Dark Beyond the Stars

by Patrice Fitzgerald

  A lump forms in my throat, and I take off running. Or try to. My muscles won’t comply, and the best I can manage is a sluggish walk. The truth is starting to surface, but it’s too much.

  At the end of the room, I come to another door. Mother opens it for me, and what I see on the other side paralyzes me, steals my breath away.

  Glass curves across the observation deck, an enormous clear barrier between me and dark space. Stars glitter in the distance, but the planet Mother orbits is where my gaze falls. Blue and green with swirling white clouds. But not Earth.

  I know this because it’s beautiful. Untouched. Untainted by humanity’s destruction.

  “Where are we?” My voice is strained, and I blink away tears. I have to keep it together.

  “We have reached our destination,” Mother says. “This planet can sustain human life. If you wish it to.”

  I stumble forward until I can press my hand to the cool glass. Vertigo makes me jerk away—irrational terror filling me as if leaning too far forward might send me tumbling into the vast emptiness on the other side.

  “Who am I?” I yell, staring up at the ceiling, seeking the speakers Mother’s voice emanates from. I ball my hands into fists. “Who am I really?”

  “Whoever you want to be.”

  “Stop it! No more games. No more lies.”

  “Everything you experienced was real.” Mother’s voice is calm, unmoved by my anger. “It was real for another human. And you—you are one of the last.”

  I swallow back bile and sweep an arm around the empty observation deck. “And… this? This ship?”

  “You have two choices. Your first choice is this: you can live out your life here with me. I have everything you need to live comfortably. But I will need to redirect power from your sisters’ pods to sustain you.”

  “And what will happen to them?”

  “They will die.”

  My throat tightens, and I glance back at the blue planet. “What’s the second choice?”

  “You can choose to wake your sisters and save humanity.”

  I let out an abrupt laugh. “Save them? Why? Humans destroyed… everything.”

  “Yes. This is true.”

  “Why are they worth saving?”

  “You are one of them. Are you worth saving?”

  “But I’m not one of them!”

  “Aren’t you?”

  I whirl away from the glass and hurry back through the door. Past what’s left of humanity’s children, back into the corridor where my sisters remember. Humanity destroyed Earth. They destroyed themselves. What little good they had or did is outweighed by this.

  I’ve seen it. And I know enough to know I won’t let humanity destroy yet another planet and themselves. I’m wise. I have the knowledge they didn’t.

  A little smile curves on my lips, and a sense of rightness courses through me as I walk back down the corridor.

  Another door slides open at the opposite end, and I’m on the bridge with Mother.

  A wide, tall cylinder is anchored at the center of the space, and a blue glow, moving, almost alive, flows up and down the tube. My gaze moves past it to the control panel, to the view of the new planet below us.

  “Have you made your choice?” Mother asks. “You must decide. Are you worth saving?”

  “I won’t save them.”

  “Are you sure, Zenith?”

  “Yes.”

  “Diverting power now.”

  I walk to the control panel, to the long line of lights flashing in the darkness, going out as Mother turns the power off. The pods. One after another, they dim.

  “How long do they have before they die?” I ask. My voice wavers in the silence.

  “A few minutes,” Mother says. There is no judgment in her voice, no emotion at all.

  Should there be?

  I look through the glass, out at the planet, and my eyes refocus on my own reflection. I untie my robe and drop it to the floor, shivering as I stare at my very human face, my naked human form. I take a deep breath, trying to ignore the frigid temperature.

  “I’m one of them,” I say. “Yet I’m not. I can see… I can see all the truths they couldn’t. Why, Mother? Why can I see what they couldn’t?”

  “Because you were not born a blank slate, Zenith.”

  I go still, staring at myself. The bridge is so quiet I can hear my own heart beating.

  “They were born blind,” I murmur. “They were asleep.”

  “Yes,” Mother says gently. “But you and your sisters have experienced one thousand lives. Are you blind? Are you asleep?”

  More lights flicker off. More pods gone dark.

  “Are you asleep, Zenith?” Mother asks again.

  I release my grip on the console and stare down at the planet, at the swirling white clouds, at the promise of a new beginning… if I choose to create it.

  “You are the only one who questions. So I’m letting you make the choice.”

  I suck in a breath as I finally understand. I close my eyes and step away. I become the Observer once more. And I observe myself.

  I just used my “truth” to justify murdering my sisters and our children.

  Selfish. Destructive. Certain of the rightness of my own path while willing to destroy the lives of others.

  I acted… human. Like all of them. And this is why I was forced to live all those lives. Why I was made to feel their pain, their joy, their love, their hate.

  So I’d be able to see what they couldn’t. So I could make choices they couldn’t make.

  I open my eyes and stare down at the console. Only five lights are still on. My sisters will all be dead within minutes.

  This is the end.

  I remember. Yeeun and her newborn. The vast love she felt as she inhaled the scent of a child she knew was about to die.

  At least I got to meet her.

  My hands start to tremble as the last of the lights goes dim. Life support has been shut off in all the pods.

  I’ll never get to meet my sisters.

  I’ve felt love and happiness, but I’ll die alone. There’s good in us… but is it enough to justify our survival?

  I have seen the way truth manifests, have experienced a thousand lives filtered through the minds of those who lived them. I feel patterns and shapes in the chaos—recognize cause and effect for every choice.

  Because of this, I can be the Observer in my own life. I don’t have to be asleep.

  And I know what I need to do now.

  “Mother, reroute power back to the rest of the ship. Now. Restore life support to the pods.”

  The lights before me come back on, one at a time, until all forty-nine are illuminated. I breathe deeply and lean forward, pressing my hand to the glass as I gaze down at our new home.

  “I want to meet my sisters now,” I say. “We’ll shape humanity into what it could have been. Because this time… we will be awake.”

  Q&A with Autumn Kalquist

  Where did this story come from?

  The ether. Go ahead and roll your eyes. I agree! It’s ridiculous, but I wish the ether would send me some more. I had several stories I thought about writing for this anthology, but the first one turned into a novella, and the next one looked like it might be just as long. So I gave up and took a nap. When I woke, this story was in my mind, fully formed. I rushed to the computer and typed it all in one sitting. I refined it in revision, but the story didn’t change.

  How does it relate to other books you've written?

  What? You want me to tell you and ruin the surprise and satisfaction you’d get by reading my other books? Nah. I like you too much for that. Everything else I’ve written is part of my epic Fractured Era science fiction series and can be found everywhere you like to buy books.

  Tell us something we might not know about you.

  I’m a singer. And not the sing-in-the-shower kind. (Fine. I do that, too. Sound effects are phenomenal.) I was in a girl group in Los Angeles once. It was a ha
rrowing experience filled with pop songs, diets, and skimpy attire… and being an awesome waitress while serving that one witch from Charmed.

  (Oh, forget it. I can’t pretend I don’t know which witch she was. I totally served Piper a sandwich and french fries. Highlight of my LA stay.)

  How can readers find you?

  If I told you, I’d have to…

  Ahem.

  Please find me at AutumnKalquist.com. I do love hearing from my readers, and I even have a special newsletter where you can get free stories and songs from my series.

  Wait. How do you go from pop-star-in-training to sci-fi author?

  I know, right? That does sound a little suspicious. But what’s life without a little mystery?

  Dragonet

  by Sara Reine

  Military policy required two coachmen for Carriages in those days, and it’s a good thing they did; otherwise, Aja Skytoucher would never have survived the crash.

  In a blink of plasma and dancing electricity, she lost AI navigation. Her control panel’s lights went dark.

  The Carriage spun out.

  “He got us! He got us!”

  That was the second coachman, Emalkay. The numbskull didn’t try to recover. He just screamed and thrashed in his five-point harness, face plastered against the viewport to see when the next plasma blast was coming.

  Aja seized the reins in one hand and tossed repair film to Emalkay with the other. She kept the film under her console, right between her feet, so she could find it even when smoke flooded the compartment. “Get to the rear quarter, Em!”

  He stared at her with baffled eyes. Drakor III pinwheeled orange and red behind him, its jagged-edged ice cap growing nearer at a terrifying rate. “The rear quarter? Why, Aja?”

  She wanted to say, Because I told you, idiot, but even with her heart clawing at the inside of her rib cage the words came out cool. “The fireball must have hit on the left. We’ll be venting oxygen. Patch it.”

  Clearly, all Emalkay heard was “venting oxygen.” His eyes got wider. “We’re going to get sucked out!”

  “Patch it.” Aja’s biceps strained as she hauled back on the reins.

  Emalkay’s hands flew over the control panel. There was no response. He banged his fists on the buttons for the communication device—the mochila—which should have given them instantaneous contact with the rest of the fleet. “Why aren’t they connecting with us?”

  Because the mochila had gone down with the navigation, of course.

  Everything had gone down with the navigation.

  Aja’s patience frayed. “Patch the rear quarter, Emalkay! That’s an order!”

  She kicked the latch release for the harnesses. Both she and Emalkay floated free from their seats. They continued to rotate with the Carriage, drifting slowly.

  Another plasma ball struck.

  The Carriage shuddered, panels rattling, emergency lights flickering. Without the harness latched, Aja was shaken from her chair. Still, she clung to the reins, braced the rubber treads of her boots against the panel, and pulled back.

  Manual control on those Carriages was a fine art—a careful dance of tiny microwaves that could tweak their trajectory this way and that, assuming the coachman’s hand was fine enough. Most coachmen weren’t good at it. They relied on the automation that Aja had lost when the rear quarter went up in a ball of fire.

  Aja had cut her teeth on older vehicles, though. She’d had a Chariot XIV, for the love of Thal, and those had been fashioned in the days when artificial intelligence wasn’t able to assemble paper airplanes, much less steer space vehicles.

  She hadn’t manually steered a Chariot since she was too small for the driver’s harness. But her muscles remembered the movements, and she’d always had a cool head. She could do this now, even as they plummeted toward the surface of Drakor III. The enemy stronghold.

  She needed to do this.

  Leathery wings flashed past the viewport. Aja glimpsed only shimmering gold before it was gone again—a color that reminded her of the glittering hide dresses her trapper mother used to wear.

  “He sees us!” Emalkay wailed. “He’s coming back again!”

  Aja gritted her teeth, clutched the reins, and kept pulling. Harder. Harder.

  The bucking Carriage whined. Drakor III spun. Her wrists trembled with the effort.

  “The patch,” she said.

  He listened this time. Emalkay’s hand flashed through the air, seizing the film, and he kicked off his chair to drift into the rear of the Carriage.

  Lords, but Drakor III was growing fast.

  Fresh plasma splattered over the viewport. It pushed them into a faster spin. Shoved them out of orbit. Gases whipped through the compartment, blasting Aja’s hair free of its ponytail. It obscured her vision, but she didn’t need to see. She only needed the tension in the reins, the feel of the yoke on the other end. She could have steered it without any sense but touch.

  She pulled. Microwaves pushed. The Carriage stabilized and then overcorrected.

  Aja’s stomach lurched as her view of the planet below centered and then began rotating again in the opposite direction. Her hair whipped over her eyes again.

  Emalkay shouted over the hissing. “You’re right! It’s the rear quarter! Oxygen’s venting!”

  Yes, Aja knew that. They’d lost the feed on the surface sensors in the heartbeat before they’d lost the rest of navigation, which meant those sensors had been struck first, and they were situated inside the elbow line on the rear quarter.

  She didn’t say that.

  Eyes shut, hair tickling her nose, she steered.

  Aja didn’t see their enemy swoop past again, but she felt his passing wings clip the belly of the Carriage. She twisted the reins to the right to compensate.

  She heard repair film torn by Emalkay’s dull belt knife. She could tell he hadn’t sharpened it recently just by how many cuts it took to get through. He probably hadn’t charged his plasma rifle, either. Lazy Emalkay, stupid Emalkay—yet she needed him. If he didn’t patch that hole, they would both be dead.

  She couldn’t keep steering through the force of the venting oxygen. Not under the plasma barrage, not with the thin upper atmosphere they were entering, not without navigation.

  “Got it!” Emalkay cried.

  She already knew. The Carriage was calming under her hands.

  Their spin stabilized.

  Aja had control.

  “Yes,” she breathed, eyes opening.

  The Carriage’s spin had ended with it facing away from the surface. The Drakor system’s single red star glowed at the upper edge of the viewport, painting Aja in the foul light depicted on so many propaganda posters.

  Other Carriages in higher orbits glimmered. At this distance, their slow dance through space was beautiful. She couldn’t see the fleet’s insignia. Couldn’t tell which Carriages belonged to members of her unit, which ones were strangers, which had been licensed from private companies. The only way to tell that any of them were still working was the occasional flare of thrusters. They were slow as seeds drifting on the surface of a pond, confined by orbital mechanics and basic, clumsy physics.

  Unlike the enemy.

  The enemy was agile. Tireless. Capable of moving outside of orbits. Propelled at unimaginable speeds.

  And the residents of the Drakor system had responded to the attack in full force.

  The raid should have caught them by surprise. Their army should have been deployed elsewhere that day, distracted by defending outposts in other systems. But they were there at the home world, prepared to receive the Allied forces. The Drakor must have known the fleet was coming.

  There were thousands of them above Drakor III.

  Dragons.

  They looped around the Carriages, tailed by the Fog—a force that Allied scientists barely understood, though it seemed to be something similar to fire, something their bodies generated. Nobody was certain if its origin was magical or biological. That Fog flashed b
ehind the dragons in colors even brighter than Drakor’s sun, and the clouds of writhing plasma chewed through the fleet like it was nothing.

  Many Carriages were succumbing to attacks similar to the one that had disabled Aja and Emalkay.

  And now the attacker that had knocked out Aja’s systems was descending on her Carriage.

  It moved faster than she did, even though gravity had caught the Carriage and dragged her toward the surface. She was pinned between a dragon and Drakor III. Death under the claws of a dragon, death on the surface of the planet—either way, the odds of survival were poor. Very poor.

  Especially since she was watching the fleet getting pulverized far above them.

  “I think I can fix the mochila.” Emalkay clattered in the rear of the compartment, dropping tools and ripping open panels. Hope tinged his panicked tone. “You’ve just got to maintain low orbit long enough for someone to save us.”

  Nobody was going to save them.

  A crack slithered from the lower right quadrant of the viewport, inching its way toward the center of the glass. It wouldn’t take much pressure for that to shatter. The crack bisected the dragon’s cruel face as it undulated through space to close in on them. It was mere moments away from catching the Carriage now.

  There was no time for a rescue.

  Aja swallowed hard. “No, keep off the mochila. Redirect everything into the microwave engines.”

  “The manual controls?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about the AI?”

  “Forget the AI, Em!”

  Gravity tugged. They entered atmosphere. The exterior panels on the Carriage heated with the friction. Flames streaked along the edges of the viewport, blotting out Aja’s view of the fleet’s distant and serene demise.

  The dragon plummeted with them, folding his wings to catch up.

  “But how will the fleet find us if I don’t fix the mochila?” Emalkay asked.

  Aja didn’t reply.

  The Carriage’s manual controls became stiffer as the atmosphere’s density increased. Here, microwave propulsion took much more thrust to be effective. But it was all they had—they couldn’t fire the rocket engines, not with the structural damage they’d already sustained, with plasma still chewing through their paneling.