Final Days

by Gary Gibson

  She shook her head. ‘Couldn’t think straight up there. Whatever’s happening up there, it’s getting worse. Is it done yet?’

  He nodded briefly, leading her back towards the elevator that would take them back up into the Array. ‘It’s done. We’ve got thirty minutes to get ourselves through a gate. Whichever way you look at it, we’re going to be cutting it close.’

  Saul kept willing the elevator to move faster as it carried them back up. The strange noise penetrated the walls of the elevator car more clearly the higher they ascended, drilling into his thoughts. He glanced at Amy and saw she wasn’t having any easier a time of it.

  The entire concourse shook as they emerged, the air now so thick and fluid it almost felt like being underwater. That dreadful ululation seemed to vibrate right through the atoms in Saul’s body. He looked up at the twists of light that now crowded the concourse ceiling. Something about them made his eyes hurt, so that he couldn’t look at them for more than a second or two.

  ‘Thirty minutes won’t be enough time, will it?’ Amy yelled to him over the din. ‘Whatever’s driving those clouds is going to get through before that. No telling what might happen then.’

  Saul remembered something. ‘The HMX,’ he shouted.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Explosives,’ Saul yelled. ‘Those troopers Mitchell killed had an APC filled with HMX explosives. They were wiring the Florida gate so they could blow it up.’

  ‘Would that work?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it might delay the clouds, but that’s about it.’

  ‘Better than nothing,’ she yelled back.

  He nodded, and they made their way quickly over to the APC. Saul took the lead, but Amy struggled to keep up, so he put one arm around her waist and half carried her. She didn’t protest or try to push him away, which only showed how exhausted she was. In truth, he was running on little more than adrenalin himself.

  All they had to do was keep going just a little longer.

  ‘I’m getting a bit too old for this,’ panted Amy. ‘Seriously.’

  They now came to the barricades, where the bodies of Merrill and Dallas still lay alongside a crate filled with bricks of HMX. Amy picked one up and studied it for a moment.

  ‘Demolition charges,’ she said, glancing towards him, then slumped against one of the barricades, looking pale and ill. ‘By the looks of it, the detonators are already in place.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were some kind of demolitions expert?’

  ‘We used HMX when we were building biomes out on Newton. Good for excavating land real fast.’

  Something about the ululation made Saul’s skin itch like it was burning. ‘The question is, how were they going to set off the detonation?’

  ‘Remote trigger?’ she replied. ‘That’s my guess, anyway.’

  ‘You mean through their contacts?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘That way there’s too big a risk that somebody might hack your contacts and then trigger an explosion from a long way off. They’d have planned to use a dedicated device of some sort.’ She nodded towards Merrill’s butchered corpse. ‘Check him out. Maybe he’s got something on him.’

  Saul grimaced as he bent over Merrill’s body, pushing his hand inside pockets soaked with the dead man’s blood. When he found nothing, he moved over to Dallas, and soon found a slim device sporting several inlaid buttons.

  ‘That’s it,’ Amy said, as he showed it to her. ‘Same as what we used ourselves. Nothing like having a nice fat button to press when you’re blowing shit up.’

  ‘Then we can blow the HMX remotely, before we head through the Galileo gate? The starship gets there in a couple of months, and we’ll be able to survive until—’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ interrupted Amy. She stood up and glanced towards the APC parked nearby, with the rest of the crates of explosive still piled in the back. ‘That’s what they used to transport the HMX here, right? So how many of those bricks do you think they managed to place already?’

  Saul studied the APC, still mostly filled with unopened crates. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I reckon not that many.’

  Amy nodded. ‘That’s what I thought too. Looks like they barely got started before Mitchell killed them.’

  ‘Then there’s nothing we can do,’ Saul said grimly.

  Amy rubbed her mouth pensively. ‘No, I think we’ve got one other option.’ She glanced towards the escalators that led up to the departure area. ‘Is there any way to get that APC up to where the actual wormhole gate is?’

  ‘Why? What are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ she said, ‘that if someone could get all that HMX up there and close to the gate, it could do an awful lot of damage.’

  ‘No way,’ said Saul. ‘You’d never have enough time to get back out before it was too late.’

  ‘Whether or not I get out doesn’t really matter, Mr Dumont.’ She reached out a hand. ‘I’d appreciate it if you’d let me have the detonator device.’

  ‘Just look around you,’ he yelled. ‘I don’t know if the explosives would make any difference at all. They built the machinery maintaining the wormholes to sustain an awful lot of damage.’

  ‘You said yourself that we could at least slow it all down,’ she yelled back. The noise and the shimmering light were intensifying. ‘We’ve got less than twenty minutes, so there isn’t time to argue over this.’

  ‘You’ll kill yourself.’

  ‘Yeah, like I hadn’t figured that out. Go now,’ she said. ‘I can take care of this.’

  ‘No, wait, maybe I should—’

  ‘I don’t have time for this bullshit!’ she shouted, snatching the detonator from his grasp. She then picked up some of the bricks of HMX, clutching them close to her chest. ‘All my life I had Lester, and now he’s gone. You still have family on Galileo, right? Now tell me how the hell to get this APC up to that level.’

  ‘There’s a passageway running up behind the centre pair of escalators, over there,’ Saul pointed. ‘It leads to some cargo elevators big enough to take even the APC up.’

  ‘Fine.’ She nodded curtly. ‘Don’t say anything more now. No goodbyes or sentimental crap or anything like that, okay? Grab one of those other vehicles over by the courtyard and get yourself the hell through a gate already, will you?’

  Saul nodded wordlessly, then turned and ran.

  He pulled himself inside an empty APC, reversing it in a half-circle before taking one last glance back at Amy. He watched her get inside the one packed with HMX, and drive it away towards the tunnel accessing the service elevators.

  Saul turned away and gunned his own vehicle towards the main transport lane linking all the concourses. Warnings flashed at him as he pushed the vehicle to its limit, whipping the wheel around and accelerating hard. He figured he had at best fifteen minutes to make it all the way to the Galileo concourse, which lay at the farthest end of the Array; that left him barely enough time to get on board a shuttle-car that would transport him to the starship carrying the far end of the new wormhole gate, before the wormhole collapsed.

  If he was lucky, he might even manage it with a few minutes to spare.

  The constant noise and shimmering faded as he put distance between himself and the Florida gate, and soon it felt as if a heavy fog had lifted from his thoughts. He guided the APC through a series of concourses in turn, each as eerily silent as the last. Everywhere he noticed more abandoned APCs and barricades, and more corpses, but of civilians this time.

  A powerful roar surged along the lane far behind him. Saul glanced back, but a gentle curve to the route now made it impossible to see all the way back to the Florida concourse itself.

  It’s worked, he thought, his hands still clamped tightly around the wheel. He steered around a truck slanting across the lane ahead, and shot through another concourse, feeling the seconds tick away.

  As he passed through another concourse, and then another, it occurred to him
that he might very well be the last living person on the Moon, until he remembered that there was another Mitchell Stone somewhere out there, not so very far from the Array itself, even now beginning his decade-long slumber.

  Saul finally reached the last concourse, separated off from the rest of the Array complex by a tall temporary barrier that had stood in place ever since the original Galileo gate had been sabotaged. A single security entrance was set into the high barrier, and it was clearly far too narrow for his APC to squeeze through.

  He abandoned the vehicle and sprinted through the security door into the concourse beyond. It was as devoid of life as the rest, yet lacked the evidence of violent conflict such as he had observed in most of the others. There were small open trucks parked here and there of the type used by maintenance crews, along with evidence of recent preparations for the reopening of contact with Galileo. Before the growths had appeared, the news feeds had been full of speculation about the reception that might be expected from whoever turned out to be currently in charge of the colony, and whether the Coalition governments might attempt an invasion.

  A second great roaring sound set the ground beneath him shaking. Saul stumbled and then stared around him. That wasn’t the HMX, he thought wildly.

  He climbed a stairway to a platform raised several metres above the concourse, from where he could get a clear view through the windows. He glanced halfway along the curving length of the Lunar Array to where the Florida gate was located. Thick smoke, like ashes, billowed out across the lunar landscape from a rent in the wall. Light danced inside that smoke, like something alive.

  Saul backed away, dry-mouthed, realizing Amy’s sacrifice hadn’t been entirely in vain. But, then again, it didn’t look like it had done more than gain him a few minutes of a head-start.< />

  He turned to run back down the steps and across the concourse, fatigue already clouding his thoughts. He climbed inside a maintenance cart, then cursed as it began trundling towards the elevated departure area with not nearly enough speed. There he jumped off, throwing himself up on to a stationary escalator and stopping at the top just long enough to momentarily recover his breath.

  The ground beneath his feet was shaking, and the air further along the Array howling as it vented on to the lunar surface. A wind picked up, growing stronger within seconds, until Saul was forced to claw his way forward, past abandoned security cordons, and towards the waiting shuttle-cars.

  He pulled himself into the first one he came to and collapsed on to a seat, his lungs screaming with pain as the doors slid shut. The shuttle-car jerked slightly, then began to slowly move towards the gate’s entrance.

  Saul pulled himself upright and staggered to the front of the vehicle, watching the heavy steel doors slide apart at the car’s approach. Beyond lay a wide tunnel ringed with steel and dense clumps of instrumentation.

  Almost there.

  He touched the curving glass of the car’s window and felt it vibrate – the tremors increasing and decreasing in a way that reminded him of the throbbing that had filled the Florida concourse.

  A second set of doors slid open, and the shuttle-car glided inside the body of a starship light-years across the galaxy. His weary muscles protested as Saul came under the influence of the ship’s deceleration-induced gravity.

  As his UP connected with the shipboard network, he squeezed through the shuttle’s doors almost before they’d had a chance to open fully. The network then surrounded him with frantically blinking alerts to warn of terminal wormhole failure.

  Only seconds left, he realized with desperate alarm. Really, he had no time left at all.

  Saul hurtled out of the shuttle bay just as the ship shook with such terrifying violence that he was thrown to the floor of the service corridor beyond. He hooked his fingers through the black-painted metal grid comprising the floor, and held on tight. Meanwhile the ship was struggling to correct the spin resulting from the sudden collapse of the wormhole, its emergency thrusters firing as the one tenuous thread linking it back to Copernicus vanished in a blaze of dissipating exotic particles.

  Panting furiously, Saul crouched in that same spot for what felt like a very long time, while the ship continued to shudder all around him. Slowly, one by one, most of the alerts faded away. He let himself close his eyes, just for a moment . . .

  He woke up again some indeterminate amount of time later, his fingers still hooked through the gaps in the metal grid. Saul stood up uneasily, wincing at the sharp pain in his muscles.

  After that, he wandered through the silent starship until he found the emergency bay, kitted out with freeze-ed food supplies and tanks of water, enough to keep him alive for a long time if need be. He drank until he’d slaked a raging thirst, then wandered through the ship until he found an observation bay, its overhead display revealing a sprinkling of stars.

  One star in particular was far brighter than all the rest. He collapsed on to a couch and stared up at it. 94 Aquarii, more than a hundred light-years from Earth – home to the Galileo colony.

  Saul stared up at it for a long, long time, knowing that the rest of his life lay somewhere in that single bright point of light.

  Over, he thought, in the last moments before consciousness deserted him and he passed out once more.

  It was over.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Galileo Colony, 94 Aquarii System, Four Months Later

  ‘This way, please.’

  Erkrnwald, polite as ever, indicated a series of steps, cut into the cliff face, which descended towards a shoreline of pale-grey sand far below.

  Saul glanced back at the transport and saw it reverse away from the cliff edge, before turning and heading back, presumably, in search of the nearest charging port. Further inland, he could see rows of agricultural buildings stretching into the distance, each surrounded by fields of experimental crops specially designed for the Galilean soil and atmosphere.

  He turned back to Erkrnwald and nodded, the young political officer’s expression politely bland as he placed one hand on the railing that guarded the steps down. White-capped waves thick with yellowish-blue algae crashed constantly against the shore, beyond which dozens of drilling platforms were visible, stretching out to the horizon. A motorized launch waited for them below, rising and dipping with the tide.

  ‘Is there a reason we couldn’t just fly out there?’ he asked.

  ‘Not at this time of year.’ Erkrnwald shook his head. ‘We’re coming up to drift-spore season, so too much risk of getting our engines clogged.’

  Saul nodded and they began to descend the steps. The air away from town smelled different, lacking that particular odour all of Galileo’s larger settlements seemed to share. It wasn’t quite the smell of the sea back home on Earth, but close enough. He tasted salt on his lips as the wind carried a thin spray of sea water up towards the cliff top.

  A few dozen metres out from the shore, a submarine whale’s single eye pushed up from the water on its rubbery stalk, glancing briefly around in a typically comical fashion before once more sliding beneath the waves.

  The launch was a one-piece fab job, low and sleek, its lines distinctly organic. Anor man, older than Erkrnwald, waited on the shore close by.

  ‘I’m Representative Kayes,’ he said, stepping forward to greet them. He glanced at Erkrnwald the same way Saul had seen most people here do, with a mixture of cautious respect and unease. ‘And you must be Mr Dumont,’ he said, addressing Saul. ‘I’ve been following you on the news ever since they brought you down from orbit last month.’

  ‘To be honest, if heading out to the platforms means I can get away from all the press attention, that’s enough reason to be here, all on its own. And, please, call me Saul.’

  Kayes chuckled in sympathy. ‘Still, it can’t have been easy for you. You were stuck on that starship for Lord knows how many weeks before it reached Galileo.’

  Saul smiled wanly. ‘It could have been worse.’

  ‘When they first contacted you, I was
glued to the feeds,’ said Kayes. ‘I know there’s still people don’t believe your story, but I believe it. I listened to every word you said during the interviews. If I could have been there when they brought you down from orbit, I would’ve been.’

  ‘About the girl,’ said Erkrnwald, an impatient tone to his voice, ‘does she know?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kayes nodded, turning back to the officer. ‘There was still some uncertainty over her identity until this morning. We’ve asked her to take the afternoon off from her duties.’ He glanced at Saul. ‘She . . . she doesn’t know you’re coming, though she should by the time we get there.’

  ‘You’re absolutely certain it’s her?’ asked Saul. ‘Definitely her?’

  ‘You must understand it took quite some time to sort through the Revolutionary Council’s records,’ Kayes explained. ‘So many government records were destroyed in the early days, before the fighting ended.’

  ‘I’ve been thoroughly informed of the political changes since the first gate failed,’ Saul replied drily.

  ‘Then I’m sure you understand why it took quite so long to be sure,’ Kayes continued. ‘But we are now quite sure.’

  Saul felt momentarily dizzy. He stepped over to the launch that had been pulled up on to the beach and placed a hand on its hull. It felt very slightly slick to the touch. ‘You’re absolutely sure?’

  Kayes nodded. ‘It’s your daughter, Mr Dumont. There’s no doubt.’

  To his consternation, Saul found that by the time he had arrived on Galileo he was already something of a cause célèbre. Once the Revolutionary Council had realized an invasion force was never going to come pouring through the starship, they had allowed Saul greater freedom, although he was accompanied always by Erkrnwald and other men who served the Revolutionary Council.

  He quickly discovered that the Council had been working hard all those long years at reverse-engineering the technology within the defunct Galileo Array, so that they might learn how to create their own paired wormholes. Once they had heard Saul’s story, the Galileans began talking excitedly about reconnecting with the other surviving colonies, all now stranded from each other with the destruction of the Lunar Array.