Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014

by Penny Publications

  Asimov's Science Fiction

  Kindle Edition, 2014 © Penny Publications

  * * *

  SHATTERDOWN

  Suzanne Palmer | 7523 words

  Suzanne Palmer lives and works in a little pocket utopia in western Massachusetts filled with writers, artists, scientists, and dreamers during the day, and the grateful solitude of the stars at night. From her desk window, she often sees wild turkeys, deer, fox, and the occasional moose. She's been busy finishing up a novel, but took a break from it to tell a wrenching tale about the cost of mining precious resources on an alien planet and what it truly means to...

  Four moons dotted the distant horizon, pale ghosts half-lost in shadow and framed on either side by Cjoi's heavy black boots propped up against the observation glass. She slouched in her chair, mute earpiece dangling at the base of her neck, her eyes and attention on the gas giant below. Ammonia clouds seethed and spun endless bright rivers of gold across its radiant face, deadly and compelling. Her dive-sphere was rolled toward the oncoming night, engines in stand-by, no interior lights except the tiny blips of critical systems to break the spell.

  If she dared close her eyes, she knew the planet would still be there. She had no doubt it would be the last thing she ever saw; it was just a matter of when. Not today, she told herself. Tomorrow is a possibility.

  She laughed, a hollow sound; from orbit, tomorrow was as near or as far as she wanted or dared. Assuming she didn't get caught, of course. The unspoiled view wasn't the only reason for running dark.

  Somewhere out there, Helise was watching.

  They'd met, each surprised and uncertain to see the other, on the viewing platform of the Protectorate orbital station. Helise stood straight and tall, standing out against the backdrop of motley, milling tourists in her crisp white uniform. Cjoi spotted her first, and froze in the crowd as those too-bright eyes swept slowly over the meaningless people to be stopped, startled, by a too-familiar face.

  "Kinni-inhass," Helise had said. Little flyer. "You've hardly changed."

  I tried, Cjoi did not say. Instead, they clasped arms and embraced, old friends, lovers once. "You stayed," she said.

  "And you returned," Helise answered. "I never thought you would."

  "Neither did I," she said. Need was an unbearable master.

  She kept her sphere in the updraft of a high-pressure band, trailing just outside the uneasy junction between dusk and night. The blinding glare of the sun was behind her, ripping through the clouds below. Tiny traces of green and brown stained the edges of the upwell, the light catching, here and there, in the faint diamond sparkle that had earned Pahlati the nickname Shining Giant.

  When she'd first been brought here aboard the Ama, the glimmer had been a glare, like stars themselves were being born in the planet's toxic halo. How could it have dimmed, while that day was still seared, permanent and bright, across all the fields of her mind?

  "Do you know me?" she asked the planet below her feet. It didn't answer, its churning face a vast, inscrutable mask. If planets had a memory, it would.

  "Dinner," Helise had said, not really a question so much as an assumption. It was easy to say yes; with food to fill the space between them, other things might be less obvious.

  Cjoi didn't have anything to wear, beyond the clothes on her back, that wasn't meant for space. Black tank top, black pants that had been cut to de-emphasize her thick, muscular build, black boots that gave her extra height to hide from the world that she'd been "grown small." She'd given up caring enough to hide her skin, saw it as a defiance. Helise hadn't flinched, hadn't cared, all those years ago; at this moment, Cjoi despised her for it, for being here now.

  There was a café on the upper decks of the station, the ceiling a dome of thick xglass that was all that lay between the chattering people poking at their desserts with shining forks, and a short, sharp death. The station spun edge-on to the world, as if to foster an illusion that they were co-conspirators, equals, side by side; she preferred it beneath her boots.

  Helise was waiting at a table already, and stood as she walked onto the deck. Heads turned her way, then away again, talking behind their hands as if that could conceal their curiosity. One of them, she heard. An original. One of the rescued. I thought they were all dead. Look at her skin! Do you think it hurts?

  "Ah!" Helise said. "So graceful, as always. I forgot how much I loved to watch you move." She smiled, genuine affection in it, and Cjoi forgave her just a little.

  She put her hand on the back of the chair, found the mag release, and slid it out before letting it click back onto the floor. Sitting, she turned her head, scanning the room, and heads turned back to their own tables as her eyes reached them.

  "You shouldn't do that," Helise said.

  "Make people uncomfortable?"

  "Notice or care if they are."

  Cjoi shrugged, passed a hand over the tabletop to activate the menu display. "They have anything edible here?" she asked. After a moment, she added, "Or affordable?"

  Helise leaned back in her seat. She was still wearing her uniform, although the jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a crimson blouse. "It's on me," she said. "One of the perks of being stationed here: free meals. Probably because there are seventeen menu items and they never change. No matter how good they are, if we had to pay to eat the same thing over and over again every day, we'd hurl ourselves down into the clouds in despair."

  Cjoi laughed. "I've done it," she said. "It doesn't work."

  "Sorry," Helise said. After an awkward pause, she brought up her own menu, though she must have had it memorized long before now. "None of you ever came back here, except Mirja, you know," she said at last. "And... Well. Why did you?"

  "Come back?"

  "Yes."

  "Not for the same reason as Mirja." Exactly for the same reason as Mirja: because staying away was just another death.

  "Why, then?"

  "To remember."

  "The others?"

  "Myself," Cjoi said. Too much. She selected an item nearly at random, turned the menu off. "Let's hope the pasta is decent. Now, what are your thoughts on wine?"

  She rolled her dive sphere down and to starboard, keeping it steady along the shifting edges of the upwell. The horizon remained clear, as it should be. She'd hoped the wine would get Helise talking about her work and the Protectorate patrols, but instead Helise wanted to talk about Cjoi—where she'd gone, what she was doing with herself now, and again that persistent question of why she'd come back.

  At least the pasta had been good, and the portion large. Cjoi craved carbs like a furnace, always burning, seeking fuel. In the time since the Ama, she had become acquainted with the luxury of a full stomach, and found it hard not to pursue at any opportunity. Even alcohol didn't prove a significant challenge to her overdriven metabolism, more was the pity.

  Clear-headed and clear-eyed, she descended toward the thin wisp of the updraft zone. Ahead, her systems were picking up one of the ever-present storms that spun the face of the world in endless pursuit of its smaller fellows; in its wake, the clouds were a churned up mess of brown and green as great colonies of skymoss were pulled up from the depths, torn apart and scattered, to slowly settle back down and regroup.

  Even running dark, her sphere would become more obvious the closer she got to the clouds rushing beneath her, a mote in the setting sun's brilliance. Her fingers moved over the helm controls, as familiar as any lover—more so—and the sphere dropped lower. Once cloaked in the ammonia fog, she would be nearly invisible; Pahlati's magnetosphere, screaming chaos across the radios of anyone near enough and masochistic enough to listen, would mask what faint whispers her ship
traced in the depths. And they would be faint; she had spent an obscene amount of credit on tech.

  The settlement trust from Giardal Enterprises had been significant, even divided as it was among the survivors. Seventeen of one hundred sixty-four, she thought. Fiftynine had died before she'd even been sold to the Corp, desperate parents trading another mouth they couldn't feed for food that wouldn't last. Whatever anger and hurt she might have had over it went away when she outlasted them, outlived her birth colony. She'd outlived the Enterprises too, but that anger would not die down so easily.

  Memories, and news, kept it stoked: Irya and Liline, pulled apart by a mob on Crigge colony as suspected mutants. Hae killed in a bar fight she most likely started. Odelia, Hae's opposite, the glue that kept them together and sane, dead in a Humans First bomb attack in an Ogloli spaceport. The rest, one by one, dead in different violent or stupid or inevitable ways.

  With Mirja's suicide, Cjoi was the last. And the whole balance of the trust, and the burden of its ghosts, had come down to settle on her. And I brought them back here, she thought. Ha. Fucking Percival of the ghost girls, that's me. Last one left to find the Grail.

  She set her sphere on a shallow descent, and watched the barometric pressure steadily climb as she fought the updraft and slipped deeper into ammonia fog. Tiny crystals began pinging off the hull. Just ice, for now. Even through the thick hull, she knew the sound, and her skin prickled at the memory. A tiny row of scales flushed upright along her forearm, and absently she smoothed them back down.

  Another two kil down into Pahlati's troposphere, the patter had become louder, smoother. She waited to hear the first thump of something larger than ice, the beginnings of the storm she was seeking, but nothing. Helise was exaggerating, she told herself. Protectorate propaganda, only.

  Still, even if exaggerated... Cjoi had seen with her own eyes how the planet had changed. She put her hand up on the console arm and switched on the external air buffers. Tiny jets would coat the outside of the dive sphere with a layer of moving air, deflecting all but direct hits around and away. That had cost. The roar of ice against the shell instantly faded, if not the uncertainly that had stuck claws into her back, sending distress signals up and down her spine.

  Below her, through the glass, she watched for any glints of light under the growing gloom of cloud-cover, as the barometer ticked steadily upward.

  "Helise." A man had come up behind them, put a hand on the back of Helise's chair. He was achingly handsome, tall and smooth-skinned, everything Cjoi was not. He was smiling, friendly, radiating confidence like his own small sun.

  "Ah! Ryon!" Helise turned, beaming. "This is Cjoi. You remember? I've talked about her."

  "The kid?" Without asking, he pulled over a chair from the next table over, turning it around and sitting down beside Helise at the table, close enough their hips were touching. His smile grew wider. "Hardly a kid. My apologies."

  Cjoi bit back a sharp reply. She and Helise were nearly the same age; was it height that kept her from being a grownup in people's eyes? Or was it the unshakable stigma of victimhood, writ large across her small frame? I don't want to talk about me with you, she thought.

  Instead, she asked, "You're also in the Protectorate?"

  "Science and survey."

  "Ryon is also part of my quad," Helise added.

  He leaned back. "If you plan on being around here for a bit, I'm sure we can talk about trying quint," he said. He winked. "Variety is the spice, and all that."

  "I'm contented to stay solo," Cjoi answered. "And I don't plan on being here long."

  "Oh," he said. "That's a pity."

  Perhaps sensing Cjoi was uncomfortable, Helise put her hand over Ryon's. "Hey, I'm catching up with my friend, here. Don't you have something to do?" she asked.

  "Johar and I are heading out in the Veresiel tonight, to take yet another set of atmospheric samples. Work, work, work. But if you two want to skip dessert here, we'd have time for a different type of exploratory—"

  "Ryon, go away," Helise said. "Now."

  He stood up, straightening his jacket. "Can't blame me for trying," he said. Reaching out, he picked up Cjoi's hand; she was too surprised to pull it away before he'd brought it to his lips, left a tender kiss on it, and let her go. "I do hate to miss out on rare treasures."

  "Don't mind him," Helise said, as he sauntered off. "He's as incorrigible as he is charming, but... well. He has his plusses." She was blushing as she said it, and she suddenly seemed so very far away, receding back into a stranger.

  Cjoi coughed, picking up another forkful of pasta to cover her discomfort. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not used to attention, at least not the flattering kind."

  "I... look." Helise fidgeted in her chair. "It wouldn't be a problem for me, if you wanted some time alone with him—"

  "No!" Cjoi said, more forcefully than she intended. Helise looked startled, then relieved. "I'm not staying here very long," she added. "I'm taking the next shuttle back out, tonight." She hadn't planned to, but knew she would as soon as she said it. It was too complicated here, her ability to think lost in a muddle of unhappiness.

  "Well," Helise said, managing a smile. "I guess that means we do have time for dessert."

  Cjoi held her dive sphere at eighty atmos pressure. This was as low as she'd ever gone; even Giardal Enterprises, in all their greed, had known that pushing their divers further was too risky.

  They spent a lot on us, she thought. Custom-made monsters.

  She sat there for a while, nothing to see but thick, toxic cloud through the glass. When she closed her eyes, at night, that same endless shade of gray pervaded her dreams.

  Throwing her hand down on the console, she resumed her descent.

  One last obligation, before escape. Helise had insisted Cjoi come to her scheduled talk, and since her shuttle was still more than two hours out, she saw no graceful way to say no. "I may never see you again," Helise had said.

  "Don't make me part of it," she'd insisted.

  The stepped hall was about half-full. Cjoi settled in the back of the room, up against the wall, where the bright lights at the podium wouldn't reach. She wondered how many different colonies the people crowded into the seats toward the front represented, colonies that had survived and thrived enough to produce something as frivolous and wasteful as tourists. To her they all looked the same.

  She knew the planetary science inside and out; maybe she hadn't known the words ammonia and hydrogen until after she'd been freed, but she knew how they felt, how they burned. Helise walked out onto the floor and took up her space behind the podium as if that was the most natural place for her to be, and when she began to speak, her voice was loud and clear and without hesitation. If her eyes, roving the audience, found Cjoi huddled at the back, her expression did not change. The lights dimmed as the stage screen cleared to a live pic from the planet below, and the audience oooh'd and aaah'd on cue.

  "The planet Pahlati was taken into Protectorate custody after it was declared a natural wonder of the galaxy, and deemed to be endangered. You might think it's hard to endanger a gas giant!"

  Laughter.

  "I was a junior staff member aboard the Protectorate flagship, Lisians Champion, eleven years ago. You could hardly see this beautiful vista you are now viewing behind me, so thick were the poaching ships in orbit. And of course, the Giardal Enterprises vessels." Helise pressed a button, and a giant blot of ugly ship appeared on the screen. The Ama. It threw Cjoi back in her seat, a visceral panic wrapping itself around her heart and lungs, and she had to force herself to breathe. It's an image, she told herself. An old image. Nothing more. You watched the ship get towed into the scrapdock, watched it be turned to slag. Remember that.

  "All of these ships had come for one thing, and one thing only," Helise said. "The Pahlati Diamonds."

  At a hundred-twenty atmos, she put her sphere into auto-pilot, holding steady. It was dark now, full into night, but this far down it hardly mattered. She kne
w this planet, the vortexes of this zone, better than she knew herself.

  She'd been pushing up the pressure inside her sphere since she'd sealed herself into it, two days earlier. It had been parked two hops out from the shuttle station that serviced the Protectorate zone around Pahlati, just in case anyone tried to follow her. No one had. She'd had a surprisingly easy time navigating the tiny dead spaces between Protectorate sensors, which were set out to catch much bigger prey.

  Interior acclimatization was now nearly caught up; she could feel the changes in her body, a thousand tiny genetic switches thrown to wake the sleeping monster. It was time. She pulled on gloves, then wrapped a control band on her left arm from wrist to elbow. Powering it on, she checked that it was syncing properly with helm control, then untethered herself from the ship's primary console.

  She pulled her boots off, carefully, making sure the magsoles were on and she wouldn't suddenly end up with a heavy projectile in the cabin. Reaching overhead, she pulled open the storage bin, carefully extracting her exosuit from its pocket. She hated the feel of it against her skin. Even now, still lagging open at her chest, hood down, it felt like a thick, skin-tight prison.

  Sealing it down to the gloves, she slipped her boots back on. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes for a long moment, preparing herself. Then she lifted the hem of her tank top, first one side, then the other, and connected the suit's systems up to the implanted ports that ran directly into the cutting-edge, black-market hardware installed in her lungs.

  At the press of a button, her seat detached from the control arms and slid through the floor of the control cabin into the narrow space below, clamping onto ring rails with a solid clunk of inevitability.

  From her arm-band control, she set the sphere to slowly rotate one hundred eighty degrees. Her seat, running along the rails, stayed at the lowest point as the ship moved around her. From the outside of the control cabin wall, in easy reach above her face, she peeled off the equipment she wanted one piece at a time. Chute. Fluid recycling filters. Charged hi-ox packs. The breather apparatus and mouthpiece. The CO 2 force-exchanger. She attached them to her suit, hooking them into control, and running another set of checks on each before powering them live. Last was the breather setup; she inhaled deeply, enjoying that last, chill breath of filtered air, before she clicked it into the suit ports that ran into her lung implants. Instantly it began to fill her lungs with foam, and she fought the adrenaline-fear as she choked on it. When she couldn't not anymore, she breathed.