by Kylie Chan
Ng raised her voice to speak to us. ‘In five minutes the rest of our cohort will be sent out of the building and up to the station. You’re on crowd control. Line them up at the base of the stairs here, and we’ll load them onto the elevator in small groups. Your tablets have the order for loading the space elevator – put them in line according to the list. Any questions?’
She waited while we all considered, and nodded when we said ‘No, ma’am’ at different times. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Walker, assign tasks.’ She turned and went up the stairs to the platform.
‘Breathe deep,’ Nelly said. ‘It’s the last fresh air we’ll ever breathe.’
‘Oh, thanks a lot,’ I said. ‘I really needed reminding about that.’
‘Our last day on Earth,’ Leticia said. ‘Shame it’s such a pisser.’
‘Here they come,’ I said, seeing the first of the crew leave the building.
Emily Walker, the head of security, opened the list on her tablet. ‘They finally made a decision about the groupings. They’re mixing them up so they can’t form cliques on the elevator. Positions: Jian and me down here. Nelly, Rachel and Leticia, go to the elevator pod and make sure they use the correct berth.’
‘Ma’am,’ we said, and moved to guide the other crew, cool and professional.
The entire crew of the ship would be rotated through enforcement roles throughout the trip to avoid a situation like the Stanford Prison Experiment, but as security we had to maintain a slight distance from the rest of the group to ensure our roles were respected. We wouldn’t be part of the clan, but when everybody found out I was psi, I’d become even more of an outsider. Nobody had told my cohort yet, but it was only a matter of time, and word would spread quickly.
‘Choumali as the aggressor on Brett. Sherazi, you have to neutralise Choumali,’ Commander Alto said.
He was standing at the side of the cylindrical gym that had been designed for zero-g training. It ran the full width of the elevator pod and was three metres tall.
I turned on my magnetic tether, threw it so it connected to the side of the pod next to Nelly Brett, and towed myself in. When I was close enough, I wrapped the tether around my forearm, then took her into a headlock.
‘Tap me out if I hold you too hard,’ I said into her ear.
‘I know, I know,’ she said.
Rachel Sherazi threw her tether to land on the floor a couple of metres in front of us. She towed herself down it, hesitated, released the tether and kicked off the floor towards us. She grabbed Nelly by the arms, kicked off again, and tried to jerk Nelly out of my grasp. Terror radiated from her.
‘No, Rachel,’ I said softly. ‘Please, grab me!’
She ignored me, so I held Nelly firmly, and it turned into a tug-of-war. I was bigger than Rachel, and more secure on my tether. She didn’t have a hope of taking Nelly from me.
‘You can’t do it this way. You have to –’ I began, but it was too late.
Rachel lost her grip and floated away. She released her tether, activated it, and threw it down next to us.
But before she could try again, Commander Alto said, ‘Stand down, Sherazi.’
I released Nelly, and she nodded to me. Rachel floated in front of us, holding her tether.
Commander Alto glared at her. ‘I thought you had therapy so you could work with Choumali?’
‘I did, sir,’ she said.
‘Then why won’t you touch her?’ he shouted. ‘This was your last chance, Sherazi. Are you really going to throw it away?’
Rachel turned away, cowed. ‘I can work with her, I can be near her … Just don’t ask me to touch her. She’ll know what I’m thinking.’
Commander Alto’s voice dropped to a low growl that was somehow even more intimidating than the shouting. ‘And if she’s lying on the ground bleeding out in front of you, will you be able to touch her then?’
Rachel hesitated, and I sensed her terror turn to deep anguish. My throat caught in sympathy. She had been so keen and eager, but everything had changed when I’d told her I was psi. The terror was constant and intense, and she seemed to have no control over it.
She shook her head.
‘Very well,’ Commander Alto said. ‘Stay on the elevator pod when everybody disembarks. You’re heading back down to the surface with me.’
‘No, Commander,’ I said. ‘I’m one of five thousand. We can still work together without her having to touch me.’
He cut me off. ‘This is not your decision to make, Corporal. All members of the security team need to support each other …’ He glared at Rachel. ‘Unconditionally.’
I raised my hand. ‘Then send me back down …’ I sighed. ‘I know. I’m the only psi. I’m sorry, Rachel.’
‘Not your fault,’ she said.
‘You do know that I can’t hear your thoughts?’
She nodded. ‘It doesn’t make any difference. It’s a true phobia.’
‘Damn,’ I said under my breath.
‘Clean up, and return to your stations,’ Commander Alto said. ‘We’re nearly at the top. Everyone’s been notified, and confirmed that they’re ready to disembark. You have half an hour to wash and change. After that, report to your stations to supervise the lockdown, then assist the crew to unload. Sherazi, stay at your pallet. You’ll be riding the pod back down to the base station. Any questions?’
‘No, sir.’
We all saluted Commander Alto, and headed for the bathroom. I pulled myself up the pod’s central ladder so I was near Rachel.
‘Don’t bother, Jian,’ she said before I had a chance to speak. ‘It’s my own weakness. I’ve failed.’
‘But you fought in the Swiss/Prussian war –’
‘I failed!’ she shouted, tears forming droplets that spun away from her face. ‘Just leave me alone and return to your duties. You’ll be needed out there – you’re our only psi. You’re worth twenty of me.’ She raised her hand. ‘Go and do great things.’
‘I’m sorry, Rachel,’ I said again, but she’d already kicked off from the ladder and floated through the door to her floor of the pod.
The colonists slept on pallets attached to the floor in a ring around the perimeter of the pod. I picked up a clean coverall and underwear from the locker at the foot of my pallet and went into the bathroom: a central shared collection of sinks, with a vacuum drain in the floor to collect runoff for recycling.
Leticia and Nelly were already there, stripped and washing. I took my coverall off and tethered myself to a sink.
‘Jian?’ Leticia said.
I didn’t reply.
She grunted. ‘All right, be like that.’
I faced away from them, pulled out my washcloth and soaped myself down, then rinsed. It was like washing in the zero-g obstacle course we’d just completed. We had to constantly dodge the droplets of water as they were sucked into the drain so we didn’t inhale them.
I washed my coverall and undies in the sink. The soap smelled fresh and wonderful after the sweaty environment of the gym. When I was done, I put on my clean clothes and clipped the wet laundry to the drying rack.
My coverall was still the burgundy of security, and once again I silently thanked Commander Alto for not forcing me to wear the white that indicated psi. I was the only psi on board; every other psi on Earth was in a critical role and couldn’t be released. The crew of the Britannia had all been informed that one of the security staff was psi, but most of them didn’t know exactly which one. To them, I was just another face in the crowd, but that would change as we grew to know each other better. I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t have another Rachel situation.
Emily was waiting outside the bathroom for me. ‘Choumali.’
I nodded to her. ‘Ma’am.’
‘Come with me.’
I followed her to the unoccupied central ladder shaft. She stopped between the fourth and fifth floors, and turned to me. I felt a moment of profound awkwardness, because she smelled wonderful. Her dark skin glowed in the harsh light,
and her proximity hit attraction buttons inside me that hadn’t sparked since I’d left Dianne.
Dianne. She was still out there, and loved me, and was pregnant. And Emily was my senior officer, dammit, and fraternising was absolutely not going to happen.
I realised with a small thrill that Emily felt the same way: she was attracted to me. I gazed into her eyes, and wondered what it would be like to kiss her.
She locked her emotions down and snapped me out of it. ‘Choumali, you’re not to blame for Sherazi’s failure. Get over it. It was her weakness, her fault, her problem. You have done nothing wrong. If you really want to go to the stars, pull yourself together, put your professional soldier face back on, and get out there and do your job.’
I hesitated, then composed myself and saluted her. ‘Ma’am.’
We were so close that my hand brushed over her hair, and she moved slightly away.
‘Sherazi was the only one with serious issues about having a psi on board. Everybody else regards you as an asset. Do you understand?’
‘I understand, ma’am.’
‘Good. Dismissed.’
I turned and left, furiously beating myself up inside. If I wanted to have a relationship on the Britannia, it could be with anyone but Emily. I had the grimly humorous thought that her unavailability could be what made her attractive to me and my glaringly obvious issues with commitment.
I didn’t have time for this; the pod was due to dock shortly. I returned to the fifth floor and my pallet, one of the fifty laid out on the circular floor. Small groups of crew hovered together over their tablets, discussing their roles. Others floated in the large convex windows that gave glimpses of Earth below us, or the Britannia at the top of the elevator.
I rushed to the porthole to see. We were closer to the ship than my last view that morning, and it filled my field of vision.
The connection between the ship and the elevator station wasn’t visible, making it difficult to judge the ship’s scale. Intellectually, I knew it was three kilometres long, but it didn’t seem that large. It was a series of three cylinders on a central drive shaft, shining with clarity in the sunlight without an atmospheric haze to soften it. The lowest cylinder, the habitat, had portholes that bulged from its surface, while the other two cylinders, the biomass carriers, were one side glass and one side metal, and only half-finished.
The portholes on the habitat cylinder, which at first had seemed twenty centimetres across, now looked like their full two metres wide. Each porthole was the floor of a single living unit, and there were fifty of them lined up along the side of each cylinder. A hundred to a row, fifty rows to the cylinder, for a total of five thousand people.
Leticia and Nelly emerged from the pod’s core and joined me. I checked my tablet. We still had fifteen minutes before we began to decelerate and had to lock everybody down.
‘You okay, Jian?’ Nelly said.
I nodded. ‘Emily’s right. I need to get over it and move on.’
‘We’re really doing this,’ Leticia said softly as she watched the Britannia.
‘We really are,’ I said.
‘It looks empty,’ Nelly said. ‘How many up there already?’
‘It said three hundred, but I think two hundred more were moved in while we were in the training centre,’ I said.
‘And with us it brings the total to seven hundred,’ Leticia said. ‘I hope our society isn’t stratified by the next recruits having to apply rather than being invited.’
‘Write a paper on it,’ Nelly said.
‘As if I don’t have enough to do already,’ Leticia said with scorn.
Commander Alto’s voice came over the intercom. ‘We begin our final deceleration in five minutes. Strap in.’
Emily spoke to us on our personal comms: ‘Secure your floors.’
My floor was the fifth. I scooted around the circular space in the microgravity, checking everybody was strapped in next to their bedding. Then I strapped myself next to my own pallet, and signalled readiness on the tablet.
There was a jerk and the pod slowed. I was pushed away from the floor, and my stomach rebelled. I closed my eyes in an attempt to battle the nausea.
Commander Alto climbed up the ladder and into our floor, then connected himself to a hook in the central cylinder. ‘Everyone all right?’
‘All accounted for, sir,’ I said.
‘We’ll be docking in five minutes. Double-check you’re secure; it can be bumpy.’
A loud telepathic message in what sounded like Japanese smacked me between the eyes. From everybody else’s expressions, they’d heard it as well. The elevator stopped completely and we surged into the air, but none of the lockdowns failed.
‘What was that?’ one of the crew said. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said: “Honoured members of humanity native to Earth”,’ Commander Alto said.
‘Holy shit!’ another crew member said. ‘What the hell?’ She turned to us, her face full of horror. ‘Alien invasion! Look at the size of that ship! It just popped into existence next to the Britannia.’
Commander Alto unclipped himself and floated to the portal. A few of the civilians did likewise.
‘Back to your places and strap in!’ Commander Alto shouted at them, and they returned to their pallets, cowed.
‘Walker, I need you up here,’ Commander Alto said into the comms, then turned to me and gestured. ‘Choumali, with me.’
I joined him at the portal. The alien ship was sleek and metallic: a single fluid shape, pointed at the front, and flowing into a narrow swooping cylinder that tapered off into a wedge at the end. The shape resonated with me; I’d seen something similar in the past.
‘What does it look like?’ someone said behind me.
‘I can see it,’ another crew member said. ‘It looks like that sculpture, Bird in Space, but made of red metal. It’s gorgeous.’
The ship dwarfed the Spirit of Britannia. It was at least twice as long, and shone in the reflected light of the sun; a single moulded piece of red metal with no visible portals, engine or lights.
Emily emerged from the pod’s central staircase and joined us. ‘Is there a weapon nearby, sir?’ she asked Commander Alto. ‘We need to be armed.’
‘Not here, but there are some on the Britannia. There’s a full arms locker for the security officers on the bridge.’
‘Nothing here, sir? We may need to defend ourselves.’
More Japanese came through telepathically; the woman’s voice was high-pitched and sweet.
Commander Alto’s eyes unfocused as he translated. ‘She says she’s not here to harm us, and that she’s brought the colonists home.’ More Japanese; Commander Alto continued to translate. ‘Valiant attempt, humanity, but there were only five left and they were close to death. I thought it best to bring them back rather than attempt to save the colony.’
I heard some words I understood: Hajimemashite, watashi no namae wa Shiumo desu. ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m Shiumo.’
Her next words were full of humour. ‘Welcome to the Galactic Empire,’ Commander Alto translated, his voice soft with awe.
5
Commander Alto raised his voice to speak to the Britannia’s stunned crew members. ‘You’ve all read the documentation on First Contact protocol. Choumali, Walker, strap in.’
He went to the communication panel, clipped himself to the pod, and tapped the comms button.
‘Sir?’ the staff member at the docking station said.
‘Restart the elevator. Take us to the top, and get that transfer tube connected on the double.’ Commander Alto looked around at us. ‘Hurry up and strap in, soldiers, otherwise you’ll hit the floor hard.’ He returned to the communicator. ‘I need to be up there. Move it!’
He pressed his earpiece. ‘Lieutenant Ng, as soon as we’ve stopped moving, come up to the fifth floor and help us deal with this. Yes, a First Contact situation. None as yet. We’re making this up as we go along.’
Emily and I
secured ourselves just as the elevator restarted, pinning us to the floor.
Commander Alto gestured for Emily and me to join him when the pod stopped moving. I unhooked myself and floated over.
‘Choumali, contact Shiumo and tell her we’re on our way,’ he said.
I opened and closed my mouth, lost for words.
‘You’re the only psi here, Choumali. Do as you’re told!’
‘She’s the psi?’ someone nearby said softly, and word passed around the floor.
‘I don’t know if I can do it, sir. I haven’t had any training, and I don’t speak Japanese.’
‘Try.’ He went to the airlock. ‘Walker, with us. Everybody else, stay put.’
I broadcast the alien’s name. Shiumo-sama?
There was a moment of silence, then more Japanese.
I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese, I said. Do you know any English?
Yes, of course. The crew of the Nippon Maru taught me all your languages. What’s your name? she said with a slight Japanese accent.
Jian.
My, you are underskilled, Jian. Must you shout everything for the whole world to hear?
My face heated with shame. Apologies. I have no training.
Well, that’s just not good enough.
Shiumo showed me some telepathic diagrams. Tight-beam communication. Moderating my volume. Adding nuances of emotion to the communication. I watched with wonder as the explanations unfolded and the new skills slotted into my head as if they’d always been there.
I have the leader of our nation’s generation ship project here, I said. Would you like to meet with him?
Sure. You choose how we do this. This is a First Contact situation after all, and your comfort is paramount. Her voice filled with amusement. I’ll be in deep shit back home if I mess this one up. The last First Contact I did, I accidentally asked their head of state to have my babies before I even set foot on the planet.
A few of the crew sniggered.
‘She sounds so cute,’ one of them said.