Here Be Dragons

by Alan, Craig

  “You know what happens to a skirt in zero gravity, don’t you?”

  Alejandra shook the dress, cut in the latest Havana style, and watched it ripple slowly. It was royal blue, several shades above an Agency uniform, and shimmered softly under the lights.

  “We’ll get you matching stockings.”

  Elena laughed and ran her fingers over the dress. The material color shifted under the heat of her skin, and left vibrant orange trails that slowly faded as they cooled.

  “Maybe I can use it as a parachute.”

  “Fine.” Alejandra turned to hand it back to the shopgirl. “We’ll get you shoes. You still wear shoes in space, correct?”

  She spoke with the haughty umbrage reserved exclusively for the parents of ungrateful children. Elena stopped her hand.

  “It’s fine, mama. I just feel like you’re spoiling me.”

  “I only have the one daughter.” Alejandra and the shop girl pressed their electronic bracelets together, and the transaction was completed in an instant. The woman left to find a garment bag for the dress that Elena doubted she would ever have the opportunity to wear. “And for maybe not much longer.”

  “Stop.”

  Elena knew that her mother was entirely correct. It wasn’t exactly unheard for vessels to be lost in the Belt. The reach of the Global Union, from the Sun to the Belt, was nearly half a billion kilometers. Between Mercury and Mars, one could feel perfectly safe, as there had never been a single recorded attack inside that fortified ring. But the Belt was the frontier, and outside was the wilderness.

  “I suppose those big guns are for decoration, then.”

  The shopgirl returned with the dress, a bag, and a smile. Elena took the first two and gave a smile back. The girl was almost gorgeous enough to make Elena wish that Alejandra wasn’t there.

  Elena and her mother stepped out onto the High Street, which circled the forest. A nearby elevator station from below opened and disgorged a flood of passengers. Most people lived and worked beneath the crater, inside the lunar surface, but the trendy shops and posh townhouses were up here, lining the crater wall. A few—the most expensive, including her mother’s apartment—had been nestled among the trees. But Maginus was an expensive town, no matter where one chose to live. It was an original, like Tranquility and Fra Mauro, one of the settlements created over a century before by the Avram Corporation. The old colonists were long gone, just like the company, and its founder, presumed dead during the Storm. But their cities remained, carved into the surface.

  The lunar workday had nearly ended, and Maginus bustled with the first of the artificial night’s crowds. The true lunar night was actually several weeks old, and the near side of the Moon wouldn’t face the sun for another hour or so. But the city lights, shining down on the crater from the top of the dome, followed a twenty four hour cycle, and they died down now to create the illusion of twilight.

  Elena and Alejandra found a seat in the dimming light on a bench not far from the shop. The High Street billboards gleamed brightly in the dusk, and their holograms flickered with luminous campaign ads—Socialist red, Conservative blue, Liberal gold, and the white of the Alliance for Sovereignty.

  Alejandra spoke first.

  “The Defense Minister is from the old country, you know.”

  Elena looked at her mother and tried to follow her through yet another sharp conversational turn.

  “Yes, I knew that. I didn’t know that you knew that.”

  “Well?”

  Alejandra’s dark eyes had faded in the gloom, but Elena could feel them searching her.

  “Madre de dios. You looked him up while I was in the restroom, didn’t you?”

  “I’m not wrong, am I?”

  Elena sighed. It was impossible to explain military protocol to someone who was placidly determined not to understand it. After more than fifteen years, concepts such as “active duty,” “scheduled leave,” and “chain of command” still failed to make an impression upon Alejandra.

  “It doesn’t work that way, mama.”

  “You think you’d be the first candidate to get a good word from a countryman?”

  “It shouldn’t work that way, then,” Elena said. “Besides, I’m too young.”

  Her mother was quiet for a moment.

  “She was younger than you are now, Elena.”

  Elena hadn’t expected Alejandra to remember that detail. She felt her cheeks grow hot again.

  “Captain Muller had a combat record. I spent a six month tour on an asteroid and didn’t see action once.”

  Alejandra turned away and began to brush nonexistent lint from her sleeves.

  “Well, if you have an answer for everything.”

  “Jesucristo, an hour ago you were talking like you didn’t want me to go. You need to make up your mind, mama.”

  “If I’m going to lose my daughter for however long again, I want it to be for a good reason.” She hesitated once more. “And I think it would have made Anne proud.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be proud of me already?”

  “Elena, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Anne knew how hard I had to work to get where I am. It takes fifteen years to make your name in the Agency, and I didn’t have a very good fucking name to begin with.”

  “Elena.” Her mother spoke quietly. Her knee pulled away from Elena’s own. “There’s no need for—”

  “You don’t have any idea why they wouldn’t trust me? Then let’s ask papa and see if he knows.”

  Alejandra said nothing, and Elena turned away.

  The artificial light cycle had reached its darkest point, and now resembled an early summer evening. This was the Maginus equivalent of sunset. The night had begun, and the tide of humanity on the High Street swarmed back and forth, bounding in the peculiar lunar gait.

  When Elena finally risked a look, Alejandra was busily checking her mascara in a tiny mirror. She snapped it shut and glanced at her bracelet.

  “We’re going to be late.”

  Earthrise was a busy time at the observation decks. Elena and Alejandra had to wait half an hour for one of the massive elevators to the top of the dome to become available, and it was nearly the same amount of time to their destination. They passed in silence above the canopy of the trees, spread out like a green carpet beneath them, and then they were enveloped in the white downy softness of the cloud layer. Maginus City was nearly two kilometers tall at its highest point, and its upper levels were perpetually clothed in a fine mist. Elena had been told that lightning sometimes struck the towers, but thankfully did not have the opportunity to observe it.

  The elevator terminated at an airlock set into the curve of the dome itself. Elena’s professional judgment was highly impressed—it was a triple lock system over twenty meters thick, each manned by a helpful attendant. It was far more secure than anything she had ever seen aboard a ship or station. Then again, no ship or station had ever held a fraction of Maginus’ one hundred thousand residents. Even if it had been breached, only the elevator shaft would have been exposed, and it possessed its own safety locks—but one could never be too careful.

  There were no spacesuits here, and no helmets. Elena could feel her heart quicken inside the last lock, just one away from the vacuum. It was as though she had walked outside her home in the nude. Beside her Alejandra craned her neck curiously, wanting to be among the first to see the stars. The crowd—tourists from Earth, mostly, to judge from their awkward motion—seemed just as nonchalant, as if they were completely unaware that a million tonnes of air pressure were straining to blow them out into space.

  A gasp ran through the cloud when final lock opened and allowed them into the observation bubble. It looked like the inside of an impossibly authentic planetarium. The starscape above them shone on the dome like diamonds on black velvet, and the pearly arm of the Mi
lky Way reached over their heads and stretched away into the distance, and disappeared over the horizon. Once at the center Elena could look up without seeing the walls behind her, or the surface before her, and feel like she was floating in space. This was a view that was impossible down below—the sun and moon were too bright during the lunar day to see much of anything else.

  Elena glanced at Alejandra. An expression of wonder had taken two decades off a face that already seemed much younger than its sixty years. She thought of the camping trips to the Andes that she had taken with her father, paddling a canoe at the top of the world. Her mother had never come with them.

  Elena’s wrist vibrated three times in quick succession, and she raised it to her eyes. Alejandra looked over, and spoke for the first time in thirty minutes.

  “I should have known that I wouldn’t get you to myself today.”

  “Just be glad that I didn’t check it during lunch,” Elena said.

  She tapped the bracelet, and the holo projector sprang to life. Elena had to tilt her wrist so that she could see the image—if the projector wasn’t aimed directly at her eyes, the display was invisible. She studiously ignored the unread mountain of routine communications, and concentrated on the latest message from Gabriel.

  20/09/2152 live fire exercise. Trajectory attached, HQ approved. Request permission to fire.

  The image showed a single red line that shot from Gabriel and lanced through Overstar-12, an old military satellite that hovered near the end of its life, approved for destruction. Elena had chosen the target herself—if the round missed, it was guaranteed to disappear safely into oblivion. But Gabriel would not miss.

  “Anything important?” Alejandra had stopped pretending to ignore her daughter’s bad manners.

  “No,” Elena said. “Just a budget thing.”

  “All that money you people throw around, and my company still can’t get a government contract.”

  “When I’m Director, mama, the Agency will eat algae three meals a day. Would that make you happy?”

  “Only if you buy it from me,” Alejandra said.

  She began to wander along the outer edge of the bubble, and Elena trailed behind her. The two of them came to the opposite of side of the observation deck. Elena sat down and motioned for her mother to join her, and Alejandra sat down stiffly.

  There was no easy way to do this, so Elena jumped right in and took her mother by the hand. Alejandra started, but did not pull back.

  “Mama. I’m not going to command Gabriel.”

  Alejandra nodded slightly. She had no more fight in her.

  “I may not even get to take her on the trial cruise. And I will never get another chance after this. I’m not saying this to argue with you, it is just a matter of fact. There are things beneath the surface here that you do not see, because I cannot tell you about them. But I promise you that it will make sense one day soon.”

  Alejandra nodded again.

  “Me entiendo, nina.”

  “I know you weren’t expecting me to come all this way to tell you something like that. But I thought that if I was going to disappoint you, I should at least have the courtesy to do it in person.”

  Alejandra squeezed her daughter’s hand.

  “You have never disappointed me. I know hard you’ve worked to put everything behind you. You don’t need a ship to prove yourself to me, or to Anne. We’ve both lost so much over the years, you and I, but I have always had my daughter. I just wanted you to have something that would make you as proud as I am of you.”

  “And what if I lost her?”

  “You made her,” her mother said. “She’ll always be yours.”

  Elena smiled and squeezed back. Then she replied.

  Permission granted.

  The Agency had a protocol in place for the discovery of fissile material, and if she followed it a cleanup team would arrive within the day. They would collect the sample, wipe down the site, debrief the crew, and vanish. And that would be the end of it. Everyone knew that nuclear accidents happened occasionally, but no official reports had ever been filed, and no one ever spoke of it openly—the topic was as dangerous as the substance itself. The plutonium would just disappear, like a dream at sunrise.

  There had been no one else aboard Gabriel that night, and only she and Arnaud had heard the alarm. Overstar-12 too was alone in its high orbit, far from the crowded equatorial regions, and Gabriel would not fire unless there were no ships within a hundred kilometers of the line of fire. Elena had made sure that the plutonium shell was the first on the rack.

  “It’s over,” she said to no one in particular. Whoever had filled that steel ball with a nuclear pit would know exactly what she had done. She could only hope that they would burn with her.

  Alejandra opened her mouth to say something, but Elena never learned what. The din of conversation crescendoed and drowned her mother out. A wave ran through the crowd as people hurried to their feet, pointing to the ceiling. High in the sky above them, an enormous slice of bright blue cut through the darkness and began to swell. The field of azure spreading in the sky was huge, nearly four times the size of a full moon, and its soft light fell upon a gray sea of upturned faces. The Earth had risen.

  Elena felt her mother’s hand slide into her fingers. It was warm and soft, softer than her daughter’s hands had been in many years. Elena smiled and squeezed briefly and began to drop her mother’s hand. She found that she couldn’t, and instead it remained clasped tightly within her own.

  She looked at her mother, but Alejandra did not look back. Instead she remained with her face skyward, towards the home she had not seen in over fifteen years. Even now, Alejandra Estrella couldn’t bear to look her countrymen in the eye. She would always be Alejandra Gonzales to them.

  The crowd gasped again. A second star, as bright as the sun itself, had flourished above the Earth. As one they brought their hands to their eyes, but it was already over. The star had died, and left only blue seas and white clouds. The ball of plutonium-239 inside the shell had smashed itself flat against Overstar-12 and gone critical upon impact. Just as intended.

  Elena squeezed her mother’s hand once more as they stood together in the earthlight, remembering what they had left behind.

  Lost Souls

  More than a week had passed since the death of Pascal Arnaud, and the debt was still unpaid. Gabriel had now entered Jupiter’s moon system, the most distant of which was a rock about a mile across, orbiting at a distance of thirty million kilometers. Soon enough she would pass into Jupiter’s shadow, and still the outsiders were nowhere to be seen. The Archangels were built to strike quickly and quietly, and kill from the shadows. But there had been no reaction, no reinforcements. The outsiders had pulled back into the darkness, where she couldn’t find them, and she couldn’t kill what she couldn’t see.

  “Minus fifteen minutes,” Vijay said from his seat at the watch station.

  And now a new danger had found Gabriel, one that couldn’t be harmed by guns or missiles. The solar flare that had struck the Earth ten days before had reached Jupiter.

  He brought the spectral image up on the holo, and in false color the waves of high energy particles bearing down on her looked like a gentle breeze. Elena watched the tide creep closer. In its own way, this was almost worse than the battle. At least then she could fight back.

  “Hassoun, tell Chief Gupta to begin cooldown.”

  Humans had feared the sun for longer than they had feared the outsiders. The massive solar explosion that had rocked the Earth one hundred years earlier had killed every satellite in orbit and every human in space, scorched the ozone layer, and wrecked most of the world’s power grids and computer networks. Billions had been left without electricity, and petabytes of data had been lost. The aurora borealis that evening was so powerful that midnight at the equator had been bright as an autumn evening. There h
ad been twenty four hours of daylight, followed by a half century of darkness—the wars had begun the next morning.

  In the hundred years since, there hadn’t been a solar flare a tithe of the size and power of the Storm. It was as if the sun had poured out all her wrath and had none left to spare. But every time a sunspot appeared on its surface, the Earth flinched.

  “Minus ten.”

  “Chief Gupta reports ready, Cap’n,” Hassoun said. “Cooldown on your mark.”

  Without an atmosphere and magnetic field for protection, a solar flare could swamp a ship and disable it. There were two strategies for survival when caught in the open. The first, the most preferred, was to activate the avram and rely on it to shield the ship. But to leave the avram on for too long this close to Jupiter would throw Gabriel off course and force her to resort to firing thrusters to get back on track. And avramatic physics could backfire spectacularly inside the radiation surge, and cause the very disaster they had been meant to prevent—blind a ship’s telescopes and squelch her radios, or even short out her power grid completely and leave her to drift.

  The nearest rescue and salvage vessel was in the Asteroid Belt, and Elena wasn’t going to take that risk. She would lie ahull—turn off most of the electrical systems, leave just enough battery power to run the computers and the air processors, and wait out the storm.

  “Minus five minutes,” Vijay said.

  “Shut it down,” she said.

  Gupta cut the fuel cells moments later, and the status indicators for the ship’s systems went from green to blue, just like they had at the border ten days before. Gabriel was running cold.

  “Ten seconds.”

  The flare and the field collided, and a shock wave detonated at the leading edge and spread to the poles. Even this far out there was more energy in the flare than in an entire day’s worth of sunshine, and the tide of radiation broke through and crashed against Gabriel, silently, invisibly. If Vijay hadn’t reported the impact, Elena would have never known that her ship had just been buried by a seething ocean of ionized gas hurled halfway across the solar system.