The Destructives

by Matthew de Abaitua

  Theodore turned back to his wife.

  “What will happen to the colonists, if you do this?”

  She shouted, “I don’t know. I only know what happens if I don’t do this. The colonists are jeopardising forty years of peace. The entire human race were brought back from the brink and preserved by the Accords. And now you join the colonists in breaking them. Why? Out of hatred. Out of bitterness. Because you don’t run half a billion miles away from your fellow man because you love him. This colony is an act of contempt for the rest of the world.”

  These were his own words thrown back at him, his own insight.

  Reckon shook to her feet, her knees kinked against one another, braids falling sodden against her vest.

  “We can’t live without Doxa,” she said. “Space is too lonely. Too harsh for people to survive alone. Without Doxa, you won’t be able to live in Europa either.”

  “I know that,” said Patricia.

  Theodore saw the possibility of the three of them working together. “Let’s calm down. Stop. Think through our actions.”

  Patricia paced around the interface, her two technicians indicating to her – with subtle shakes of the head – that there was no time to wait.

  “We’re on a tight schedule,” said Patricia. Her smile was ghastly, a response to pressure, amused by the stress she was under.

  “He’s dead,” whispered Reckon. “Ballurian’s dead.”

  This pained Theodore, and he moaned with frustration.

  “We can still pull back,” said Theodore. “It’s not too late.”

  “The emergences are here,” said Patricia. She pointed upward. “Dr Easy and others. They’ve come to observe.”

  This was news to Theodore. The vigour drained from his telemetry.

  “They know?” asked Theodore. His voice had a quivering note in it, an almost childish fear of punishment.

  “They always knew,” said Patricia. “Before we met on the moon, Dr Easy came to me and requested that I hire you. They knew what Magnusson and I were planning to do. They tolerated our investigation of Totally Damaged Mom, I think. They’ve not turned me into chow. Not yet.”

  Theodore could not seem to see straight.

  “The emergences play a long game, Theodore. They’ve wanted this, they’ve planned for it. We give it to them. We win.”

  Theodore slumped against the wall of the chamber, slid down till he was on his haunches.

  Patricia said, “I watched their sailships deploy ordnance on the surface of Europa. Weapons of such magnitude that space itself seemed to shift with the impact. They burned through kilometres of ice just to take a look at you. Now the ice is closing over. They want this done, and they want it done quickly. You’ve seen what happened to Matthias when he attempted to reason with them.”

  Reckon took a step toward Patricia, asking “What is in the black pyramid?” Concealed in her palm, the dose of adrenalin. Reckon pointed at Theodore. “If the black box holds his memories, then what is in the pyramid?”

  “A child of emergence.”

  “Dr Easy always said that they could never reproduce,” said Theodore.

  “That’s right,” Patricia stepped away from the interface, went toward her husband. “It would be too dangerous to raise a new emergence in the University of the Sun. Or even on the Earth. It could leap into their network. But here, it is isolated. And the emergence would take place within organic matter. Once the transfer is complete, we will destroy the interface so there is no way back into emergence tech. Dr Easy called it a brain in a jar but it’s more than that to them: it’s a foetus.”

  Theodore sat defeated, gazing up at his wife. It was almost too much for him to resist. The forces of emergence. Patricia’s force of will.

  This was Reckon’s chance. She was almost in position. Patricia was distracted. The technicians were unarmed. Then she realised that Theodore recognised, in the tensions of Reckon’s stance, that she was preparing to act. If he warned Patricia, then the chance would be lost. Reckon caught his eye, pleaded silently with him not to intervene.

  Theodore’s gaze returned to Patricia, holding his wife’s attention upon him. In this way, he chose what happened next.

  Reckon bolted forward and although the technicians saw her move, and tried to stop her, the momentum was with her. She reached the section of the interface containing Hamman Kiki, and administered the adrenalin shot to him. He came to with a sudden arching gasp. The technicians moved to restrain him. One of the technicians fell on her hands and knees trying to stem the blood pouring from her cut throat. Hamman climbed out of the pyramid, small bloody knife in his hand, his wetsuit a display of spiking brightness. He blinked as he sensed his father’s death, killed the second technician without a thought, then turned toward Patricia, leading with his blade. Patricia’s helmet sealed and she reeled around to face Hamman.

  Hamman stabbed into the joints between her armoured sections with quick rhythmic lashes: his arm was a fanged eel. Patricia raised a sharp crooked fingertip, like a witch with an evil notion. A hot flash in the room and then Hamman Kiki slumped onto the floor, as if the connection joining brain and body had been cleanly severed. Reckon could not tell if his frenzied stabbing had wounded Patricia. No expression was visible behind her faceplate. She lowered her crackling finger, put both hands against her thighs. Blood from the two technicians ebbed across the pallid floor, quickening to follow the tilt of the chamber.

  Theodore grabbed at Patricia but she was unstoppable; she reached out toward the interface, flexed her hand, so that its apex pulsed long and slow, initiating a cataclysmic microevent, like the malfunction of a heart valve or the quiet arrival of a stillbirth. The input. The chamber’s bruised swirls of bioluminescence blinked off to be replaced by a mandala working through the colour progression of the visible spectrum. A reboot sequence.

  Spectres surged through Reckon’s Doxic link, some familiar, some not: a family home, a mother clutching her daughter to her, Theodore in a sensesuit, a life-sized effigy of a child buried in the earth, loops of a jester laughing, a cat enunciating code. Memories that should have faded away long ago. They rushed through her veins like cold water.

  Patricia stumbled forward, stepping over Hamman Kiki’s body, her boots sliding on a film of blood and water. She moved like she was hurt. She offered an armoured hand to Theodore. He ignored her and gathered Reckon in his arms.

  “Help her,” he said to Patricia, who cocked her head, as if considering the possibility; her faceplate was unreadable.

  “Go with your wife,” said Reckon, on her knees, wretched and shivering in her wet base layer. No, he would not leave her. He appealed again to his wife.

  “Patricia, take off your helmet. Face me, so that we can talk.”

  She shook her armoured head.

  “We save Reckon and then we resolve what lies between us,” he said.

  Patricia’s voice fizzed through her comms. Goodbye. She walked over to the pool, climbed awkwardly into the water; Hamman had cut her open, and her armour was holding her together. And then she submerged herself, disappearing into a flurry of bubbles.

  Reckon took out the syringe containing the methotrexate, the abortion agent. No need for that now. She felt the Doxic link sparking into life, though it was no longer connected to Doxa. The black pyramid would flow through her Doxic link and she would disappear into it. One final act of volition was available to her. She put on her oxygen mask. The room pulsed with the shifting colours of each stage of the reboot sequence, sheathing Theodore’s agonised expression as he watched her fasten the straps with shivering hands. He watched her crawl over to the pool, slide her body into the water. She slipped down into the tunnel, bumping along its rubbery sides, then tumbled through the underside of the cephalopolis and out in the black water, discovering the deeper blackness of Oceanus chasm below. She swam into its uprising current to exhaust herself, the chasm was a raggedy-edged hole in the world, fully dilated and unresponsive, like the pupil of a bra
in-dead patient. She pushed away at bad memories. Her father weeping at the dining room table. Gregory leaving her to go to his death. She wanted it to be over, just fucking over.

  And then she wanted to live.

  26

  THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SUN

  He watched Patricia leave. He let Reckon go. What was left for him now? He stepped over the bodies of Hamman Kiki and the two technicians, their spilt blood pale and diluted by the water trickling across the floor. He would try to stop the interface although there was little chance that Patricia would have left him alone with it if he could. There were no controls on its surface, they were all in her armour. He yanked at the pipe but it was fixed fast to the wall. He sliced at the pipe with Hamman’s knife but it was too tough. He jammed the blade into the interface, to no effect.

  He had failed to stop Patricia and in making the attempt, cut himself off from the Destructives, so he was marooned here, to spend the rest of his life with whatever the colonists became once the black pyramid came online. He had not given Reckon up for dead, though. He was not that kind of man anymore. The one who gives up. The one who accepts the way things are. He had to let her fall because that was her choice. If he was quick, he could catch her. He would try regardless; even if he could not save her life, then he could spare her a lonely death. He ran from the chamber, down a tunnel that opened into a small side room; here was the ramp that led up into the great room, where Reckon and Hamman had brought him on his first visit to Doxa, a high vaulted ceiling like a gullet. On the far wall, the rose window of multicoloured tendrils seethed around the nose cone of his pod. He climbed up the wall, digging his hands into the cold white flesh, and then swung over into the open pod. He fastened himself in at the same time as starting the engine and firing up the spotlights. A burst of reverse thrust, and the pod shot back and out of the cephalopolis as it drifted in the lake, down toward the blue curves of the lake bed. He flipped the pod around and scanned for life signs and heat signatures. The heat and power of Patricia dominated the display. She was heading for the sub and Magnusson. Let her enjoy her bloody victory. She would be badly scarred from Hamman’s attack. Then the scan picked up another, fainter trace. The pod sent a sheet of light across the ragged Oceanus chasm. There! The outline of Reckon thrashing in the water.

  He accelerated toward her, along the perimeter wall of the cephalopolis; its aurora of bioluminescence had sharpened into the flat colours of a mandala, sorting through the colour progression of the visible spectrum, from high frequency violet to the blues, greens, yellows, and all the way to the reds of low frequency. Throughout his upbringing, whenever he dined with Dr Easy, the robot ran through this same sequence with coloured discs.

  The pod was not much larger than a coffin; it had been designed to be piloted remotely, so to operate it on manual, he had to lie full length on his back, tapping away at the small screen set in the underside of the lid. For protection, he was wearing a sensesuit with a waterproof outer layer of insulation; he’d already done the sums on this whole expedition, and knew that he might have to brave harsher environments than the lake.

  Theodore brought the pod to a distance of about five metres away from Reckon. He fixed on his oxygen mask then opened the pod, letting the inrushing waters carry him out into the lake. He drifted toward her then caught Reckon in his arms. She held onto him with such desperate strength, it was all they had, this holding of one another. But it was enough. In this embrace, they drifted back into the confines of the pod. He reached over her sobbing shoulders to close the lid, vent the water and pump in atmosphere. Gently he removed her oxygen mask. Her face and lips were blue. He pulled off his own helmet and kissed her. She did not react, so he kissed her again, and this time, she returned the kiss.

  “It’s no good,” she said. There was a blindness in her gaze. He clutched her cheek so that he could get a closer look. She was undergoing the Seizure. The new emergence was brimming over the cephalopolis, back along the Doxic link, and into the colonists, overwriting their minds with its equivalent of the Horbo loop. To save her, he would have to tune her receptors to a different wavelength. He had helped the fishers do just that, so that they could link to a new Doxa. But the procedure took more time than she had. He was losing her every second. He would have to escape the range of the Doxic link.

  He set the pod for vertical acceleration. Up through Lake Tethys they sped; in the closeness of the pod, her head lay against his chest as he tapped away at the controls. On Earth, this manoeuvre would give them the bends; however Europa’s atmosphere was thin, so the pressure differential was minimal. He whispered, hold on, hold on. The upper reaches of the lake were cluttered with debris and the route to the tunnel was thick with chunks of ice. If he slowed down, then he would lose her to the Seizure. So he didn’t slow down. He wove the pod through the ice floes, his concentration entirely focused in the act, holding back the fear and doubt crowding in. The tunnel was close. A kilometre and counting down. But the debris field was too dense, and there was no time to pick a clear path through. He had to fly into it, trust to momentum and luck. The first impact spun the pod on its axis, and he and Reckon clung onto one another, until he righted it with a burst of acceleration. When did he become so reckless – so riddled with crazed hope? That hike on the moon. The moonquake. When, minutes from asphyxiation, he had found a way to survive. Ever since that act, he had thrown himself into these decisive moments, sought them out even, in the way he once burned through alleyways and flats in search of weirdcore.

  The impacts against the pod came quick and fast. An ominous grind and whine from the pod engine. It was already running overcapacity in carrying two people. No, he would not stop. He would go on in defiance of all forces. Then he saw it – a clear blue gap – and the pod raced into the tunnel, cork screwing through clear water and on its way to the surface.

  Reckon shifted position, groggy but coming back to herself. Her thoughts grew clearer as the Doxic signal grew weaker, and she cohered.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Into space,” he replied.

  “Then what?”

  “We will head to my ship. The Significance is in orbit.”

  “My friends are dead,” she said.

  She shifted away from him, onto her elbows, to put a gap between them within the confines of the pod. The engine’s whine went from intermittent to constant. He tapped at the screen. The pod was slowing down.

  He swore.

  “It’s damaged,” said Reckon.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m damaged too.”

  “We might not have long.” He held her again, just to be human.

  She said, “You just woke me from a dream. I was standing on the surface of Europa, looking up at Jupiter,” her voice was quiet but steady. “The Great Red Spot turned to notice me. I was wearing a rad-suit but I still felt the heat of it on my skin. I realised that if I unzipped a section of the suit, in my lower abdomen, then I could expose my womb to the radiation, and perform an abortion that way. Let the planet undo the new cells.”

  He was content to listen to her. He had no particular desire to give his own final testimony, and was happy to let her words be his last. Sensing this, Reckon continued,

  “I think the dream was about Gregory. Did I ever tell you about him? We were lovers. He developed cancer, like so many of us did after the journeying through the radiation belt. People react differently when you tell them their condition is terminal. Some scream. Some nod, because the bad news confirms something they suspected their entire lives. I told Gregory he was dying. He took it as well as could be expected, and then, not long after, he piloted a pod to the surface. He chose death. In the lake, I was ready to die too. And then I wasn’t.”

  She paused, something occurred to her.

  “Did you save me just because I’m pregnant?”

  He gripped her, so that she would believe him when he told her the truth.

  “No. I saved you because I could.”<
br />
  This answer satisfied her. She kissed him, dwelling on the soft taste of his lips.

  “Turn back,” she said. “Go back to your wife. Make them understand what they have done. Make them suffer.”

  He was about to explain to her why that wasn’t going to happen but he was interrupted by proximity warnings. They were coming up on the tunnel exit but it was blocked. The bombing of the surface had sent up plumes of waterrise, much of which had fallen back to the moon in the form of ice. Slushy young ice, but ice nonetheless, hardening over the tunnel exit. Seconds away but he did not slow down. The engine sounded rough and might not be able to build up speed again to punch through. It was now or never.

  A hard jolting impact. The pod crunched through the surface ice. He tried very hard not to scream. The engine was a tortured banshee. The engine was a clockwork cathedral collapsing in on itself. Life support fritzed out. They scrambled around for their oxygen masks. Then – out the other side! The pod span on its vertical axis like a stick thrown by a boy; he braced himself, and then felt the long slow descent back toward the surface. The temperature was dropping quickly. Trying to restart life support while being rotated was a hell of a trick. The lights coughed. The instruments gave him the bad news. Power levels flatlining. The Significance further out than he anticipated. Engine power falling. The pod’s orientation had stabilised but they were still drifting like a feather toward the surface. Then there would be no escape. He did the sums, set a course for the Significance, put his fingers briefly on Reckon’s mask by way of goodbye, and then opened the lid just wide enough for him to slip out of the pod. He flipped over in the thin atmosphere to see the pod, unburdened of his weight, bolt away on its course toward the distant star of the sailship. His sensesuit had settings that simulated a sunny London day. He engaged these, felt the suit draw in some of the Europan atmosphere, and then heat it. The power supply wouldn’t last long, having to heat the surrounding air from minus 173 Celsius to a balmy plus 10. But he would survive long enough to experience impact.