In the chamber of the airlock, Wong looked over at the four of us. “Private Farshi, you’re sick. Feel that cough coming on, don’t you?”
“You’re right, Lieutenant. I think I need to lie down,” he said.
“I will stamp your sheet. Just send it to me. Get some rest, technician.”
Private Kumal Farshi handed his equipment to me. It was a series of lights with laser tagging. Wong looked at the two of us remaining. “Keep your recording devices off when we suit up. Don’t make me say it twice.”
“Safety protocol . . .”
“Ensign,” said the other tech, one of the four women on board, “recording off.”
I nodded, confused. Wong handed me the helmet and the suit. I checked for any signs of damage. We sprayed ourselves with UV blockers, and suited up. We were not in heavy gravity. The airlock door, once opened, would lead to a long tube that ran straight to the central axis upon which we spun. We would fall down into weightlessness and then climb out with ladders to the surface of the station’s outer shell. First, we checked each others’ suits. Never assume a suit is sealed unless it is checked twice by two diligent people. Then, plug in the interface, and check the diagnostics for a seal. Recording begins, with the computer interface. It can be turned off manually at any time. In cases of imminent death, I am told, it is considered wise to say what needs to be said, then turn it off to protect others from dying screams. There are also situations where communication signals are possibly compromised in wartime, and individual units need to be able to unplug from the network. I did not understand why Wong would want recording off. Even on board the station, while on duty, everything was recorded. We were so accustomed to the microcameras and microphones, we didn’t even see them. Who could bother watching all that footage, anyway, except a machine?
I had to choose between my rigorous training and my new role model’s odd command. Safety protocols trump chain of command. I only pretended to adjust my computer. I consider what I did sinful. Wong had his reasons, and only with the communication recorders off could he even dictate them aloud, but I didn’t think about that, in the moment.
Suited up, the three of us checked the airlock doors in turn, securing the station with our redundant safety protocols.
With the door sealed, Wong checked internal com signals, and tested emergency backups in the remote suit systems. We could talk to each other without recording anything. Then, he turned the hard crank, and swung open the door. The silence came on so swiftly, it was misinterpreted in the ear as whooshing. Space is an instantaneous and overwhelming silence. The black sky was a surprise. We were so far out of the main galaxy cluster that whole swathes of sky had limited starlight in our range of vision. It was the black void that I had studied on charts and simulations, but seeing it through a pane of helmet shielding was different. It was like black ink had been spilled in spreading lines across the celestial sphere. Certainly, with telescopes and wider ranges of vision, galaxies and stars appear in the darkness, far out into the depths, but the distances were so great, and the competing lights and black holes and nebulae too great, that the minute pinpricks were shrouded in a black fog. The other half of the sky, toward the rest of the Sagittarius cluster, and the Milky Way, was a horizon line of swept marbles.
Wong chimed in. “Open com. Signals off. Focus on the mission. Sweep and clear, and check for anything we need to tag for drone repair. Walk carefully. She is an old hull, and we need to be gentle with our steps.”
He took the first step over the edge.
Drones swept the hull, keyed in to the quartermaster’s terminals. We were a redundancy check, able to put naked eyes on the hull, where drones just gave cameras and data readouts. It is the difference between studying the void in a simulator and seeing it firsthand. To pilot a ship, I need to feel the difference in my gut. To keep our station aloft and repaired, we would need to walk the hull and get a feel for what looks right. We were looking for things that intuition alone would know. Exosuit walkers were regular jobs, and were expected to know the hull as intimately as an old pair of boots. If something was wrong, they could just feel it in the close study of the stellar wind–battered, micro-meteorite-struck panels.
We had simple tools: a radioactive measuring device to check for unusual spikes, a biometric light sweeper to scan for biotic evolution leaking out onto the outer hull or into it, and a good, old-fashioned flashlight to sweep for obvious mechanical defects.
“We will take a long walk to get some calisthenics, out here. Check in every quarter click, and follow Tech Jensen. She knows the hull better than anyone and she can get us home in time for lunch. Remember, Ensign, only move one foot after the other is magnetized down.”
“I have spacewalked before, Lieutenant. I am rated for hull repair, if need be, on moving vessels.”
“That wasn’t you,” he said. His offhand comment revealed his theology. Wong was more in line with the legalists who are quick to divide living quantum errata.
Tech Corporal Jensen punched my suited boot from inside the tunnel, where she was waiting for me to move out of her way so she could climb up to the hull. “Ensign, I don’t think you understand what is going down. I am checking the hull. Wong is checking you. You walk in the middle. You follow me. I have been doing this for six years and I have had no accidents on my walks. Mistakes on a walk are very bad.”
“Oh, okay, Corporal,” I said, confused.
“I am sure you will do excellent,” said Wong. “You arrived with all the necessary training.”
Jensen stepped out next. Her boots pulled her hard to the hull. She checked the magnetic pull, and worked her switches. “My left boot button is sticky,” she said.
“Want to go back and grab a new suit?”
“I think it will be fine. Sock lint has probably jammed it up. If it gets worse, I’ll signal for a drone ride home. My signal line is working, even if it’s off.”
“I trust your judgment,” said Wong.
The walk was going to fill my dreams with night for years afterward. The sky bent all around me where the suit pulled me over the edge. The smooth, clear hull was lined with solar panels that soaked up energy from the sun and stars. The panels were very small, and very efficient. We would never run out of energy here. Water, perhaps, and food, perhaps, but energy, never.
We walked a circuitous path along the edge of the hull, with our equipment. The ship was welded together out of extra parts and a ruined battleship from long ago. It was perfectly smooth and round along the sides, leading up to the two major points: the antennae array on one end and the warship dock on the other. The station was like a pointed, painted egg. Our little warship was so small where it docked below the spin.
Have you ever spacewalked, confessor? It’s exhausting for toes more than anything. I lifted toes to release the magnet. I curled the toes to latch in. We set out single file. I felt the clamp in my boots, but I did not hear it. The deafening silence of space was all I heard, with the blood pumping in my ears, my breath in and out, my body cells burning and humming with energy—the black expanse above until we reached the starry side of the sky and saw the Milky Way in all her glory. The glistening solar paneling created a horizon so vivid and near to the eye that I was glad to have Corporal Jensen in the lead. Her walk was calm and straight. She swept the hull with her tools with precision built of repetition. Behind her, all I saw on the hull were the occasional remnants of her flashing light sinking into the sensitive cells.
“A beautiful day for a stroll,” said Wong. “Perfect weather. No strong wind. No meteor dust.”
“Low radiation today, too,” said Jensen. “At least until we turn out toward the planet’s albedo.”
“Where is the Planet Citadel?” I said. I saw only the black strips of the gap between galaxies.
“It is behind us,” said Wong. “It will be in front of us soon enough. Be patient, Ensign.”
The suits were quite flexible, and I could turn around, but it would slow us
down. I did not wish to slow us down. I had enough of a view.
At the dock of the station, I saw the tiny warship like a knife with wings. I had flown newer versions, and larger ones at the War College, before cloning here. This old scout was a survivor of the last battle, where so much was stripped for parts in the aftermath. It was a relic of a war I would never fight, despite all my training.
“How much farther, Lieutenant?” said Jensen.
“A little more. I still have a recording signal popping in and out, right now. We need to go a little more, where the hull is really thick.”
“For what?” I said.
“Ensign, please. All in due time.”
Scanning the hull, I saw the ghostly flicker of biotics where the scanner saw them, purple shining above the solar cells. It had already been flagged for scrubbing by Tech Jensen. I saw the red dot on the scanner. With my other hand, I moved the flashlight out and over the area. If I hadn’t scanned it, I wouldn’t have known there were rogue biotics there, eating into the organic matter on the hull.
“I don’t see any obvious damage. Should we go closer and investigate?” I said.
“No,” said Wong. “No, we will not. We know where it came from. It will take a little more scrubbing to clear it all out, for good. Biotic crew know about it and are always checking underneath.”
“Have they already repaired the damage, then?”
“Something like that,” said Wong. “I will explain it another time.”
“That is where Edward, the last AstroNav . . . That is where he did it,” said Jensen, with an inexplicable flatness to her voice, even through the com link. “I flagged it. It is all that’s left of him. And it is getting radiation and mutating in open space. It’s just a couple biotic lines. Almost everything couldn’t survive. He certainly couldn’t. We keep walking.”
We were silent a while, then, walking the hull.
Before us, the planet rose like a huge, golden moon, pale yellow dunes and mountains without a single sign of human habitation from this distance. It was nearly the same size as Earth, and nearly as habitable, in the “Goldilocks zone” of extra-terran colonization, with an atmosphere that began quite nearly breathable upon initial settlement, with some native biotics living in the poles that proved noninvasive, though there are occasional headache infections and any open water must be boiled.
The naked rock of the Planet Citadel, beautiful and gold, loomed immense, a coin stamped with antique effigies of geologic time alone in the sky. The world floated in this immense black. Behind us, the central star—we always spacewalk with our back to the planet’s sun when we could—extended our shadows out over the horizon of the station hull, as if we were, the three of us, bound by our shadows to the yellow surface.
“We can stop here, Jensen,” said Wong. “Check your recording devices again.”
“Off,” she said.
“What? Oh . . . Uh . . . Off,” I said, lying. I felt it in my bones, my dishonesty. After my inauspicious beginning, I think I wanted to be by the book. I think I am rationalizing the past. My sin was dishonesty, and a mortal one. My sin was also obeying the sinful station’s ridiculous rule of law instead of respecting Wong’s human judgment.
“Talk to me, Jensen,” said Wong.
“I want out. Get me out.”
“Dishonorable discharge is no laughing matter. No pension, no support, just let go planetside, and that’s it. My fee is very high. You would be starting over with nothing.”
“It is better to start over than to open my helmet on the hull.”
“I am sorry, but . . .”
“We couldn’t even tell anyone about us, Edward and me. We couldn’t even say the words where cameras could see our lips moving. Do you understand? The officer corps were not permitted to mingle with enlisted. You might transcend. We never do.”
“The rules of the Milky Way are not exactly the rules of the Citadel. How about a nice vacation, first. I can get you admitted with a rare illness and forge some documents and you get a month planetside with my friends at the hospital below. Give you time to consider.”
“You got Gudachowski out for good, and he has a hydroponic farm now, and sells seeds across the colony, and he’s even hired on a tank for a kid with his husband. Come on, help me out!”
“He was fifteen years in, and I could early retire him. Plus, Gudachowski was not so critical to the mission of keeping this hunk of junk in one piece. He was one of Nguyen’s computer flunkies. If the computers break, the hull holds us together until the patch comes through. You are the hull. You are uniquely skilled at maintenance, Jensen. Without skilled hull walkers, we all die.”
“I am replaceable. We are all replaceable.”
“And someone else comes here, and experiences this posting? I’ll think about it, Jensen. Here’s what I can do, for the right price. I can investigate you for theft, and pull you into the prison system. You can relax, read, and take some time to consider your future.”
“How much?”
“Three months’ pay for three weeks off.”
“Okay,” she said. “Poker?”
“I will arrange the game.” His black, glass mask revolved toward me. “Ensign, is there anything I can do for you?”
I was speechless. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m the law around here. I can help you get things done,” he said. He pointed up to the Citadel planet hanging in the sky above our heads. “I can get you there for long stretches of time. I can get you a break. Everyone needs a break.”
“For a fee,” I said.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Is that a problem for you?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I didn’t really expect to be asked that question, honestly. I’m taken aback.”
“I understand completely,” said Wong.
Jensen snorted. “When I was a kid, I lived in a forest. They have only just planted a few groves over there, all jujube trees and moringa. Drought-tolerant stuff, high in nutrition but they taste like paste and grass. I hate jujubes, and I hate moringa. When I was a kid, my grandfather had a plum orchard behind his house.” She stopped there, catching herself in her own bitter nostalgia for something remembered, but never had in the existence we shared here. Is there such a thing as an apple tree, at all? Obasanjo asks that. To him, everything here is a fabrication, and that includes our memories. We are a memorial to the civilization the enemy destroyed, nothing more, and everything that came to us from outside was invented by them to keep us satiated in our tiny shell.
Oh, and all was recorded, oh, I recorded everything. I had it all sitting in the files, waiting to be sifted by the algorithms that searched out keywords and erratic behaviors. With two records empty and missing, and one present, it would get flagged for HR review. Following the rules of an unjust system, and lying to my peers about them, Jensen would never forgive me, even if Wong pretended it never happened for a little while.
We swept the hull, my sin ringing in my ears. I realized that I needed to try and delete the recording, or leave it to permit the truth to come out, as would be my duty. In fact, I should have reported the conversation, with the recording, but Wong was the security officer, and the only person over him was Admiral Diego. How would the admiral receive this message? How would it be perceived? He sent Wong out, with Jensen, and with me, and he must know about Wong. How could he not know?
I cannot dispute my own moral failure. I did nothing but leave the recording there, as if I didn’t realize what had just occurred. I did not alert Wong. I did not alert the admiral. I did not sneak back and attempt to wipe the data. I did not even reach out to Obasanjo for help and advice.
Inside, I slept unsound, tossing and turning, and dreaming of the black void overhead, the crushing presence of the planet growing in size, closer and closer.
That morning, I received the first letter from my original self, on Earth, and it mentioned something that I had not even considered at all: money.
Dear Ronaldo Aldo II,
I am glad you arrived safely. I don’t really know what I should call you. Brother? Son? Clone? I shall use the moniker you have chosen. You are number II.
I have been dead bored making transport flights from one space elevator to another. Much of the time, space is duller than a boat at calm sea. There isn’t even any weather. Still, I have plenty of time to read. I envy you, with your warships and probe launches and patrols.
I have decided not to set up an account for you. Your planet is simply too sparse to need one. Your salary should more than meet your needs. When you promote out, we can talk about a joint account for him, but, honestly, you will be living on the top of your world with your current salary. Whatever luxuries you need through the ansible, please let me know and I will see what I can arrange. I understand that later in your deployment, you will likely be asking for seeds and nursery plants for a farm there. I will help you with that, truly and gladly.
Serve with honor, II.
Ensign Ronaldo Aldo I
* * *
I have mentioned Obasanjo’s theory, that we are all mere fabrications of people created by the enemy and alone in the universe. I have not mentioned the man very much. He was a gloomy sort, and until I returned from the first expedition upon the hull, I had no clue how to reconcile the existence of the ever-smiling Wong, with the ever-frowning Obasanjo. Two important orbital bodies rotating at opposites to each other, these men did not get along. Playing poker with them both was like observing a long and bitter feud, each attempting to break the other’s facade. Wong told dirty jokes in an effort to get Obasanjo to smile. Obasanjo glared through them, and shared bitter narratives of his conspiracy theory.
“We receive radio waves from all over the galaxy, and they bounce and become corrupted. I have been attempting to figure out if they all actually come from Earth, to see if the colonies are only an illusion.”
The Fortress at the End of Time Page 5