your friends.’

  ‘Sorry won’t bring them back.’

  ‘I know.’ She stared at her painted clouds.

  ‘I’m not asking you to forgive me, Jonas. I’m not doing this for redemption. There’s no redemption, not for me. There’s just this bomb.’

  ‘How much longer now?’

  ‘Not long.’

  He traced his own finger along the button’s casing. Keldra still hadn’t flipped it up. He looked up at the black sphere of the gravity bomb. From his position at its base, he could imagine it was egg-shaped rather than spherical.

  He had never known what to believe about life after death. He wondered if he would still be with Keldra after they pushed the button down together. He wondered if he would see Gabriel again.

  ‘One thing I’m not sorry for,’ Keldra said. There was a faint mischievous smile on her face, as if she was about to play a practical joke and couldn’t help giving it away.

  ‘What?’

  A servitor appeared in the doorway. It had a nerve gun in its hand.

  ‘It’s time for you to go,’ she said.

  He sprang up from the dais. ‘Keldra! What are you—?’

  The nerve gun blast hit him in the chest. His muscles seized up painfully, rooting him to the spot like another of Keldra’s plants. The servitor advanced on him, and another entered behind it.

  ‘I’m saving your ass, Jonas,’ Keldra said. ‘It only takes one to push the button.’

  The servitors grabbed him by his elbows, one arm each. One of them touched him with an anti-paralyzer, and then both of them tugged him towards the door. Keldra didn’t seem to be concentrating on controlling the servitors; they must be carrying out pre-programmed orders. She watched the action with an amused smile.

  ‘Why?’ he blurted as he was dragged out of the door.

  ‘You should have run!’ Keldra called after him. ‘You’ve been trying to kill yourself since the Iron Dragon. So have I, but you didn’t need to stay with me.’

  ‘You needed my help!’

  Jonas was in the corridor now. The servitors were half-running, holding him between them, his feet barely touching the ground. Keldra’s voice followed them, relayed through the ship’s internal speakers.

  ‘Bullshit!’ she called. ‘I could have done this without you, and you know it. This isn’t your fight. You should have run.’

  ‘There was no way for me to get off! I had to pick between you and Cooper—’

  ‘Sure there was, if you’d put your mind to it.’

  The servitors were dragging him along the corridor past the prison cells now; the converted cargo containers where Keldra had kept her true-born hostages for ransom, where Jonas had spent his first night on the ship. There was a knot in his stomach, feeling as if it was rising; he wanted to be sick. It was the after-effects of the paralysis, but it wasn’t just that. He wanted to be back in that garden: he wanted to help Keldra push the button. His and Keldra’s and Gabriel’s hands on the button, pushing down together.

  ‘You always said…’ he panted. ‘You always said, “You should have fought”.’

  Her chuckle echoed along the corridor. God damn her, she was enjoying this.

  ‘Yeah, well, I changed my mind. Maybe I learned something from you. You run away now, Jonas. I don’t give a damn what you want. I want you to live.’ The servitors were dragging him
through the servitor barracks now. Corpse-like faces looked at the floor, not reacting as he was whisked past. ‘I had a think about what you said,’ Keldra continued. ‘That I want someone here to watch. Well, I don’t just want you to watch. I want you to remember, and that means you have to survive. They’ll see the explosion from Belt Three. When people talk about it, I want you to know that it was me.’

  Jonas had reached the transit hub. The door to the shuttle bay was open, and so was the hatch leading to one of the shuttles. The servitors dragged him into the room and towards the hatch. He struggled, momentarily breaking free. He wasn’t thinking clearly; the memory of Servitor-Ayla’s brief shuttle trip flashed into his mind and, for a moment, he was convinced that Keldra was going to launch the shuttle and then shoot it down. The zap of a nerve gun shock made him flinch, and the servitors managed to grab him again. They forced him down feet first into the cramped shuttle and slammed the hatch closed. The shuttle’s internal door slid shut beneath the hatch and sealed; two airtight barriers between him and Keldra in her garden.

  The shuttle interior was coffin-like, with just enough room for a single occupant to lie on their back. Jonas could feel objects packed around him. It was dark and very warm. He hammered on the tiny window above him.

  ‘Let me out!’

  Suddenly, he was weightless. He stopped pounding on the window and lay still, sweat clinging to his face. Through the external window he saw the Remembrance of Clouds fall away above him, the docking hatch quickly vanishing as the ring rotated. The surface of the ship was glowing gold, every millimetre of it furiously trying to radiate the built-up heat; Jonas knew that his little shuttle would be similarly glowing. Both grav-rings came into view, whirling past one another, the supports that connected them to the spine warping in the heat. The patch over the damaged section of the first ring stood out darkly. The observation blister was crumpled in on itself, its windows shattered and melted. The Earth mural on the cargo bay was peeling, strips of bare metal seeming to add new golden-grey cloud bands to the painted planet. The reaction drive was still flaring, sputtering unevenly, the heat fins surrounding it glowing white-hot.

  Jonas found himself holding his breath as the Remembrance shrank into starless darkness. The shuttle was almost silent, the whirr of its miniature hab system nothing compared to the creaks and groans of Keldra’s ship.

  The shuttle shook and clattered as a mechanism activated somewhere in the recesses to the sides of where Jonas lay. He saw a flash of gold through the window, a glimpse of movement as if of an insect’s wings unfurling. He felt the shuttle spin around through a half-circle, and then felt a violent tug as gravity returned, about a full gee. Above him the Remembrance of Clouds came back into view, mirrored and distorted, floating in a golden haze. He was seeing its reflection in a sail, he realized. The sail wasn’t quite perpendicular to his eyeline, so he couldn’t see the reflection of the shuttle itself, but he could see behind it as the light pressure pushed it starward.

  ‘There never was a tear in the sail,’ he said out loud.

  ‘Fooled you!’ Keldra’s childish, triumphant voice rang close in his ear through the shuttle’s speakers. ‘I picked up some of your lying bastard ways. You could always fool anyone but you never thought I’d fool you.’

  He couldn’t help smiling. ‘Clever.’

  ‘You’ve got three months of supplies, enough for you to reach Belt Three, if you ration yourself. It won’t be comfortable, but you’ll survive. There’s a distress beacon. Someone should pick you up in Belt Two or Belt Three. After that, it’s up to you.’

  Light flooded into the shuttle, suddenly, hitting Jonas like a wave. The darkness the Remembrance had been receding towards hadn’t been space; it had been the Worldbreaker cluster, dwarfing the ship as it made its final kamikaze approach. The shuttle had fallen out of the cluster’s shadow now, and the sun had become visible, filtered down to a non-lethal level by the shuttle’s window, but still unbearably bright. The Remembrance seemed doubly tiny, barely visible against the filtered brightness.

  ‘What do you mean, it’s up to me?’ Jonas asked.

  Keldra’s voice was starting to crackle, the electromagnetic interference from the sun already taking hold. ‘You said you wanted to achieve something great. Cooper said something about that, too, about how you want to prove yourself to your dead lover? Well, you still can.’

  ‘What? The belts are dying. There’s nothing left.’

  ‘Think of something. You have skills I don’t. I don’t care what you do, but I won’t let you claim this as your great achievement. This is my blaze of glory, Jonas. Get your own.’

  The Remembrance was tiny now, visible only in the light of its own reaction drive flame. Jonas could see the silhouettes of the Worldbreakers swarming around the cluster: the ordinary Worldbreakers, the shipyards, the solar collector petals. Calmer now, he shuffled around in the shuttle, feeling the space. There was just room enough for him to lie flat and move his arms. His fingers found packets of food, a water teat, and a miniature toilet system like that of a vacuum suit. He was glad he wasn’t claustrophobic.

  ‘Goodbye, Keldra,’ he said.

  ‘Goodbye, Jonas. It’s not long now. The explosion should give you a boost.’

  ‘Thank you, for sending me off. I’ll try to do…something.’ The words sat heavily on his chest after he said them. Now he would have two ghosts to satisfy, Gabriel’s and Keldra’s, but he couldn’t help making the vow.

  ‘This still doesn’t redeem me.’ Keldra sounded annoyed at his thanks, although it was getting hard to tell through the interference. ‘I’m not doing this because I like you—Jonas, do you see that? Jonas!’

  He squinted at the tiny reflection. More shapes were moving across the dark face of the cluster, visible as flattened green five-pointed stars, pentagonal faces opening. They moved towards Remembrance of Clouds.

  ‘Worldbreakers, moving towards you,’ he said.

  ‘They’ve changed course!’ Keldra yelled, her voice vanishing into distortion. ‘They’ve noticed me! Do you see that, Jonas? They’ve noticed me!’

  ‘I can see a dozen of them,’ he said. ‘They’re closing on you, but…’

  ‘But they’re too late!’ He could hear tears in her voice: wild, furious, triumphant. ‘This is it! All right, you robot bastards! You stole my clouds, and you don’t steal from a fucking thief! You don’t steal from me!’

  Keldra vanished in a burst of static and light. The window went white, its filter barely coping with the sudden brightness. The shuttle lurched and Jonas felt as if he was being pulled apart as the gravity wave hit him: the micro-scale variations in the gravity field weren’t enough to destroy the shuttle at this range, but they made it shake.

  When the light dimmed to its previous level, a crater had appeared in the near face of the Worldbreaker cluster, its edges ragged and glowing green and red. Shards of the cluster, dormant Worldbreakers that had been part of the construction, spun off into space. Cracks spread out from the crater, wrapping around the cluster as it began to split up into chunks. The entire mass was visibly receding, given a nudge towards the sun by the gravity bomb. Worldbreakers swarmed around, green mouths opening, but they were too late: it was falling into the sun faster than they would be able to retrieve it. Jonas felt a surge of triumph. He tried to punch the air, but his fist hit the wall of the shuttle. They had done it! Keldra had done it!

  None of the Worldbreakers were approaching his shuttle. He lay back, closed his eyes, and breathed deeply. There was a steady pull of acceleration gravity from the sail, about one gee, making him feel as though he was back on the Remembrance. That would drop off as the shuttle got further from the sun, but it should give him enough speed to reach the inhabited belts before the supplies ran out. He felt calm, and for the moment, even happy. He had a new lease of life, and an extra ghost to appease. He would have plenty of time to think of something on the journey back to Belt Three.

  Epilogue

&n
bsp; The ship was a kilometre-long iron-grey lozenge, most of its mass made up by a hollowed-out Belt Three debris shard. The only colour was an enormous mural that stood out on its side: a blue circle, filled with spirals of green and white and grey.

  ‘Mr Reinhardt?’ The speaker was Strell, Jonas’s latest Administrator-caste assistant. A fresh-faced young man, always impeccably dressed, as if anything he wore turned into a uniform.

  Jonas straightened up in his chair. It was a big, faux-leather executive chair, surrounded by a ring of gleaming control panels. He’d had it constructed himself, in the executive suite at the bottom of his starscraper. His own control nest.

  He didn’t leave the chair much these days. He wasn’t paralyzed, he was just getting too old to move around comfortably. For the last few years, he’d been reduced to a figurehead, he knew, riding on top of the wave he’d set in motion when he’d returned from the sun. It didn’t matter. The project would still achieve its goal.

  ‘I’m sorry, Strell,’ he said. ‘I was belts away.’

  ‘It’s time, sir,’ Strell said. ‘Everything’s in place. We thought you should give the order.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Jonas took a deep breath; he felt as if he had to be in the right frame of mind for this. He surveyed the ship on the screen again, and pulled the view back to take in its sister ship. He had only been able to raise enough money for two ships. He would have liked to build more, but as long as one completed its mission, he would have succeeded.

  Both ships bore the Earth mural on their sides, the only decoration he’d given them. It would have eroded away by the time they reached their destinations, but he thought it was an important symbol for people to see as the ships departed. Apart from the Earth murals, the surfaces were bare, all the delicate equipment safe behind radiation-and micrometeorite-proof shells.