by Linda Nagata
She switches off the mic. Then she leans back in her seat, gaze frozen on the instrument panel. “I’m sorry, Shelley.”
I use my satellite relay to link to gen-com.
“Jaynie?”
“Here.”
“We’re not coming back. We’re being routed to Johnston Atoll on the basis of an undefined and unconfirmed emergency. They say we’ll be allowed to land, but there may be an accident.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll see what we can find out, what we can do. Can you divert and land somewhere else?”
“Negative,” Kurnakova says. “Flight computer has control.”
“Roger that.”
Our long bank has gone full circle. We are spiraling down through the atmosphere, dumping velocity fast. I can’t help myself. I glance over the seat back to check on the warhead, where it’s securely strapped to the deck. It looks as harmless as ever, just an unadorned steel cylinder that gives no hint of its terrible potential. But more dangerous now than its physical power are the implications of its existence and its history. The warhead is testimony to failed nuclear security, both past and present, and to the vulnerability of the technological system we have created with our satellites and our ubiquitous electronics.
If Semak had blown the nuke in orbit, he could have ignited a world war. That didn’t happen. We brought the device down to ensure it wouldn’t happen, but now both the Americans and the Russians have a problem, because if the news gets out that they allowed a nuke into orbit, old treaties will be terminated and a race to militarize space will commence. Even the dreams of dragons will fade as private development is choked off out of concerns for security, leaving companies like Sidereal Transit Systems to crumble into dust.
To prevent that, time is now being unwound, history rewritten, facts force-fitted into a politically convenient narrative. The warhead we found will disappear again, Semak will not survive his precarious descent in the evacuation capsule, Kurnakova will die in a tragic accident at Johnston Atoll, and I will never have been present at all.
The worst part of it is I understand why they need to do this.
Not that I intend to cooperate.
“Jaynie.”
“Here, Shelley.”
“Talk to Jones. If we can get control of the flight computer—”
The plasma glow is gone, but the night sky lights up again in a blinding white burst. As swift as the light, the realization comes: They are shooting at us. Shock follows: They did not score a direct hit.
Maybe our speed saved us, or maybe the tiny profile of our spaceplane wasn’t programmed into their guidance system—or maybe the Red is trying to play this out a little longer?
The shock wave from the explosion collapses that hope. We are still in a steep bank when it slams into us. An alarm launches a buzzing protest as Lotus bucks, shimmies, and rolls over, hard and fast so that the horizon line on the instrument panel is upside down and I’m hanging in my harness. The truth hits next: The missile detonated as intended—ahead of us—avoiding the miniscule risk of a direct hit on the nuke, because the shock wave alone is enough to bring us down.
Debris from the blast slams into us with ear-shattering concussions. The flight computer is overwhelmed and aborts its program, yielding to Kurnakova. She grabs the controls. “Fuck!” she screams, working frantically to get us upright again. “Roll for me, sweet one. Try!”
Lotus swoops. I’m thrown sideways in my harness. The fuselage vibrates madly, and from somewhere there comes a high metallic scream as the plane begins to tear apart—but the horizon icon on the instrument panel shows us to be upright again.
Then Lotus goes dark as the electrical system fails.
A thin wash of moonlight falls across the instrument panel. The satellite relay is still clipped to it. It’s a field unit, independent of Lotus and running on batteries. “Jaynie!”
“Stand by. We’re talking to STS ground con—”
“Jaynie, we’re going down! Tell Delphi I’m sorry.”
Kurnakova is alternately cursing at Lotus and begging the plane to bring its nose up, up, as she works the flight controls. I flash on Delphi, listening. She doesn’t need to hear any more of this. Breathing hard, I reach out and switch the satellite link off.
Lotus continues to shudder and shake. Not long now before we burst apart.
At least the mission succeeded. It was worth doing. We recovered the intel from Semak, and then we went beyond the mission plan and returned a rogue nuke to the world. That nuke will soon be on the bottom of the Pacific, but a submarine crew will surely come to recover it.
I wonder: Is the story supposed to end this way?
I think it is. I’ve had my run. I’ve played my role. Welcome to the finale.
Fuck that.
I don’t want it to end. I don’t want it to be over. So I grope for options. I grasp for ideas. Anything. There is no way Lotus can hold together long enough to land, but maybe it doesn’t have to. I unbuckle my harness. Lotus bucks, throwing me into the instrument panel. But then I get myself braced. “Slow us down!” I yell at Kurnakova. “Get our speed down as far as you can!”
She pitches me a look, moonlight glittering in her wild eyes. “I’m trying to make Johnston!”
“We’ll never make Johnston! So we’re getting out. You remember? The B61? We’ve got its parachute!”
“You’re fucking crazy!”
No shit.
“It cannot happen,” she insists as if the idea actually offends her. “You say this because you do not comprehend how fast we are going!”
“So slow us the fuck down! Do you want to die?”
I heave myself over the seat just as the plane drops out from under me. It’s only my grip on the seat back that keeps me from being hurled against the ceiling. But when I get my feet under me again, Kurnakova has recovered control. The plane is still trembling, shuddering, but we’re flying level. It’s an interlude of peace compared with what we just went through—but it lasts only seconds. There’s a deafening crack! and then wind shrieks, prying into the fuselage and I’m in free fall again—but Kurnakova is still doing battle. She gets the nose of the plane up and once more our descent slows. If we were still flying at supersonic velocity, surely we would have ripped apart by now?
I heave myself at the parachute, hammering the quick-release buckles that hold it strapped to the deck. Then I haul it to the jump seat we set up for Semak. I’m gambling the seat has a titanium frame. Holding myself in place with my feet, I couple the parachute to the jump seat using a cargo strap and the swivel from the parachute rig. Then I unclip the seat from the deck. My theory is that when the seat falls with my weight and Kurnakova’s in it, it will be enough to trigger the parachute to deploy—or at least things would work that way in a comic-book universe where superheroes rule. In the real world? The seat frame will probably snap.
Like Kurnakova said, I’m fucking crazy.
I grip the seat with my foot to keep it close, then I lean over Kurnakova, screaming to be heard over the wind. “How fast are we going?”
“It does not matter! We are going down!”
“Come with me now!” I reach over the seat to unbuckle her harness.
She shoves my hands away. It’s an instinctive defense. She’s not fighting me. Not really, because a moment later she hits the release button, wriggles out of her harness, and rolls over the back of the seat.
Lotus starts to roll again. I grab Kurnakova and throw myself into the jump seat before it can slide away. I’ve got her in my lap while I grip the seat’s frame with my robot feet. “Get the harness around us!”
The deck tilts and the fuselage screams. A piece tears out above our heads. Another follows. We are seconds away from catastrophic failure.
Kurnakova twists, grabbing one side of the jump seat’s harness. I grab the other just as the fu
selage shatters with an ear-rending scream. What I see is like a still shot, composed in moonlight, frozen in time: flakes and shards of the fuselage suspended in the grip of a hurricane wind.
A fraction of a second later the debris hits. Kurnakova’s body shields mine. I feel her anguished spasms. I taste her blood in the ripping air. And then she’s gone. Vanished in the roaring dark.
I’m still in the chair, my feet locked on its frame, one hand with a death grip on half the harness. And I’m falling backward. God knows if I’m clear of the debris. I wrestle the harness over my shoulders and fight with the buckle, once, twice, and then it locks just as the parachute deploys, a roar of rippling canvas followed by a low whump! like mortar fire that puts the stars out. God’s hand reaches down out of the empty dark, arresting my momentum so abruptly my bones try to separate at every joint, my lungs collapse, and my brain slams against the inside of my skull.
• • • •
The world starts up again and I’m still falling. It takes me a few seconds to really register the fact. Surprise follows that I’m not dead—not yet. Can’t be much longer though. Fuck.
I try to assess the situation. Wind is racing past me, brutalizing my eyes, roaring in my ears, stripping away my body heat as it hammers the fabric of my coverall into rippling waves and drives a mad feathering in the canvas above my head.
That canvas is my parachute. Is it working? It’s deployed, but is it fully deployed or is it just a tangled mess trailing me in my long fall?
My eyes are clamped to slits against the force of the wind but I crane my neck anyway and try to look. Nothing’s there. . . . Maybe that’s a good sign? If the chute weren’t deployed I’d see the stars.
Right?
Maybe I’m looking up at a cloud deck.
Nothing I can do about it anyway.
I look down.
I’ve seen the world from orbit. This is a well-lit planet. There are only a few places in all the world that are still dark at night. Too bad for me the middle of the Pacific Ocean is one of them. There is not a spark of bright yellow, not a speck of electric white. No ship’s lights, no shore. All I can see is a faint glittering of moonlight reflected and refracted in fine, sinuous, broken, watery lines.
I twist around to look behind me. The movement sends me reeling sideways like I’m on a fucking carnival swing but I get a view in the other direction—and it’s just more moonlight on water, endless water, nothing else.
I’m spinning, twisting, breathing hard.
How lost am I?
I need to know.
So I check my GPS. I have to close my eyes all the way to do it, to keep out the wind that wants to destroy the lenses of my overlay. Another few seconds slip past while the lenses rehydrate. Then I get the menu open. Pull up a map. A map with nothing on it because I’m falling to Earth in the middle of fucking nowhere. I zoom out, and that reveals islands that might as well be a million miles away. I don’t bother to identify them because it doesn’t fucking matter. All I care about now is how many seconds I have left before I hit. So I open my eyes to just slits and look down.
I can see texture in the water now.
I have a feeling I’m falling too fast.
Nukes like the B61 use parachutes in part to soften their landing, but mostly the chute serves to slow the bomb’s fall so the delivery plane has time to get away before fucking Armageddon ignites. I have been a soldier in the war against Armageddon and that is something I am proud of—but soldiers, of course, are expendable.
Oh, I can easily see the long crests and ridges of swells now, moonlight glittering on their peaks.
Soon.
I am falling too fast, I’m sure of it.
I’m sorry, Delphi.
This time for sure, I won’t be coming back.
The closer I get to the glittering dark, the faster it seems I’m falling. With my hand on my harness release, I watch the sparkle of moonlight—so hard to tell how far away the surface is—and then it’s not far at all. The scent of the sea envelopes me as spume blows off a wave crest only meters below.
I hit the harness release, kick free of the seat, and drop feetfirst into the water.
It’s farther away than I thought. When I hit it’s a hammer blow. Whatever air I had in my lungs is expelled on impact. I plunge into utter darkness with a horde of tingling bubbles racing across the skin of my hands and face.
• • • •
I want to breathe, but where is the surface?
Don’t panic.
Somewhere above me is the parachute, square meters of canvas coming down on my head. Somewhere in the dark, guylines are sinking beneath the surface, tangling in an invisible web.
I pick a direction and swim. I pull hard at the water and kick—and learn something new. For all their amazing engineering, my robot feet are useless for swimming because they’re so well made they slice through the water without any significant resistance.
I kick anyway, I stroke, thinking of Harvey, lost over the side of the Non-Negotiable. Her rig pulled her down, but I know she didn’t panic. She would have kept her cool, tried to escape—she would have tried, but she never saw the surface again.
I don’t know if I’ve gone far enough to clear the chute, but I’ve gone as far as I can. I need the surface. So I swim up, up, up, empty lungs lined in fire, offering me no buoyancy. It’s all a struggle and for what?
To breathe again.
To breathe. That’s all that matters.
I’m going so fast when I reach the surface that I burst through to my waist, throwing off a spray of glittering foam.
• • • •
There is a gibbous moon above me, a handful of bright stars, and the flashing lights of an airliner so far away its engine noise doesn’t reach me. Long swells roll past, lifting me up, ferrying me down, again and again. I breathe.
Breathe.
Embraced by a silence that is not silence because it’s broken by the blowing wind and the gurgle of water in my ears as I float with only my face above the surface, all too conscious of the infinite deep below me.
There is no reason in the world I should be alive.
I watch the plane until it disappears.
A little longer.
• • • •
Strange things happen on the edge of death. There are always stories.
My fingers have become wrinkled and numb, my ears are aching from the cold water, my eyes burning from the salt, and I think I’m owed something before I go. A ghost, a vision, here on the edge of death. Harvey, come to escort me to Valhalla. Or Lissa, come to show me the way to the Elysian fields. Hell, I’d be happy if Matt Ransom showed up, eager to haul me off to Heaven or Hell, I don’t give a shit which, just as long as something’s there.
They don’t come.
But why should they? I’m the one who got them killed.
There’s a faint flicker from the skullnet icon, the first I’ve noticed. Safe bet that I’ll be seeing a lot more of that. Wouldn’t want to remember my own death as a traumatic experience.
Fuck.
It’s too damn bad I don’t have a satellite uplink because I’ve got some hellacious good video recorded. I’d send it out into the world if I could.
Not that it matters.
A hundred years from now, no one will give a shit about anything I’ve ever done.
Hell, one year from now it’ll all be ancient history, with some new crisis on the stage.
The world goes on. Not one of us matters all that much. The dragons want to change that, they want to believe they matter.
Hell, we all do.
• • • •
Far, far overhead, an airliner passes. My overlay wakes up, sensing a link to the Cloud. I watch the trembling of the network icon and my heart beats a little faster. But the connection is den
ied and then the plane is out of range.
I don’t need false hope. I don’t want it. If I’m going to die, let me die.
I’m cold and exhausted and I want to sleep.
I remember that the skullnet can help me with that.
Am I done then?
Maybe I am.
I’ve come back from the dead too many times.
I close my salt-swollen eyelids and, using my gaze, I work my way through the overlay’s menu tree. First, I shut down network access. No more false hope for me.
Next, sleep.
A word, a thought. That’s all it will take.
• • • •
I don’t do it.
Why chase death? It’ll get here soon enough.
• • • •
I hear things: the wind, my heartbeat, fish jumping, the gurgle of water in my ears, a low bass thrumming. I stir, open my eyes, lift my head from the water—and I can’t hear the low noise anymore. So I let the water fill my ears again and there it is, the rumble of a distant engine.
No false hope. That’s all I ask.
I tread water to keep my head above the surface so I don’t have to hear it.
A swell rolls under me, raising me up. As I pass over its crest, motion draws my gaze. Motion far above the ceaseless motion of the waves. A shadow, a shape, moving in the moon-washed sky. It’s high, thirty degrees below the zenith. It’s not an airliner; it has no lights. I can see it only because moonlight falls gray against its delta wing as it transits swiftly, silently, between horizons.
It’s a surveillance drone—a larger, faster, higher-flying aircraft than the angel we used in the LCS.
Why?
Why is it here? If the navy has come to look for the fallen nuke, they should have come with a submarine. A drone won’t help them.
Why is it flying so low that I can see it?
I blink against the salt, watching it, until after several seconds it disappears in the distance, leaving me alone again at the empty center of nowhere.
Maybe it will come back.
Doesn’t matter.
With only my head above the water I am a speck, a mote in the wave-tossed, glittering vast night, my body as cold as the ocean that cradles me. Even an AI couldn’t pick me out against the background noise.