Obsidio

by Amie Kaufman

  Steph PARK: i thought we were going to communicate about this ****. since when are we setting bombs at the airfield??

  Bruno WAY: gotta admit, when I heard that boom I thought u set it off, Steph.

  Steph PARK: Me????

  Bruno WAY: u work at the stadium, u’ve got access to the landing pads.

  Steph PARK: look, I’m not saying blowing a few more of these *******s to hell isn’t a good idea. i been suggesting that for months now. but I’d have cleared it with you all first

  Asha GRANT: we don’t even know if this was one of our people. BeiTech’s gear is 7 months in the snow now. could’ve been a tech failure

  Steph PARK: riiiight, like that air-con failure that wasted thirty-seven of their officers??

  Bruno WAY: let’s look on the bright side. We’re all ok. and that happy little accident in the town hall took most of their tech specialists with it u know.

  Steph PARK: my point exactly. too good to be true.

  Asha GRANT: Maybe we deserve a little good luck

  Steph PARK: luck my ***. they’ll just bring down more techheads from Magellan to replace the ones they lost.

  Asha GRANT: they’re gonna run out of em sooner or later

  Bruno WAY: so if it wasn’t an accident, is this someone in the resistance going rogue you think? Someone from the mine maybe?

  Joran KARALIS: no way, my guys are solid. Nobody down here is risking anything this stupid. Our families are on the line. I’ve got a wife and daughter locked up in Complex C, and bull**** like this risks everyone’s safety.

  Steph PARK: we don’t all have families held hostage, Joran

  Bruno WAY: hey, everyone breathe. Joran, of course we take the hostages seriously. We all have people we miss. I think about Jenna every day.

  Steph PARK: not everybody had their loved ones get out on the evac fleet either, Bruno

  Bruno WAY: Steph, Hans wouldn’t have wanted u to throw your life away, u know that.

  Steph PARK: AND I DIDN’T!! that explosion wasn’t me! but we all know damn well they’re going to shoot every one of us sooner or later.

  Joran KARALIS: It might end up being sooner than we think. Just heard from Monty. The warp storm has apparently dispersed enough for them to get stellar comms back online.

  Joran KARALIS: We think BeiTech got a message out.

  Steph PARK: ****.

  Asha GRANT: ****.

  Bruno WAY: ****.

  Asha GRANT: we HAVE to find out what it said. hell, we have to find out if anybody received it.

  Joran KARALIS: Yes, but how?

  Steph PARK: if they got in touch with BT HQ, we’re screwed. I mean, even at light speed, it’ll take a while for the message to reach the heimdall gate and get out into the core, but sooner or later, we’re into the final countdown.

  Joran KARALIS: We may be anyway. They’re pushing us hard in the mine. I think they’re getting close to the quota of hermium they need.

  Steph PARK: they must be close to getting the Magellan’s jump gate generator functioning. as soon as they have enough hermium to jump the system, it’s curtains for us.

  Bruno WAY: we don’t know that. They keep saying they’re gonna evac everybody

  Steph PARK: and you believe that? After what they’ve done?

  Bruno WAY: it’s not impossible. I mean, who are we going to complain to about what they did? The UTA? “Excuse me, but BeiTech came and ****ed me while I was busy illegally mining hermium, but their lawbreaking was worse than mine…”

  Bruno WAY: they know we won’t tell anyone, so yes, I believe it’s at least possible

  Asha GRANT: i have to go soon, my dead people will be incoming

  Joran KARALIS: We have to find out who’s setting these bombs.

  Steph PARK: forget the bombs, we need to know what was in that transmission!

  Asha GRANT: we’ve got no access to their comms array

  Steph PARK: this is exactly why we need to take more direct action. stealth hit the comms station + find out direct

  Joran KARALIS: No, it’s too risky. Our families are on the line, dammit.

  Steph PARK: and where do you think they’ll be when the Magellan is ready to jump, Joran?

  Steph PARK: against the ****ing wall, that’s where

  Bruno WAY: let’s not talk like that, okay?

  Joran KARALIS: We’re no good to anyone dead!

  Steph PARK: and what good are we if all we do is sit around and chat???

  Joran KARALIS: We have to be cautious!

  Steph PARK: u and your caution can get ****ed, Joran.

 

  Joran KARALIS: Goddamm it. Break is over. I have to go. Keep your ears open. And keep calm for crissakes. We’ll talk soon.

 

  Bruno WAY: ok that went well

  Asha GRANT: better than last meet

  Bruno WAY: :P

  Asha GRANT: …Bruno, u think Steph did it?

  Bruno WAY: the airfield bomb? i honestly don’t know. I mean, I understand how she feels. She watched her husband die. she thinks she has nothing left to lose.

  Asha GRANT: We all have something left to lose

  Bruno WAY: I know. that’s why I fight every day. we have to, for hostages here, and the people we love who got away. Jenna and I are going to be together again, I know it.

  Asha GRANT: I hope so, Bruno. I really do.

  Bruno WAY: r u okay, Ash?

  Asha GRANT: i have a dozen dead people incoming, my boss had the **** beat out of him by a BT officer yesterday, and i…yeah.

  Asha GRANT: yeah, I’m ok, u?

  Bruno WAY: I’m okay. man, this is a long way from high school, huh? Remember when the biggest prob u had was me throwing stuff at the back of ur head in class?

  Asha GRANT: Bruno, I have to go.

  Bruno WAY: aw c’mon I outgrew throwing **** around when the planet got bombed

  Asha GRANT: ha, not that. i need a minute to pull it together before they bring in the corpsicles

  Bruno WAY: ok. take care, my friend.

  Asha GRANT: u too

 

 

  The video starts with a wash of snow that clears to reveal the face of Asha Grant. She’s half-lit by the screen, and the dark shapes behind her sharpen into mops and brooms as the camera of her palmpad finds focus. She’s in a supply closet, switching from an online conversation to a video recording.

  Her dark hair’s pulled back in a ponytail, and her light brown skin is washed a greenish shade by the glow of the palmpad she’s using to record. Twin white reflections of her screen show in her green eyes. She’s chewing on her lower lip, fingers drumming against her temple as she considers her opening words.

  “Hey, Kady.” Her voice is hoarse with tiredness, and she clears her throat, then continues, softer. “Miss you, cuz. Just need to talk to you for a minute before I go out there and face it all. S’funny, it doesn’t matter at all that these recordings just live here on my palmpad, that I don’t send them anywhere. It still feels like talking to you. I keep these files behind the encryptions you set up for me, and in a way, that feels like you guarding me, keeping me safe. Locking up my secrets for me where nobody can find them.”

  She sighs, tipping her head sideways to rest it against a broom handle. “This is ****ed, Kades. There was an explosion at the landing pads, and a bunch of BT troops are dead, and if anyone puts a foot wrong the next day or two, a bunch of us will be dead in retaliation. A bunch more of us, I mean. It has to be someone in the resistance who did it. The coincidence of this and
the deaths in the barracks…too much.”

  Her lips curve into a tired smile as she reaches out to adjust the palmpad, framing her face more squarely. “My boss, Morton, got the **** beat out of him yesterday. Long story short, he got into another argument with the head of the BeiTech med team and ended up with a broken nose, broken ribs and a fractured eye socket. I told him, Kades, I ****ing told him. I said, BeiTech are the ones with the guns around here. BeiTech giveth, and BeiTech taketh away. Right now they’re letting us use the facilities to treat our people, as long as we help their medical team with theirs. But they can take away our access anytime they like, which is exactly the damn point they’re making locking him up, and still he doesn’t…”

  She trails off, scrunching up her face, then letting her expression slacken.

  “Let’s just say,” she continues, quieter, “that I’m glad I didn’t let him in on any of the resistance channels. We’ve got enough problems with our loose cannon already. Then again, once BT have enough hermium to jump the Magellan out of here, we’ll be dead anyway, and Morton’s ribs will be the least of his problems.”

  She rests her head against the broom handle again, sighs.

  “What’s it like to be dead, Kady?”

  There’s a tired smile for the question, and a pause as she leans past the palmpad to retrieve a water bottle. “I mean, I assume you’re dead. I heard you made it onto one of the ships, but one of them got blown up right overhead, and the others had that huge BeiTech dreadnought after them, so it seems likely someone blew you to pieces already. But I like to imagine you’re alive, sitting on the couch in my living room, all pink hair and boots on my coffee table, messaging Ezra and *****ing to me about your parents, and…”

  Her lips press together so hard they thin, turn pale, and still that doesn’t hide the tremor. Her ponytail falls forward over her shoulder as her head drops, hands coming up to her face for nearly a minute. From outside the closet there’s the muffled noise of a loudspeaker, but she ignores it.

  Her eyes are bright when she looks up. “Anyway. I heard you made it onto one of the shuttles. So you’re Schrödinger’s Kady right now. That was this weird old Terran experiment where you put a cat in a box, and since you couldn’t actually know if the cat was dead or alive from that point on, the cat was considered simultaneously both alive and dead…and presumably ****ed off about being in a box. So right now I choose to believe you’re alive. I—”

  There’s another noise, this one above her. It’s a softer scrape, and where she ignored the loudspeaker, now she freezes, looking up.

  “Katya, what are you doing up there?” she finally whispers.

  “Asha, I’m hungry,” a second whisper comes. Younger. Much younger.

  Grant digs around in the pocket of her scrubs to produce a snack bar. She reaches toward the ceiling, and when she sits again, her hand is empty.

  “I’ll find some more for you tonight, I promise, baby girl,” she whispers. “Keep out of sight, you got it? Quiet as a mouse.”

  “The cleverest mouse.”

  “And the cleverest mouse never gets caught, does she?”

  “She’s way too clever,” is the whispered reply from the invisible child, mumbled around a mouthful of snack bar. Then, with a scrape, she withdraws.

  Grant stares at her own reflection in the screen, features slackening into exhaustion now she’s alone. Then she shakes her head, quick and sure, and tugs her scrubs straight as if she’s donning armor.

  Reaching forward, she switches off the camera.

  This is a transcript of ATLAS-cam footage and video taken from the Kerenza colony hospital server. The quality of the hospital cams is ****. The audio sounds like it was recorded in a toilet. I cannot work under these conditions. Waaaaa.

  The ride to the hospital is taken mostly in silence. Specialist Lindstrom and Sergeant Oshiro bundle themselves into the back of an Armored Personnel Carrier, along with the dead bodies of thirteen BeiTech soldiers and spanner monkeys. Aside from Oshiro notifying the hospital that they’re inbound, neither she or Lindstrom speaks much. Some of the corpses are still smoking—there weren’t enough body bags for them all. The stink in the APC must be ungodly, but the pair are sealed inside their ATLAS armor, so they’re spared the smell of freshly barbecued pounder.

  “Sorry about your friends,” Lindstrom finally says.

  Oshiro glances at the lumps of cooling meat that used to be her squaddies.

  “Shut up, Cherry,” she sighs.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No, Cherry, I want you to shut up.”

  A few minutes pass, no sound except for the sound of tires crunching on snow.

  “Oshiro?”

  “Jesus, what?”

  “Why are we taking corpses to a hospital?”

  The woman sighs again, the sound rasping through her suit’s vox unit.

  “Morgue facilities,” she says at last. “All BeiTech personnel killed in the line of duty need to be autopsied before transport to the Churchill. The admiral’s a stickler for procedure. This place had an experimental bioweapon dropped on it in January, remember? Sūn doesn’t want trace components getting aboard the fleet. Can you imagine what it might do if it got released inside a spaceship?”

  Unaware of what BeiTech’s bioweapon did evolve into when given a few months to mutate inside a floating metal can in space, Lindstrom simply shrugs. “I don’t get it. It’s not like we don’t know how they died.”

  “We don’t make the rules. We follow them. They should’ve taught you that in basic.”

  “I’m Science Division. They teach us to look at the world analytically. Search for more efficient ways of doing things. You know. To think and stuff.”

  “Did they teach you how to shut up? Because this’ll be the third time I tell you to do it.”

  The kid sighs, doesn’t say another word. The APC trundles over frozen roads, thumping into shrapnel potholes made by seven-month-old missile strikes. It’s another ten minutes before they pull to a halt—the hospital is all the way across town from the airfield. The bodies have stopped smoking by then.

  As they step out into the freezing air, we get our first look at what’s left of the Kerenza colony. The place was basically a big country town, built to accommodate about eighteen thousand people. Miners and engineers, their families, and all the folks needed to run the facilities that sprang up around the WUC’s illegal hermium op. Schools and shops. Fuel stations and liquor stores. Warehouses and apartment blocks and cineplexes, oh my.

  Now the place is a ghost town. Everything covered in snow. Freezing winds whipping through shattered buildings, the collapsed ruins of the spaceport. Three gaping cracks run along the glacial shelf, cutting through the center of town. The only people in sight are BeiTech troopers or colonists on special duty. The next shift of miners is being shuttled to work in a motley convoy of civilian vehicles, flanked by APCs—BeiTech missiles collapsed the subway system during the initial invasion, so roads are the only way to get to the hermium mine. The facility is just a blurred speck on the horizon. A small city of processing towers and pipes and concrete, a good twenty kilometers out of town.

  It’s at minimum safe distance in case the **** hits the fan. As the near interdimensional disaster aboard Heimdall should’ve taught you, when you’re dealing with exotic ultra-heavy elements and things go bad, they go bad all the way.

  Four BeiTech soldiers with VK burst rifles are waiting in the hospital parking bay, along with two colonists in orderly uniforms. Shivering in the chill, the civis begin unloading the bodies onto waiting gurneys. Lindstrom moves to help a sad-looking woman with graying hair lift the biggest corpse.

  “Cherry, what are you doing?” Oshiro asks.

  “Um, helping with the bodies?”

  “Um, is that your ****ing job
?”

  “No, but—”

  “Lieutenant Christie ordered you to fix the hospital enviro regulator, did he not?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Soooo, what usually happens next?” Oshiro snaps her fingers a few times. “Dammit, I should remember this one. Help me out, Specialist…”

  “…I fix the hospital enviro regulator.”

  “See, there you go. And here I was thinking all that time you spent in basic learning to ‘think and stuff’ would’ve been better spent with a skinvid and a gym sock.”

  “Jesus…”

  The sergeant tilts her head in the hospital’s direction.

  “Get the **** inside before I freeze my Britney off.”

  With an apologetic shrug, Lindstrom slings his satchel of tools onto his shoulder and leaves the civis to it. The orderlies keep loading the corpses under the watchful eyes of the four other BeiTech goons. The knowledge that the bodies are all wearing BT uniforms doesn’t seem like it’s lost on anyone.

  Inside, the hospital looks like it’s seen better days. Once-white walls are now scuffed gray, the windows are cracked and the lighting is flickering intermittently. The place is medium-sized, maybe fifty beds in total.

  Oshiro strides to the reception counter, removes her helmet with a whoosh of escaping air. A sharp black bob falls about sharper cheeks, dark eyes and unpainted lips. Lindstrom’s ridiculous quiff has been squashed flat beneath his headgear, but as he removes his helmet, it somehow springs back to attention in defiance of all laws of physics.

  “Where is everyone?” he asks.

  There’s not a soul in sight. Raised voices can be heard up the corridor, and a small blue globe is flashing above the reception area. As if in response to Lindstrom’s query, a female voice spills across the hospital PA.

  “Dr. Sarah Wiesner, report to Room Twenty-Four. Dr. Wiesner, Twenty-Four.”

  “What’s going on?” Lindstrom asks.

  “Code blue.” Oshiro points to the flashing globe. “Someone’s dying.”

  The sergeant peers down the corridor, catches sight of a disheveled nurse dashing across the hall. Glancing at Lindstrom, she holds up one armored finger.