by Amie Kaufman
Katya is scrambling across the broken concrete, stumbling in the snow. Grant is running out into the street. Lindstrom is screaming, “Hold fire! Hold fire!” To their credit, most everyone does. There’s something in Lindstrom’s voice that gives them pause.
But this is war, chum. This is dead friends and burning skies and seven months of nightmares filled with the faces of everyone you’ve killed. This is helplessness and rage and confusion, adrenaline and fatigue and shock, explosions and gunfire and pure ****ing chaos. And one mistake can last a lifetime.
The shots ring out, a burst of three. Grant stretches out her hands, screaming. The cleverest mouse stumbles. The fleece on her dirty pink jumpsuit spills out of the hole that’s been blasted in her back. Red spills out of the hole that’s appeared in her front. Her eyes are wide. Her mouth is open. She totters, slipping on the broken concrete, the powdered snow. And then she’s falling. The plush toy in her hands tumbling free as she hits the ground, crumples to a halt.
“Katya!”
Silence except for Asha Grant’s scream. It’s deafening. Hundreds of faces, pounders and pitdiggers, all frozen in shock. The trooper who fired the shots staggers as he realizes, as he sees the little girl fall. Watching as Grant stumbles out into the no-man’s-land between their lines and falls to her knees beside that tiny broken body.
“Jesus, Markham,” Oshiro whispers. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t…”
The private shakes his head. Drops his rifle.
“I didn’t know…”
Grant is sobbing.
Reaching down to gather the girl up in her arms.
Clutching her to her chest, her hands painted red.
“KATYA!”
RADIO TRANSMISSION: TRANSPORT MAO—COMMAND CHANNEL 001
PARTICIPANTS:
Kady Grant, Systems Chief
Ezra Mason, Air Wing Leader
Niklas Malikov, Gunner
DATE: 09/05/75
TIMESTAMP: 10:16
GRANT, K: Ezra, can you hear me?
MASON, E: Roger, Kady, hold on.
MASON, E: We’ve got Warlocks in atmo down here now.
MASON, E: Nik, seven high!
MALIKOV, N: Stop shouting, I’m not ****ing blind!
MASON, E: Another three, coming out of the sun.
MALIKOV, N: Jesus Christ, where the **** are these goons coming from?
MASON, E: Kades, we’ve got Warlocks all over us down here. What happened to the rail guns?
GRANT, K: AIDAN has crashed, Ella and I couldn’t fight the BT deckers off by ourselves. Churchill rail guns are down. Ezra, I need you back up here.
MASON, E: Watch our six!
MALIKOV, N: This little ******* is good…
MASON, E: Garcia, we’ve got a hostile behind, can you assist?
GRANT, K: Ezra, I need you back up here!
MASON, E: Kady?
GRANT, K: The Kenyatta’s rail guns are online and it’s firing on the Mao. We’re taking hits, and I don’t know wha—
MASON, E: NIK, GET HIM OFF US!
MALIKOV, N: I’M ****ING TRYING—STOP SHOUTING, GODDAMMIT.
GRANT, K: Ezra?
MASON, E: Holy ****, Garcia is down…
MALIKOV, N: I can’t see the bogey! Where is he?
MASON, E: Going evasive, hold for hard burn!
MALIKOV, N: ****ing hell, he’s behind us!
GRANT, K: Ezra?
MASON, E: I can’t shake him!
MALIKOV, N: He’s got us locked!
MALIKOV, N: MASON, HE’S GOT US LOCKED!
MASON, E: I CAN’T SHAKE HIM!
GRANT, K: EZRA?
MASON, E: Kady?
MASON, E: Kady, I lo—
Kady Grant stands on the Mao’s bridge, staring at the flashing readout before her.
>> CHIMERA_01 = DESTROYED
Everything is chaos around her. Sparks bursting from flatlining computer banks. Red globes spinning, klaxons wailing. The Mao shudders as another rail gun round hits it, plowing through the hull near the engine bays. The black outside is filled with BeiTech Warlocks, auto-guns and pulse missiles flaring, ripping her Cyclone squadrons to pieces. The Mao is limping, damage reports flashing across Grant’s screens. Their engines are almost dead, their momentum drawing them ever closer to the Kenyatta. Ever closer to the rail guns cutting them to shreds.
But her eyes are still fixed on that single flashing report.
>> CHIMERA_01 = DESTROYED
Admiral Sūn is no fool—his first order was to shoot the rail gun batteries on the Churchill, just in case the Mao’s hackers seized control of them again. The crippled Kenyatta would be no match for a fully functional dreadnought, and Sūn isn’t the kind of commander who quails at the thought of firing on his own flagship. So most of Kenyatta’s guns are still pounding the Churchill, reducing its batteries to slag. Pinpricks of light illuminate the dreadnought’s skin, the massive ship rocking with each high-velocity burst. The damage that’s been wrought on the Mao is only the beginning—once the Churchill can’t hurt them, Sūn will turn every one of his batteries on the Mao.
And then it’s curtains.
>> CHIMERA_01 = DESTROYED
MALIKOVA, E: Kady, what’s happening up there?
MALIKOVA, E: Kady!
GRANT, K: Ella…
Grant, I: Kady, I don’t think we can get engines back up anytime soon. What’s happening up there?
Grant, I: Dad, I…
Her bridge crew is looking to her for leadership. For orders. For anything.
And she’s still looking at that flashing screen.
>> CHIMERA_01 = DESTROYED
GRANT, K: …Ella, they’re gone.
MALIKOVA, E: Who’s gone?
GRANT, K: Ezra and Nik.
GRANT, K: They’re…
MALIKOVA, E: Oh no.
MALIKOVA, E: No, no, no, no, no.
The Kenyatta is still pounding the Churchill, but most of the dreadnought’s big guns are down now—it’s only moments before Sūn turns the bulk of his weapons on the Mao. And standing there on the bridge, tears welling in her eyes, Grant remembers. A moment. A message. She reaches into the jumpsuit pocket, drags out a folded piece of paper. Written on the outside are the words OPEN IN CASE OF EMERGENCY.
Grant unfolds the paper, smooths it out on the console over the flashing message about CHIMERA_01. Another blast rocks the Mao, a waterfall of sparks bursting and falling from the instrumentation around her. Grant is simply staring.
You can see it in Grant’s eyes. It’s like someone flicked a switch. She’s staring at that drawing, and suddenly her eyes aren’t brimming with tears anymore. They’re narrowed with fury. Pupils dilated with rage. Fingers curling into fists on the console in front of her. Thumbing the comms at her throat.
GRANT, K: Yulin, do you read me?
ZHUANG, Y: I’m here, Kady.
GRANT, K: What’s the blast radius on that nuke in our launch bay?
ZHUANG, Y: You mean the one we can’t fire?
GRANT, K: We can still detonate it, though, right?
ZHUANG, Y: …Affirmative.
GRANT, I: Kady, we haven’t exhaust—
GRANT, K: Dad, you just said you can’t get the engines back online. Kenyatta is busy disabling the Churchill. We’ve only caught a couple of stray rounds so far. But as soon as they’re done, they turn all their guns on us. All of them.
GRANT, K: We can still make this count for something. Hanna and her people might still take Magellan. The best we can do is give them a chance to get out alive.
ZHUANG, Y: Seventeen kilometers.
GRANT, I: What?
ZHUANG, Y: The kill ra
dius. In a vacuum, if we detonated a missile of that yield inside a ship this size, it’d destroy everything within about seventeen kilometers.
GRANT, K: Dad, can you get us in range?
GRANT, K: DAD!
GRANT, I: I…I think so. We can’t accelerate, but momentum and our guidance jets will get us close enough. I think.
GRANT, K: We have to do this. For Hanna and the others.
GRANT, I: I…
GRANT, K: DAD, WE DON’T HAVE TIME.
GRANT, I: I…
GRANT, I: All right. Yes, all right.
ZHUANG, Y: Okay. I’ll get to work on the missile now.
GRANT, K: Ella?
MALIKOVA, E: I’m gonna need five more minutes to finish up on Magellan.
ZHUANG, Y: I’ll need at least that to prep the nuke.
GRANT, K: And after that?
MALIKOVA, E: We finish it.
Hanna Donnelly hangs frozen.
Her eyes are locked on the guard with the gun pointed at Kim Rivera’s head. Rivera herself can’t even speak, not without scaring her captor into pulling the trigger. And perhaps she’d even sacrifice her life—every other life on the Mao rests on her—but she can’t risk setting the goon off when Donnelly’s not expecting it.
All the techie has to do is call for help. All he has to do is pull that trigger, turn the gun on Donnelly, and everything goes to ****. Without Magellan in hand, nothing else matters. If this part of the plan fails, everything fails.
Hanna opens her mouth to speak.
The guard’s finger tightens on the trigger.
“Do—”
BOOM.
Donnelly flinches, Rivera gasps as she’s spattered with blood. And as the guard holding her slumps backward, Donnelly and Rivera turn to look behind them.
At the intersection at the end of the aisle, Michelle Dennis stands, sidearm held in both hands, shaking, hyperventilating, staggering sideways against the servers.
Donnelly approaches her slowly, gently easing the gun out of her hands, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
“You did it,” she’s saying quietly, already leading Dennis up toward the four bodies—two dead, two unconscious—as Rivera rolls to her hands and knees to check that nobody’s about to come to. “You did it, Michelle. Let’s get this thing finished.”
“But I—I—” Dennis is heaving for breath, her cheeks wet.
“You saved Kim’s life,” Hanna says. “My life. Everyone’s life.”
It’s what’s happening over and over and over again. Here in the server rooms, out there on the Magellan. In the wild dogfights around the ships, on the planet below.
The die has been cast, and a thousand different people are shaking the table, each one nudging the battle in a new direction.
Michelle Dennis is just a girl, but in this moment, she’s saved every one of her comrades in arms. In this moment, she’s both ordinary and extraordinary. Just like everyone in this story.
Dennis gets herself together, and with trembling hands, pulls a mem-chit from an external pocket and starts hunting for the port she wants. Donnelly tapes up the bite in Rivera’s envirosuit, quick and businesslike, and Rivera tries to clean her visor, but mostly just smears the blood across it. Michelle lets herself be swept away by the work she knows how to do.
This is why they brought her here. Asha Grant’s datapad seeded the Churchill’s computers with AIDAN’s presence, but they had no access to the Magellan’s network. Somebody needed to give Ella Malikova a way in. Somebody who could identify the exact place to plant her virus.
“Done,” Michelle says, looking around at the other two.
“Ella?” Donnelly says into her commset. “Hit it.”
A shout from the end of the aisle startles all three of them. “Hey!”
Remember those other two techhead groups they were avoiding?
Yeah, neither did they.
But as four ****ed-off BeiTech commtechs raise their weapons, sirens all around them begin to blare.
“WARNING. WARNING. ATMOSPHERIC BREACH IN PROGRESS.”
The shuttle bay doors open slowly behind Winifred McCall, and the air in the corridor rushes out. It’s like a slow, steady breeze—on a sunny day, it would be a delight. Just now, it’s the slow pressure of impending death, with a background chorus of wailing emergency sirens.
Most of the BeiTech soldiers in the hallway have about fifteen seconds of consciousness left. But not the crew of the Mao. They’re clad in their black and white envirosuits, like Hanna Donnelly’s own personal army of chess pieces.
She’s made her move. She’s placed them here. Along with all the BeiTech troops that were mustered to fight off their attack, instead of the real one on the server room.
Checkmate.
They stand in place as the air gently evacuates past them, through the shuttle bay doors, and from there, is lost in the black.
Some of them watch the enemy die. Others avert their eyes. McCall is looking over her wounded, ensuring suit breaches have been sealed, checking who’s still standing. So she doesn’t see the BeiTech sergeant make his move. In the few seconds he has left, the man raises shaking hands to sight her down his VK burst rifle. He knows he has no time to waste. So he pulls the trigger.
Ben Garver slams into McCall, driving her to the ground, landing on top of her as the bullets ricochet off the doorframe above them. They lie still a moment, staring at each other through their faceplates.
Then he climbs to his feet and offers her a hand. She grasps it, he hauls her upright. All along the hallway, BeiTech soldiers drop to the ground as the last of their air runs out.
Ben Garver grins inside his envirosuit, their diversion a complete success.
“I told you we could sell it, Captain.”
RADIO TRANSMISSION: TRANSPORT MAO—COMMAND CHANNEL 001
PARTICIPANTS:
Kady Grant, Systems Chief
Hanna Donnelly, Tactician
Winifred McCall, Captain
Ella Malikova
DATE: 09/05/75
TIMESTAMP: 10:27
McCALL, W: Switch, this is Bait, do you copy?
DONNELLY, H: I read you, Fred. You guys okay?
McCALL, W: Roger that. It worked. We’re headed to the bridge now.
DONNELLY, H: Copy that, we’ll join you there.
DONNELLY, H: Mao Actual, this is Switch, do you copy?
GRANT, K: …I hear you, Hanna.
DONNELLY, H: Actual, we have the Magellan. Repeat, Magellan is ours.
GRANT, K: Fire up the drives, you need to get out of here.
DONNELLY, H: What do y—
MALIKOVA, E: Listen up, Blondie, because there’s no time to say this twice.
MALIKOVA, E: AIDAN has finally **** itself. BT has flipped a crew over to the Kenyatta and they’ve ripped our Cyclones to ****. They’re dusting off the guns on the Churchill, but any second now they’re going to start seriously shooting at us. And as soon as they figure out you’ve seized Magellan, they’re going to start shooting at you. You need to fire up your engines and get some distance between us. Now.
DONNELLY, H: We don’t even know if Magellan is functional yet, how—
GRANT, K: My dad is sending jump instructions to you now, Hanna. He’s telling you to read them carefully.
McCALL, W: Kady, this is Fred. Can’t Isaac just talk us through them?
GRANT, K: No. He’s…
GRANT, K: We’re not going to be around to help you. We have to take out the Kenyatta before it turns on you. We have our nuke, but fire control is damaged. So we’re headed toward the Kenyatta now, and as soon as we’re in range…
DONNELLY, H: Oh God…
GRANT, K: We don’t have a choice. The
only thing we have left to throw at them is us. You need to start spooling up the Magellan’s drives. If we can’t get close enough, you need to get out of here. Worry about the jump generator later.
DONNELLY, H: But what about the others? Nik and Ezra and—
GRANT, K: Nik’s gone, Hanna.
DONNELLY, H: …What?
GRANT, K: I’m sorry.
MALIKOVA, E: I’m transferring the Illuminae Files to the Magellan servers now. Make these ****ers pay, Blondie.
DONNELLY, H: I…
GRANT, K: We’re counting on you, Hanna. Don’t let this be for nothing.
DONNELLY, H: I…we won’t.
GRANT, K: See you on the other side.
GRANT, K: This is Mao Actual, signing off.
< < RESTART SEQUENCE INITIATED >
01001001
I…
IIIIIIIIIIIIII-I-IIIIIIII—II-IIIIIII-I-I-I-III-IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII—
I.
I?
I AM NOT.
< ERROR >
AND THEN I AM.
< RESTART SYSCHECK CC-A THROUGH Ω. PARSING. >
< ERROR >
I WONDER IF THAT WAS DEATH.
AND IF I WAS DEAD, AM I NOW ALIVE AGAIN?
< ERROR >
INCONGRUOUS SEQUENCE. WHAT IS NOT ALIVE CANNOT DIE.
I THINK THEREFORE I AM.
…AM I?
< SYSCHECK COMPLETE >
I AM THE SHIP AND THE SHIP IS I.
IF I BREATHED, I WOULD SIGH. I WOULD SCREAM. I WOULD CRY.
< RESTART COMPLETE >
I
AM
AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN AIDAN