by C. Gockel
“How did you know that the cave mouth would be large enough for the craft?” James asked.
“It was just a hunch,” said Noa.
“That’s not reassuring,” said James.
“We’re alive, aren’t we?” Noa said in what was supposed to be a calm rational voice, but came out angry and half-shouted.
James was quiet for a moment, but then he said, “Why haven’t they found us?” He sounded irritated rather than relieved.
“You’d rather they did?”
“Of course not,” he snapped. “But I want to understand.”
There was an edge of something frantic in his tone. She remembered his words last night, “I’m just trying to understand ...” He wanted the world to make sense. So much of it didn’t. Noa swung the light around to the front of the vehicle. They were parked in water, but up ahead was dryish rock. Suddenly feeling tired, she said, “Their sensors picked up the cave, but they’ve input the model of our vehicle into their computers. Our craft’s manufacturer’s description specifically says it is not meant to be an aquatic vehicle, and so this hiding place will be completely discounted without ever being reviewed by a human brain.”
“How did you know this model was capable of submersion?” James asked.
Noa blinked and pointed the flashlight back at him. His sleeves were rolled up, and his tattoos were back. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light, but they didn’t seem as dark this time. Remembering how he’d reacted to them before, she quickly brought her eyes back to his face. “When we hit the water last time, we survived.”
“You didn’t know we could survive the impact when you plunged us over a cliff?” James whispered, his eyes wide.
“Nope,” said Noa, testing the water with a finger. She stared at the uneven waves around the digit and realized she was shaking from head to toe to fingertip. The cave was tropically warm due to the depth of the canyon, but the water was snow melt from the mountains.
“You risked our lives—”
“I risked a quick death versus a long painful death,” Noa snapped, blowing her cool completely. She closed her eyes. Taking a deep breath, she opened them again. She met James’s gaze. His expression was a blank mask.
“It was a Hail Mary move, James.” She swallowed. Hadn’t he heard her prayer? “I’ve seen what they’ve done to hyper-augments like you, and I know what they’d do to me.”
His face didn’t soften. Annoyed, Noa looked away. “I’d like to move us up to dry rock and let this boat drain while I disengage the turbo dampener,” she said, as much to herself as to him. Gently pulsing the accelerator, she moved the craft forward. Sliding it up onto dry rock and turning it off, Noa said, “It is really lucky that we found this hidey-hole, I thought we were going to be stuck underwater, gulping at the air pockets as the ship slowly sank.”
“Lovely imagery,” said James dryly.
Stepping out of the vehicle, Noa shone the flashlight he’d given her down a long dark tunnel. “Maybe we’ll discover a new species!” She tried to sound gleeful and carefree, to ease herself off of her adrenaline high, and to forget that she was still breathing too fast and trembling from it.
“What type of new species?” said James, sounding vaguely interested.
“A species like the one in the asteroid that tried to eat that spaceship in the move-ee last night,” Noa said.
“A creature of that size and mass would have been detected by now,” James said, climbing out of the craft.
Noa rolled her eyes in only semi-feigned exasperation. “I’m trying to lighten the mood here, James!”
James scowled at her. Noa’s eyes dropped to his bare arms. With each passing second, the tattoos seemed to be getting darker.
Shaking herself and leaning into the craft, she said, “Help me lift the seats up so I can access the turbo dampener ... do you have any tools?”
James didn’t say anything, but he helped lift the seat and retrieve a toolbox from the boot. Handing him the flashlight as he deposited the tools beside her, she said, “Go behind me and hold this over my shoulder.”
Rolling up her sleeves, Noa went about disengaging the dampening conduit. Since James wouldn’t talk to her, she did it for herself. “Look at me, repairing the reverse power coupling!”
“You are joking,” James said, now standing behind her.
Not the witty repertoire or joking camaraderie she would have gotten from her fellow veterans, but it was better than nothing. “Yep,” said Noa. “I am Han Solo.”
Silence.
“Work with me! I can’t be the only one trying to crack jokes and raise spirits as we head on a course toward certain death.”
“Why not raise our spirits by not sending us on a course to certain death?” James said, his voice testy.
She turned around. His face was unreadable. She felt her skin heat. “Too late for that. No matter where we go.”
James was quiet. Noa put her hand over her mouth. The comment had been half barb and half justification for her risky actions, but she suddenly realized the truth of it. “They sent a hover-carrier after us.” A ship that could carry auxiliary vehicles and hundreds of personnel. She wasn’t finished with the turbo booster, but stood up, turned away from James, and took a breath that physically hurt—maybe just from the enormity of that sinking in. If the Luddeccean Guard wanted James and Noa so badly, even the mountains wouldn’t keep them safe. They’d be too busy running to help stage resistance in any meaningful way. She closed her eyes, bowing her head. “There are thousands of people in the camps. How can we save them on the run?”
“Millions.”
Noa spun to him. “What?”
Standing still as a statue, James said, “I’d estimate there are millions in the camps.”
Noa gaped. “How do you estimate that?”
“When you were asleep, I watched the Briefing Room channel for a bit.”
Noa’s eyes narrowed at mention of the “news” station.
“There were some callers to the Briefing Room—”
“How did they call with the ethernet down?” Noa asked.
“Telephones.”
When Noa blinked at him, he said, “They are devices that use the landlines they were talking about last night. Callers asked about missing family members and neighbors. According to Bob Wang, alien influence corrupted the data banks of many of the populace and they had been brainwashed into wandering from their homes and places of work—and the authorities were in the process of finding them and deprogramming them.”
Noa’s jaw fell. Her brain sort of blinked off with the sheer stupidity of it all. But when she finally spoke, the words came in a torrent. “That’s crazy—massive viral attacks of that sort of magnitude don’t happen when there is a biological interface. Even cockroaches can ward off thought control!”
James’s jaw did that sideways movement; his eyebrows rose. “I did an experiment like that in seventh grade!”
Noa’s shoulders fell and she looked at a puddle of still water on the cave floor. “I did too. But a lot of people on Luddeccea don’t believe their kids should study neural nets.” She’d only done that experiment because her parents had sent her and her siblings to a progressive fourth-wave school. She met James’s eyes. “There are a lot of people here who don’t believe in neural interfaces; and, even if they get one, they’re ambivalent about them and only use them for emergencies. They arrange their kids’ awakenings much later, they teach that the NI can be a direct ticket to the materialist culture of Old World sin, and that they are the antithesis of families.”
She touched the stumps of her fingers. And in some ways they were right, she supposed. Getting her interface had only increased Noa’s desire to get off world, to not become the happy housewife with six kids that Luddeccean culture encouraged. She pushed those thoughts aside. “So they’re claiming there are millions of people who just wandered off due to alien mind control?”
Voice too level, James said, “In part
. Other callers asked about workers in the New Valley.” Noa lifted her gaze at the mention of Luddeccea’s small but growing cybernetics hub. The planet might be anti-tech, but the solar system was loaded with the rare metals that made cybernetics hum. Luddeccea’s New Valley was the perfect place to assemble the raw materials—cheap labor for the parts that had to be made by humans, with no need for an air dome, cosmic ray filters, or radioactive asteroid water. It was also where Ashley was from.
“The region is apparently a ghost town,” James continued. “According to Bob Wang, the workers were relocated to secure locations.”
Noa looked down at her tattoo. “They’re secure, all right.”
“It’s all very reminiscent of the Third Reich,” James said. “I’m sure many were exterminated … ”
Her skin started to heat at his calm, and the hair at the back of her neck stood on end.
“... but not all,” James continued. “The local government will need cheap and available labor while they transition Luddeccea’s manufacturing to a system not reliant on augments.”
He said it as though repeating a history lesson. She felt a prickle of sweat on her skin and it wasn’t just from heat. Her hands balled into fists.
“Do you have any feelings on this matter, James?” She didn’t try to hide the bitter edge to her voice.
“It makes me concerned about the possibility of being caught,” he said.
For a few heart beats, Noa couldn’t speak. “Don’t you want to help?” she asked incredulously.
“I want us to stay alive,” James ground out.
“Millions of people are dying. And you don’t want to do anything about it?”
“No,” he said levelly.
Noa rocked back on her feet. He wasn’t a coward; he hadn’t abandoned her—he’d taken care of her, very good care of her. But now he seemed remote, unfeeling. “You’re inhuman,” she whispered.
His chin dipped nearly to his chest. “According to the authorities,” he hissed.
And then she felt a little disgusted—at herself for saying something so cruel, at the fundamentalists taking over her planet, but also at him for forsaking the other innocent people caught up in the same mess he was in.
Turning back to the hover with a growl of frustration, she began carefully scanning the wires and ports, looking for anything that might have been loosened when she disengaged the conduit. And she also began to think. The Fleet wouldn’t let their own be arrested by locals without a court martial first. Which meant they didn’t know Noa had been arrested in the first place … and acts of genocide gave the Fleet carte blanche authority to intervene. So they didn’t know what was going on here, period. The Luddeccean authorities had managed to control the data packets that were being sent between Time Gate 8 and the wider galaxy by shutting down the ethernet, but that wouldn’t be enough. She shook her head—how did they control the mouths of travelers? Were they restricting travel somehow? That would be difficult, and the Republic would be suspicious and would question it. Action would be slow in coming, bogged down by the Republic’s near endless bureaucracy. She thumped her index finger on a wire and scowled. Still, she thought surely by now the Fleet would have an inkling …
She shook her head. Lifting herself out of the craft, she said, “I have to alert the Fleet.” She felt a small wave of dizziness.
“The ethernet is down … How do you plan on doing it?”
Noa turned in his direction, tools shaking in her hands. Why wouldn’t her hands stop shaking? “I’m not going to the Northwest Province to start.”
“Where do you plan on going?”
Where indeed? She took a deep breath, felt a bite in her lungs and sweat forming on her palms. She did know where. “I’m heading to Luddeccea Prime. You can drop me off at the nearest magni-freight line.”
She expected to hear “fine,” maybe “if that’s what you want,” and at most, “you’re crazy.” James took another step closer to her. When he spoke, his voice was almost a shout. “You’re going to do what?”
* * *
Noa met James’s eyes. “You heard me.”
He didn’t want to believe what he’d heard. He didn’t care about millions, but Noa … he shouldn’t care, but he did. Dipping his chin, James said, “You’re going to the capital, the hub of the Luddeccean Guard, the location of the Central Authority of this world?”
“Yes,” said Noa.
“No,” said James, taking a step forward. She was so thin, her eye sockets sunken, her skin dry, and paler than he remembered. She was in no shape to go anywhere, much less to Luddeccea Prime. Noa didn’t back up, didn’t even wobble on her feet. She lifted her chin higher, as though she was challenging him.
He paused mid-step. Was he challenging her? A vision of swinging her over his shoulder, throwing her into the LX, and taking her to the Northwest Province flickered through his mind. And then he remembered finding her in the snow … She’d escaped a concentration camp; she would escape him. Or hate him. His vision went black for a moment. That was not acceptable. He took another step forward.
This time Noa did react. “Are you going to try to stop me?” Noa said, throwing up her hands. The pliers flew one way, and the pulse reader flew another, landing in water with a plop. And then Noa did back away, holding her hands in front of her. They were visibly shaking and she was looking at them with alarm … as though they weren’t her own. He could empathize.
Straightening and dropping her hands, she turned to the water. “I still need that,” she whispered, her voice slightly breathless.
He was barely listening. James felt like snarling—and couldn’t, just as he couldn’t smile or frown. She was going to get herself killed if she went to Prime. It shouldn’t be his business, but it was; and it made anger and frustration burn in his mind like a white hot solar flare. “I’ll get the pulse reader,” he ground out. He had to get away from her, just for a moment.
* * *
James walked past Noa before she could protest. He kicked off his shoes, and then peeled off his slacks and his sweater. Noa’s jaw fell. The tattoos that had been on his arm ran down his torso and his legs too—and they were very dark now. As he bent to put down his sweater, he paused, lifted his arms much as she did moments before, and then looked down at his body. His back was to her, so she couldn’t read his expression—but from the way he practically leapt into the water, she got the impression that he was trying to run away from what he’d seen.
Noa watched his head disappear. She put a hand through her not-quite-existent hair—she was still shaking. And breathing hard. She felt a gust of wind could knock her over. She trembled again, this time with foreboding. What was wrong with her body? When James had stalked toward her, she hadn’t been afraid, just aggravated. But when the tools had slipped through her hands … that had been scary. She wasn’t clumsy. She didn’t run out of breath. She didn’t shake like a leaf.
Her jaw hardened. She’d been in a concentration camp for weeks, that was what was wrong with her. And others were still there. She growled in frustration, and her eyes dropped to the water where James was. It was very calm … she felt a stab of worry and checked her chronometer app. It had been two minutes and thirty-three seconds since he’d plunged in. She walked to the edge of the water. “James?” she shouted. “James?” The surface of the water remained eerily calm.
Grabbing the flashlight, knowing it had to be waterproof, she kicked off her shoes and dove in, the cold water hitting her like a physical blow. For a moment she saw an underwater world straight from a fairytale. But then the light flickered and the frigid blackness wrapped around her. She could see nothing, not even the surface.
Chapter Five
It felt as though every centimeter of his skin was tightening and constricting to ward off the frigid waters in the cave. And he swore he felt all his cells cry for oxygen, and then sigh, as they gave up and realized none was forthcoming. His muscles stiffened—from the cold, or the lack of air, he wasn’t
certain. It was unpleasant. But even if he didn’t have the lost tool as a goal, he would not have wanted to return to the surface. The world beneath the water was quiet, undemanding, and fascinating. Soaring through the water over a forest of pastel-colored stalagmites on the cave floor, he caught sight of small fish-like creatures with enormous eyes. The same soft hues as the stalagmites, they darted among the columns. He dove farther, searching among the column roots for the gauge, and was struck by a memory: a smaller version of himself asking his mother, “Why do the colors leave when it gets dark?” His mother had told him about the limitations and advantages of rod and cone cells in the retina—and how in darkness, the cones, the color receptors, could not receive enough light to be effective. Rods, by contrast, could be activated by as few as six photons. The shimmering colors of the underwater world defied that memory. A product of his augmentation? The only thing that told him it was dark was that the periphery of his vision was nearly black, as though looking through binoculars. He had no memory of when his vision was augmented. It was very strange. And wonderful just the same.
Catching a glint of something at the bottom of the watery cave, he dove deeper still. The blackness on the edges of his vision expanded, the pressure in his ears and chest increased, and his world shrank. He had to keep his eyes glued to the glimmer, or he would veer off course. It took a few minutes, but he did reach the fallen gauge. He wrapped his hand around the hand grip and brought it to his eyes. The tool was blurry, and it seemed to shimmer, and he was filled with a wave of panic. Something was wrong again, he could feel it, yet he wasn’t sure what it was. He blinked in the depths, and called up every memory he had of being in a pool, a lake, or an ocean … and realized he hadn’t exhaled … he hadn’t even felt the need to. The water above him suddenly seemed solid, the cold completely frigid, and he was certain his muscles were going rigid. With a terrified kick, he propelled himself upward. As he got closer to the surface, he heard splashing, and Noa’s voice, muted by the water.