Terminus

by Tristan Palmgren

  Ways and Means had tracked her through its satellites. The same satellites that told it she had been around the Korean peninsula. It believed its satellites were compromised.

  At least that was the narrative Ways and Means had constructed. It was trying to convince her to switch to an encrypted format that, for all she knew, its crew couldn’t understand.

  She couldn’t believe what she’d been told. She shouldn’t. Not with that new heat source in the sky. Not with everything she’d seen, everything she’d felt. It had either given her a glimpse of the truth, or was convincing her to stand still, to wait for the missile.

  Here, a hundred kilometers from anything and anyone.

  Here, where she was finally in a position to speak to it and its crew.

  When she’d contacted Ways and Means, she’d thought that nothing would keep her from telling its crew what had happened. Now, in the course of just of few minutes, she was keeping her silence. It had constructed a narrative to make her consider it. When she’d been on Ways and Means’ diplomatic service, threading lies through half-truths, she knew that the best way to a person’s heart was through a good narrative.

  That new light burned high above her, hotter. It would be over an hour yet before it got here. Whatever it was, it was coming as hard and as fast as it could.

  Ways and Means said, “A high-speed shuttle will reach you before the end of the day.”

  “A shuttle,” Osia said, aloud. “Of course.”

  Meloku looked to her.

  None of what Ways and Means had told her explained what had happened to her constructs. Its signature was in the virus.

  She had not told it that part.

  When she didn’t answer, Ways and Means said, “If you won’t use encryption, we must end this conversation.” After another moment of silence, it added, “Be ready.”

  Meloku stared at Osia. Osia stood unmoving, on fire. Her demiorganics spiked warnings about her emotional health, her decision-making capability.

  An act of faith, Meloku had said.

  Osia had not cared to think about it. She had thought herself above it, as she thought herself above everything else.

  She had nowhere to turn besides Ways and Means. Nothing she cared to save herself to reach.

  “Get away from here,” Osia told Meloku.

  Meloku started to shake her head. “There’s no poi–”

  “Take Fiametta with you.”

  When Meloku did nothing, Osia grabbed her shoulder, twisted her, and gave her a hard, calculated shove.

  Meloku stumbled, almost fell, but Osia had measured the force she’d deployed. Meloku spun, faced Osia.

  “Get away from here!” Osia said.

  Meloku glared. But she stepped backward, started walking.

  Whatever Ways and Means had in mind to do to them, Osia would accept. If it had launched a weapon with a high blast radius, Meloku and Fiametta wouldn’t be able to get away fast enough. Otherwise they had a chance. Osia could do nothing else for them.

  Meloku shoved her hands in her coat for warmth. She ducked inside the broken hatch to Xati’s hideaway, where Fiametta was.

  She didn’t listen to Osia. She didn’t come out. Neither did Fiametta.

  Osia did not chase them out either.

  For want of anything better to do with her hands and legs, Osia sat against the base of the radio tower. She set her head against it and listened to the thrum of the generator.

  She closed her eyes.

  Her passive sensors kept tabs on her surroundings, but she didn’t pay attention. She no longer wanted to see.

  Ways and Means had fallen below their horizon. Out of contact. Invisible. The missile, or the shuttle, would spend most of its flight likewise, up until that final skim through the atmosphere. Depending on how fast it traveled, she would not have long to observe it.

  So she did not look.

  Faith. She had no faith in Ways and Means. A very strange thing to think, considering how she was acting.

  From what Fiametta had told them, Osia doubted she had ever really believed in the gospel of Saint Renatus. Not literally. That had not stopped her from acting as though she had. She’d had deeper beliefs – about fighting, about soldiering, about remaking herself. It had shaped the rest of her.

  Osia did not want to think about her deeper beliefs. She had not, until the past few weeks, imagined that she’d had them.

  But they had brought her to the truth: if Ways and Means wanted her to die, she would die. She had traveled with it, been too close to it, for too long. She did not want to be apart.

  There was nothing to do but wait.

  The wait was easier this time.

  She nearly did not realize her time had expired until her passive sensors spiked an alarm into her. The rumbling was too loud to ignore. Firelight pried behind her eyelids. The ground shook with the tremulous thunder of rockets, of fire and gas jetting into the ground.

  She looked. She had only an instant.

  A slender, squidlike tube – with a jet-dark hull and flaming thruster ports – settled into the rock. Its fins widened and elongated toward the end of its body, the only concession it made to aerodynamicism. Then everything vanished under a billowing gray cloud of vaporized snow.

  A high-speed shuttle, after all.

  30

  She and Fiametta bolted out of Xati’s hideaway when they heard the thunder. Meloku scrambled up the escarpment, and nearly lost her footing when she saw what was waiting at the top.

  She had not even known Ways and Means carried a high-speed shuttle.

  Fiametta gripped the rock face so tightly that her knuckles were white. She stumbled backward, edging away. Meloku let her go. She could hardly believe this either.

  She had seen shuttles like this before, on other planes and on other assignments. The amalgamate Risk Management had sent one to pick up her and her fellow agents during the evacuation of Camorral. That plane had been torn apart by seismic shocks, induced by an insurrectionist subsurface antimatter bomb. The insurrectionists had decided to make their plane less appealing to the Unity by destroying its infrastructure. It had worked.

  That trip, that emergency, had been the only time she’d seen a shuttle like it. They were expensive. Most of their body was devoted to fuel storage, and they could gobble through it in hours. Like Meloku’s last shuttle, it had been designed to accommodate flight in any medium from the interstellar to the oceanic. The only thing it was not meant to accommodate was cargo. For all its bulk, only a sliver of space had been set aside for people. The rest was taken up by fuel and the guts of its antimatter engine.

  These shuttles were famously uncomfortable. They were meant only for emergency flights. Ways and Means had sent it to them unmanned, at the speed of a missile, and at accelerations that would have crushed passengers.

  Ways and Means wanted them back. Badly.

  They must have had something especially important. Meloku doubted it was either her or Osia.

  To Meloku’s surprise, Fiametta hadn’t run away. She stood beside her, her hand planted on the ridge wall. Clouds of dust and vapor whipped around them, searing her skin.

  Meloku expected to see pale cheeks, a sheen of sweat, an oath or her God’s name on her lips. The paleness and tightness were there, but nothing else. Fiametta’s lips were set, her jawline rigid. She still held onto the rock, with her free hand raised against the dust.

  Meloku had underestimated the people of this plane. It had not been the first time. While they’d sheltered in the hideaway, Meloku had told Fiametta some of the things she thought might happen, but that couldn’t have prepared her for the storm and the thunder.

  Ways and Means must have been after her. Something about her, or something she knew. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good for her.

  Meloku told her, “You can still run away.”

  Fiametta looked to her. Then she started to walk to the shuttle.


  Meloku said, “If you go, you’re not going to be able to change your mind.”

  She was talking to herself as much as Fiametta. She should not get aboard the shuttle either. Ways and Means was responsible for everything that had happened to them. It was involved in a plot to kill them that she still did not understand.

  She could not let Fiametta get aboard that shuttle alone. Or Osia, either, come to that. She had to find out more.

  The shuttle’s boarding ramp was long, narrow, and without safety rails. It made Meloku think of a slender, lolling tongue. If this bothered Fiametta, she didn’t show it. She walked just behind Osia.

  The shuttle’s interior was as cramped as Meloku remembered. Three cabins opened from the junction at the top of the boarding ramp. One was a crew head. The second, a control cabin with a handful of acceleration couches. And the third was a compartment that could hold either minor cargo or additional passengers. During the evacuation of Camorral, fifty agents had crammed into a shuttle like this one. During the flight to Risk Management, she and the others had had to sit with their leaves weaved inside the person sitting opposite.

  Fiametta ran her hand along the bulkhead. The smooth, dark, composite was not quite metal. It was like nothing Fiametta would have felt before. The closest thing would have been well-sanded rock. It was lighter than rock, though. Meloku felt that lightness in the bow of the deck under her feet. The material was made to withstand high acceleration, and that meant being flexible rather than brittle.

  It did make the shuttle feel more fragile, though.

  The tear-shaped control cabin was tiny, and poorly lit. The light strips had been made for crew with better than human-normal vision. The bulkheads didn’t have corners. It curved upward and around the hatch, making the space feel even smaller.

  Fiametta took a short, sharp breath. Meloku wondered if she suffered from claustrophobia. She seemed to be realizing what was going to be expected of her. She raised her hand to her throat.

  The boarding ramp closed. The sliver of daylight behind them diminished and disappeared. The susurrus of the wind cut off.

  Five coffin-shaped acceleration couches unfolded from the deck like petals. All along the curved bulkheads, squares of light flickered and warmed. Exterior camera views, dozens of them, in a grid – an insect-eye view of the wasteland. Even fully demiorganic crew could only have so much information pumped into their heads at once. The camera views were meant to augment the sensor data sent from the shuttle’s NAI. If that NAI had said anything at all during warm-up, Meloku had missed it.

  Fiametta’s equanimity had not escaped Osia’s attention. Osia asked her, “Did your inner voice tell you what to expect from ships like this?”

  “No.” Fiametta’s fear didn’t show in her voice. Though her hand trembled when she ran it along the nearest couch.

  “Sizing up the furniture for value?” Osia asked. “Figuring out what you want to loot and steal?” When Fiametta didn’t take Osia’s bait, Osia told Meloku, “Get her secured. Then yourself. Ninety seconds until we get through preflight.”

  “What?” Meloku asked. After so fast a flight, safety procedure called for a half-hour grounding to verify nothing had broken during acceleration.

  “I haven’t been told why,” Osia said. “I’ve just been told.”

  That message couldn’t have come from Ways and Means, or Meloku would have picked up the signal too. So the shuttle’s NAI was talking, but only to Osia. Meloku heard its message plain enough, regardless. All their margins had been pulled. Procedure, even safety procedure, no longer mattered.

  Ways and Means was convinced that something was about to happen.

  “All right,” Meloku said, under a breath.

  That moment was all the time she needed for the shock to fade and her instincts and training to come back. She pushed Fiametta toward the acceleration couch. Meloku ignored Fiametta’s indignant shout, and likewise Fiametta shoving her back.

  Fiametta sank into the cushions. The couches were arranged to keep their passenger’s feet angled up, and their head and back flat. Meloku pulled the couch’s safety harness out, and folded it over Fiametta from her legs to her shoulders. The webbing was not meant to restrain a prisoner. It would not keep Fiametta’s hands pinned, or keep her from the manual harness release – if she found it. Meloku could only hope that she understood. She would have grabbed an anti-nauseal from the shuttle’s medical kit if she’d had the time.

  She grabbed Fiametta’s wrists and held them firmly. She burned precious seconds waiting for Fiametta to look at her.

  She would have tranquilized Fiametta, but she needed Fiametta to understand as much as she could about what she’d chosen. And no small part of her wanted the big bad condottieri captain terrified. Meloku’s sympathy for her had just about run out. If Fiametta thought she could charge into this and take command, she was about to learn otherwise.

  Meloku told her, “You had your chance to get out.”

  She dropped into her own couch. The deck plating was already starting to rumble. She tugged her own harness over herself. When she looked back at Fiametta, she was afraid she’d find her clawing at her webbing, fighting. Fiametta hadn’t moved. She glared at Meloku, frozen somewhere between terror and fury.

  She’d have a lot worse to deal with in a moment or two.

  Fiametta gasped as the thrusters fired, shaking the deck. The hiss became a howl, reverberating through the bulkheads, splitting the air. The cabin shuddered, and gradually began to lift. To tilt. To lean back.

  Then the main engine slammed a boot into Meloku’s sternum, and she could not spare the energy to think about Fiametta.

  For the first minute after launch, Meloku could not think at all. It took all her energy to breathe. She shunted most of her physiological functions to demiorganic control. She could hardly see through the blurring and graying side-effects of high acceleration, and what she saw was not helpful. The exterior cameras were like having a hundred eyes, all focused in different directions.

  A few images grabbed at her. A stream of white flame. A blossom of fire, spreading wide – the atmosphere igniting. A bright, yellow-white hand spread across the land, fringed by black smoke and ash. The shuttle’s NAI had not bothered at all to preserve the radio station. Clouds of vaporized earth poured over the hills.

  Her cheeks and forehead flushed red, itched all over. Blood flooded her brain. The underside of her eyelids felt gritty, sandy. Her demiorganics worked hard to constrict the most sensitive blood vessels.

  The deck shook not just from the engines, but the atmosphere. Stabilization fields bubbled into place over the shuttle’s prow, softening the worst turbulence. The rest beat down upon Meloku’s spine.

  A thin layer of icy cirrus whipped past the shuttle, there and gone in seconds. Half of the monitors showed only bright, solid blue. Below, the clouds billowed and dissipated as the shuttle’s exhaust whipped through them.

  The roar of the engine dampened. The heat in her ears and cheeks faded. The acceleration was diminishing. She weighed only twice as much as she usually did. She no longer felt as though she was about to sink wholly into her cushions.

  So much for the idea that Ways and Means was afraid to give away its activities to the locals. This launch would have been visible for hundreds of kilometers, and beyond. She transmitted, “Why in the fucking–” She cut herself short. “…did that have to happen?”

  She doubted it had been circumspect about its arrival, either. She had not heard the re-entry sonic booms, but the shuttle could have skimmed the atmosphere at a low enough angle that she would have missed them. Half of its agents in this hemisphere would have seen or sensed the launch.

  Osia said, “Ways and Means can’t tell me.”

  Not “can’t,” Meloku thought. Won’t.

  Osia asked, “Have you contacted any of the satellites?”

  Meloku hadn’t. She hadn’t seen the point. For weeks, her signals had g
one ignored. She tried again. This time, she received an instantaneous answer. It was a holding signal.

  She was being told to stand by. Same thing she might have gotten if the satellite had shut down for maintenance. The next one in line answered the same, and the next.

  The satellites were no longer bothering to block her and Osia in particular. They were blocking everyone. All communications were down.

  Only the satellites’ person-to-person communications were shut down. The satellites’ other functions, including sensors, were unaffected. They could speak to each other just fine. But they would not allow her to contact anyone else.

  Osia said, “It’s been like this for hours. Ways and Means believes its satellites have been compromised. Someone else has subverted them to block our signals, and to carry their own. But Ways and Means still had the power to shut the whole system down.” A blunt force solution to its problem.

  Meloku asked, “Ways and Means told you that itself?”

  She had not expected an answer, and did not get one. Ways and Means was below their horizon, incommunicado. It would not have trusted the satellites to deliver that message. Osia was guessing just as much as Meloku was.

  If Fiametta had lost consciousness, it hadn’t been for long. She looked feverish, forehead red and gleaming. But her eyes were open. A sliver of something brown glistened across her lip, falling onto her ear.

  She stared at the monitors. More than anything else at that moment, Meloku wanted to ask her what she understood. If anything.

  Color drained from the sky. Before long, the blue had narrowed to a wide band across the horizon, getting smaller. The drumfire on the deck plates diminished. Then the ventral thrusters fired, a sequence of thunder like a cannonade. They knocked Meloku deep into her couch.

  The camera displays arced. From Meloku’s seat, the shuttle felt like it was falling backward, about to tumble over itself. Fiametta coughed and gagged. But she seemed to have nothing but bile left to void. Meloku watched her when she could. Fiametta hardly blinked. Her eyes were always open. Red clouded her corneas.