by Jack Robuck
The rebel guard pulled himself along the wall faster now that he was off his injured leg, and he pushed the doctor ahead. Rachel clung to him more as an anchor than a hostage, always keeping her handgun aimed behind. Ahead, he could see the guard shoving the doctor and the technician into an open hatchway in the wall. They could hear the metallic slide of a door open far down the corridor ahead.
The injured guard looked down the corridor at them, then back at the hatch.
Rachel was breathing heavily. She called out to him, "What? What is it?"
Five Troopers ricocheted around the distant corner in zero-g formation, grabbed onto the grating for balance and raised their assault rifles. "Stop!"
He looked down the corridor to his right, then back at Rachel, and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Rachel. We'll never make it back to the barge." With that, he vaulted through the hatch and pulled the door closed behind him.
"No!" she screamed, pulling Matthew faster.
They reached the hatch door as the Troopers opened fire. They pressed themselves against the wall, sheltering in the few inches of cover provided by the ribbed beams of the corridor. Matthew could see the doctor and soldiers through the tiny, thick window. It reminded him of the port he had been peering through less than an hour before. The guard had his pistols trained on the doctor and the technician.
Rachel beat on the hatch. "Let us in, you fuck!"
Matthew broke free from her grasp. "He can't. It’s a three man capsule. It’s the Command Staff escape pod. Look at the insignia. It’s over for you. Any second now, those Troopers are gonna blast you against the wall." Matthew was pissed, and his lip was bleeding.
Rachel did the strangest thing: she laughed. "Oh yeah? I don't think that matters much right now, asshole. Because about ninety seconds after that happens, this whole ship is gonna hit the ground. We're already in the atmosphere. So we're both dead."
For the first time, he saw a look of uncertainty in her eyes. She beat on the capsule with her fist and gasped for air, looking sick, flailing.
Matthew grabbed her by the shoulder. "Hey."
"What?" She stared at him, wild eyed.
Matthew looked down at the escape capsule hatch. His hand was holding on to the door handle, just right of center. He looked back at Rachel. She met his gaze. She slowly reached up and grabbed the other end of the long bar handle with both hands. Matthew doubled his grip too.
He looked through the window at the rebel guard. He nodded once.
PHHOOOOOOM!
The capsule rocketed from the ship, leaving a gaping hole in its hull.
Matthew gasped. He couldn't breathe. He was freezing. They were spinning, falling. His body tried to vomit, but all his muscles were cramped too tight. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't breathe; he sucked in air, but something was wrong with it. He was dying, but he death-gripped the handle.
The medic's face was pressed against the glass in terror. Matthew shrieked, but the sky was blue, blue, he could breathe, a little. He could breathe. He could feel his limbs.
He could feel his heartbeat slamming through every vein. He thought his head would explode. He heard a mumbled scream. He looked at Rachel. In the roar, the numbing roar, she mouthed M-O-V-E, and she glared down at the center of the hatch, and back at him. He looked down.
There was a small circular bevel with a black and yellow striped sticker on it. He edged away from it, pulling his knee down and away. The bones in his hands felt like they would crack with his grip on the handle. The fop! was more of a pressure and a question than a sound, and it was answered with a slam. The cylinder burst from the center of the hatch and sprouted a parachute as the capsule detected atmospheric pressure.
The chute rippled and popped as it caught wind. Matthew smacked his head hard on the window. He looked down at his blood smeared on it. As the world came back into focus, he wondered if a tooth was loose, but they were slowing, they were slowing. He could feel it. We're gonna make it!
Matthew laughed at the absurdity of it as he plummeted toward an alien planet...alien in respect to the planet Earth, which was alien to him, which was...He passed out.
He came around just before they hit. The desert floor loomed hard and wide. Pocked and embossed with canyons as if the whole planet had crackled dry. He looked over at Rachel and wondered if she could hear him.
"This is probably gonna suck!"
Did she shrug?
They both tried to get their faces over their forearms, tried to tuck into the fetal position without compromising their grip. The slam bounced them both, and Matthew felt the undeniable crack of a rib against the edge of the capsule before he tumbled into the sand.
Chapter 2
It was always, always raining in the twisting, open tunnels. Always dark down beneath the arched, soaring towers, where so much rice was cooked the steam was the weather, and the alleys so narrow the occupants of the mud-flecked, chrome-rimmed stools with their backs to each other could have reached out and blocked the way with their handshake. If any of them had known each other, or looked up from their noodles—which they did not.
The colored glow from distant signs flashed faces blue, then red red red, and the other side green, the whole time, soothing. Ella wondered if all the steam made it rain. Ella loved rice. Her head was shaved, her mouth was big, her throat rippled when she laughed. Her mouth was an open wound in your heart.
Ella was wet. She was beautiful when she was wet. Her wrists were beaded. Her woven wraps slipped down below her shoulders, a blanket's embrace, and the bottom edges were mud-flecked too. Her freckled chest felt weighty. On the stool, she liked to arch her spine and wriggle.
Ella slurrrrrrrrped her last noodle, sat down her bowl, and watched the man open the rice. Steam! Up through the fortune cards and nudey playing cards pinned helpless against the back slat over the ovens like butterflies. Ella always wanted rice, but she had eaten.
Shlunck as Ella slipped off the stool and landed in a puddle. The mud always knew what to say. She sashayed away, down the lane, the alley, one side of her red red red as the man who cooked the rice watched her walk away. She could feel his eyes on her, as they always were when she walked. Her full hips belied her slender, child-like torso; her shoulder blades like the skin stretched over fragile wings.
In these short moments, she loved the old man who cooked the rice, and this was the extent of their love: that his eyes caressed her until goosebumps popped before she turned the corner, up the way, and her sandals ground gritty concrete steps up to her room.
*
Peter paid and went. She knelt over the painted metal basin and washed herself. The clink of coins in her jar had broken the haze of having reached for something...and having grasped it. The pushing feeling, and the pop that brought back knowing there was a stranger in the room; inside you: the haze; it had been broken, but the coins were a giant dull bell, not a shot. When they clink-upped in the jar, she had not been startled. She turned her cropped head on the pillow as he dressed.
"You love her very much?"
"Who's that?"
"Your wife. Your woman. I always see you distracting yourself, even before it begins, when you walk in, thinking three things so as not to realize another."
Peter slipped his damp shirt over his slender frame and kicked on his shoes, a hand balanced on the bamboo door jamb.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Why do you come here? She doesn't let you make it?"
Peter stared out the open window, into the ballpoint-blue rain, to where the neon sputtered.
"Everybody needs a little strange, Ella. You got a good thing going, a whole situation; but every once in a while, you gotta go somewhere new. Or at least, somewhere different. A man needs some strange in his life."
Ella sat in the open window now, in the square hole in the concrete wall, all fluted from the chunky bamboo mold that had formed it. The red linen curtains were drawn back, now black in the light of the rain, now red, licked by the candle as
it dueled the shadows. Ella looked out into the rain too. She thought that neon signs always looked like they were beckoning. A questionable acquaintance pointing with his nose at a far room with strange sounds coming out of it.
What the hell do they want?
Ella thought about what Peter had said. The rain sounded like the fry-pans of every counter in the alley: sizzling little crisps of fat and skin; she could almost smell it. She bit her bottom lip. She put a hand to her flat belly; her love of food would fill her out in a few more years. She whispered, "Cwrachhhhhhhhhhhhhh" and tried to sound like the rain. A question came back to her mind from all the empty hours of her life.
What does the sun look like?
Her little jar now held the make-true to a number she had to count every month. The rest was in the patched leather satchel hanging on The Hook (Ella smiled).
She dumped the water in the basin out of the window. She squatted over it, pulled up her skirts, and peed into it. Her anklet glittered in the candle light. She dumped the basin again, rinsed it with water from the clay ewer, and drank from the ewer.
She pulled at her bedding, slipped off her clothes, and nestled back into the bed-nook set into the concrete wall. She liked to count the flutes in the walls around her room, ribbed from the bamboo impression, with sharp, brittle edges splayed and chipped where the concrete had tided in the joints between bamboo trunks.
She couldn't sleep.
She stuck one toe far out from beneath the blankets into the cool air. She stretched, joint by joint, standing. She poured water from the ewer over her shorn scalp, rubbing it into her head and face.
She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and walked out onto the terrace. The gargantuan wicker statue hung mossy and present out into the void of the courtyard. The rain dripped cool onto her face, and the rush of it through gutters and over clay tiles, across space, the smash to the cobblestones; driplets on tin; her eyes closed, as she stepped forward. Raising her arms high into the air, her bracelets slid and clinked up her wrists as the damp blanket slid to the floor. She leaned far out into space, cruciform. The world smelled new.
Chapter 3
Matthew awoke to the blistering sun overhead, and the silhouette of a woman staring down at him. He looked into her eyes. She stared back. He flared his nostrils at her.
"What?"
She shook her head. "That was some real cowboy shit, kid."
"I'm not a kid. And I'm not a boy. I'm a man."
She pulled him up by his forearm and backed away, grinning, pointing a finger in his face. "You're a fucking cowboy."
Is she...impressed?
He put his hand up to his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun. He glared at her. "I'm a...cow...man."
She sucked wind, and leaned against the capsule, laughing. She tapped her revolver against its gleaming surface and chortled, peaking up at him with tears in her eyes.
"What's so funny, lady?"
She shook her head and stood, turning to the guard who was standing nearby. "Looks like he can walk, Will. You won't have to carry him."
"Good," the bald, mustached man answered back, eyeing Rachel through his eyelashes.
Rachel's boot creaked as she spun, and her sole slid gritty on the hard-packed dirt. "Not for you, asshole."
He drew both pistols at once, but her gun was already out, and the hole in Will's chest made his shots go wide. They clanged against the capsule.
The three bangs sounded like one to Matthew. "What the fuck?"
Rachel sniffled, and drew in a long slow breath. "There was plenty of room in that capsule. Motherfucker panicked."
"He was your friend, wasn't he? What the fuck?" He put up his hands, in shock.
The medic peered from behind the technician, wide-eyed, and stared at the body, pooling blood. The technician looked calmly on.
Rachel wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and holstered her weapon. She was crying. "Things ain't like they were on your ship down here, cowboy. A man wrongs you, you have a very narrow window of time before he does it again." She beckoned with her chin to the technician. "Jimmy, bring your bag over here."
He trotted over and dumped the pack at their feet. They both began to undress. Matthew felt a little sick, and stared into space in front of him. He refocused as Rachel spun toward him, wearing just a thin white tank top. She slid down her black leather pants.
She glared at him. "See something you like?"
He looked away.
The medic came over to stand with him. "You alright, son?" Matthew nodded. He wiped Matthew's forehead and taped some gauze over it. "I'm afraid that'll have to hold you for now."
Matthew grimaced. "I think I have a broken rib or something..."
The doctor fumbled in his bag for ideas, finally coming up with some pain meds and a stretch wrap that he wound around Matthew's torso under his shirt. "That's the best I can do, kid."
"Thanks."
Rachel beckoned to them. "Come on, we gotta hurry to get out of here before the Fleet shows up. They'll want us dead, for one, but most importantly, they're gonna have a field day scavenging every piece of metal that came off that ship of yours."
"Hold on." Matthew stopped in his tracks. "Hold the fucking hurry, lady. You just killed everybody I ever knew, my family, you destroyed my home. I'm not going anywhere with you!" He stood, feet apart, seething.
Jimmy the technician drew his revolver from a holster he was about to strap on.
"No!" Rachel stepped between them, putting her hands on her hips. Her thin cotton shirt floated under the threadbare vest she had donned.
"And another thing," Matthew went on. "Why the fuck did you just change clothes?"
Jimmy smirked at him. "That was our Fleet disguise. You don't think we wear that sweltering bullshit down here do you? Plus, our friends would shoot us on sight.”
Matthew eyed the dark-skinned man. He wasn't much older than Matthew, but he was capable. Confident.
Rachel held up her hands, "We don't have time for this, I..."
A blinding flash, a distant rumble. The ground shook. The medic crouched down, his chin stuck out. "Earthquake?"
Jimmy smiled. "No. This planet doesn't have any seismic activity. I didn't just set your ship to crash. They would still have been able to salvage...too much. I also set your fusion reactor to blow."
The medic gaped at him. "Are you insane? Do you have any idea what the size of that explosion would be?"
"A very good idea, old man. Don't forget how large this planet is. The ship just blew up three or four earths away."
Rachel looked off in the direction of the blast and shook her head. "All those poor people."
A brisk wind buffeted them for a moment, moving toward the explosion, then faded. Rachel narrowed her eyes. She looked at the technician. "Jimmy, did that seem right to you?"
"No. No it didn't. Everything I know about explosions would lead me to think that any such wind would be away from the blast...but at this distance, even that should have dissipated out to nothing. We should get to a town."
Matthew glanced at the aged medic. "I told you, we're staying here. The Fleet will be collecting all of the survivors from the escape capsules. We should stay nearby, and wait for help."
Rachel put her hands back on her hips. "What's your name, cowboy?"
"Matthew...Matthew Allen." He frowned.
"Matthew. And you, doc?"
"Glazier. Richard Glazier, you evil bitch."
The old man's venom surprised Matthew.
A shadow passed over Rachel's face. "Okay, Doctor Glazier. Matthew. Please listen to me for a second."
Jimmy broke in. "We don't have time for this, Rach."
She held up a hand. "Please. You have to understand. What happened upstairs"—She pointed a thumb up at the sky—"was a desperate measure in a last chance situation.
“As soon as you people came to our attention, we started arguing about what to do. But there was really no choice. Our group were the only rebels i
n space at the time. We don't have a lot of capabilities to operate up there. We just happened to be in the right place at the right moment. And I am so, so sorry, but we had no choice.
“You've got to understand our situation. The only reason we can fight them at all is because we're spread thin across an area too large for them to control with their limited resources. Your presence here altered the status-quo in a way that would get us all killed."
She paused. "I think we used to all be Fleet once. But they've devolved into nothing more than killers. I don't think anyone even knows what their mission is anymore. We're two advanced civilizations clinging onto the face of a dusty rock. One starved and anemic floating upstairs, and one dirty and violent, just trying to survive.
So you can stay here if you want to, and spend the rest of your short lives melting down parts of your ship in a grimy warehouse somewhere where you'll never see the sky again. Or you can come with us and take your chances. But I warn you, the Admiral isn't your kindly old Commander. He's a monster."
Matthew looked up, and around him. The distant walls of mesas broke the sandy plane they stood on, and led, striated red and tan like the pictures of Jupiter he had seen, up to flat tops that broke hard edged against...
I never thought...it really is blue. "It's so blue."
Glazier turned to Matthew, and put his hand on his shoulder. "Come on, son. We can probably escape from these idiots if we have to. But if she's telling the truth, who knows about the other ones."
*
Glazier was wheezing as they climbed the latest ridge. Every distant point leered at them for a thousand more steps than seemed necessary and evaporated under their feet, quenching any spark of accomplishment they might have kindled behind their beaded brows.