Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  So, why was this girl different? Why did it feel like, with this girl, I had to see her again, no matter what the risk? How could a girl who was nothing but an image on a screen mean more to me than girls I’d seen in real life?

  All of a sudden, I remembered Griff’s words. They joined with the cryptic words of the girl in the video, and together they slammed into me, an asteroid striking in the middle of interstellar space.

  It gets inside you, Griff had said. You’re not the same afterward.

  I knew he was right. And I knew what I had to do.

  I was going to find that girl. Stand in front of her and look into her eyes, the way she’d looked into mine. If I could, speak to her.

  I was going to meet that girl.

  Which, I knew, was even more impossible than seeing her on the screen. Because that girl wasn’t only on the other side of the world.

  That girl was on the other side of everything.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  Griff visits me every day in sick bay. The shoulder’s healing slowly, and the PMP insists I need rest. I’m eager to get out of bed, look around the ship, find out what’s going on, but I’m on orders. Also on drugs, which make me drowsy and disinclined to fight the orders. So I stay, and Griff tries to make the time pass as quickly as possible.

  Like I said, a lot can change in a thousand years. But that doesn’t apply to Griff. He never once got angry at me for that day in his room when I forced him to play the worldlink video. I know he hasn’t forgotten, but at least he’s forgiven. In fact, he’s forgiven not only that but a whole lot more.

  That’s another way he’s different from Adrian.

  Today he’s cracking up as he tells me the story of how the two of them found me that first night.

  “We’re on patrol, right?” he says. “Us and about fifty other teams. The last thing we’re looking for is castaways. I mean, no offense, but when your pod turned up missing, we figured that was the end of that. We were just going to have to figure out some way to survive on this dump without your brains and bubbly personality.”

  “You’re breaking my heart, man.”

  Griff pantomimes playing the violin. “So anyway, we’re out in the middle of nowhere trying to track those things, the ones that come swooping past the ship all night, moving too fast to get a lock on them. Like I’m looking forward to this, right? But the little monsters don’t have the decency to show up in the daylight, so the patrols have to go out after dark. And I’m on patrol because, guess what, Adrian’s dad is in charge, and he says everyone has to take turns being out there, no exceptions.”

  “Except him?”

  “And you’d think the top dog would be only too happy to risk his life for the rest of us peons,” Griff says with a snort. “So, Adrian and me, we’re stumbling around in the dark, maybe seeing those things swirling all around us, maybe not. Having absolutely no idea if they’re things at all or if they’re just in our minds, and if they aren’t, whether they’re harmless or plan to eat us for a bedtime snack.”

  “Thanks to me,” I say, “I think we know the answer to that one.”

  “Give the man the Corporate Cross,” Griff says, applauding. “Listen, dude, there’s easier ways to impress Adrian’s dad than getting your ass chomped.”

  I laugh for Griff’s sake, but the thought of the thing that wounded me, or of sacrificing myself for the approval of Adrian’s dad, makes me feel sick. The second probably more so than the first.

  “Anyway,” Griff goes on after he’s had his laugh. “I was the one that heard the thing opening you up. They don’t make any noise when they run past the ship, none we’ve heard anyway. But we’re out there, and there’s this click like a blade coming out, just a single click, and I’m like, ‘Was that you?’ And Adrian goes, ‘What the hell do you think?’ And I’m like, ‘I think we’re screwed.’ And I’m about to crap my pants when Adrian starts shooting into the night, and then I’m like, ‘My hero.’ ”

  “You said that to him?”

  “I think my actual words were ‘Holy shit!’ ” Griff says, laughing. “But then Adrian insists on going to check it out, to see if he really got it. And I’m like, ‘Enough macho bullshit for one night, I’m going home.’ ”

  This time, my laugh’s for real. Griff’s acting the whole thing out with his face, going from scared shitless to mock heroic in a heartbeat, and though I know it’s nothing like what actually happened, though he’s turning my near evisceration into a comedy routine, I feel better than I’ve felt since my pod opened and I stumbled out onto extra-terra incognito. Griff reads my mood and keeps going, adding more ridiculous details to the story, like how Adrian blew on his piece like some gunslinger from the Wild West and how he, Griff, nearly forgot himself and grabbed Adrian’s arm for support. It helps that Griff makes Adrian the star and himself the sidekick. It also helps that, like all the patrols, he has to wear a regulation JIPOC helmet all the time in case Chairman Conroy needs to contact him, and on Griff the thing is so big he looks like a cross between a scarecrow and a bobblehead. With freckles.

  Even Griff can’t keep the yucks going forever, though. Or he could, but he sees I’m tired, and he knows there are things I want to talk about before I nod off. Griff would much rather keep it light. But cooped up like I am, he’s my only source of information. And after spending thirteen years running interference between Adrian and me, I guess he’s become an expert at reading my mind.

  “Still no word on our location,” he says. “Which either means they don’t know where we are, or they know all too well.”

  “Too bad we don’t have Cons Piracy around anymore.”

  “I’m thinking of starting a local chapter.”

  “Yeah? Sign me up.”

  “You know what people are saying, right?” he asks. “About the ship.”

  I sit up. Griff doesn’t know any more about what happened to the mission than anyone, but he’s been nosing around, and he’s picked up plenty of rumors. “What are they saying?”

  “Well, for starters, all our major systems are shot,” he says. “Navigation and propulsion most obviously, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The computers are all glitchy, and the hardware’s not in any better shape. No operating vehicles, no loaders, no cranes, no nothing to get around outside, much less start fixing up this rock. Everything’s just sitting around, and none of it will come online.”

  “Unreal.” We came loaded with endless amounts of equipment to terraform the planet, grow our own food, extract water from air and rock, all that. How could everything be nonoperational? “You’re sure about this?”

  “No one’s sure about anything,” Griff says. “Except that we’re royally screwed.”

  “What about your dad? Isn’t he working on bringing stuff back online?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “One system at a time. Want to guess what Conroy has him working on first?”

  “Weapons?”

  “Bingo.” Griff smiles witheringly. “But brilliant as my dad is, he’s only one dude. He built in redundancies in case anything failed, but it seems the redundancies failed too. Which means that Rich Griffin, aka the Pride of CanAm, is as clueless as everyone.”

  He pauses to let his words sink in, but the conclusion is obvious. If the ship’s drive isn’t working, there’s no way to leave this place. And though we knew we might encounter problems on our maiden voyage across light-years of vacuum, we did all our planning under the assumption that the Executor would be in shape to tackle those problems, not that it would be the problem. JIPOC figured we might need to stay on board while the terraforming got up and running, which is why they stocked the dispensary with enough food and water to last us for maybe five years. Or maybe one.

  Or maybe less.

  “Oh, and get this,” Griff says. “Conroy’s minions finally did a head count. Seems your pod wasn’t the only one to go AWOL. Word on the street is we lost a hundred or more.”
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  I’m shocked to hear that, though I don’t know why I should be—this is just more icing on the cake. “And where’d they go?”

  “That’s the mystery, my friend.” He smiles again, not like he’s happy exactly. More like he’s pleased to be proved right at last. “Ship’s trashed, planet’s a cesspool, and there’s a hundred pods floating around somewhere in space. Lost. Gone. Like they never existed.”

  “Like what happened to the Lowerworld ship.”

  His face turns serious for the first time since coming in. “We’re never going to find out what happened to them. They shot that ship as far away from us as they could, dude. Which isn’t hard to do when you have the whole flipping universe to play with.”

  I’m reminded of the council that took place. The final council between Upperworld and Lowerworld. It wasn’t pretty. No one expected it to be. Except, maybe, Sofie. Sofie and, possibly, me.

  “It was totally messed up, Griff,” I say. “Twelve billion human beings, and they screwed them all. And the only reason they got away with it is because they could.”

  Griff leans back, taking his helmet off so he can run a hand through the red mop he calls his hair. I think he’s about to crack another joke when he plops the helmet back on and hunches forward, speaking in an angry undertone that’s unlike anything I’ve heard come from his mouth.

  “What goes around comes around,” he says. “One percent of one percent of the world’s population got to take this pleasure trip. That left a shitload of people with a major grievance against the Chosen Few. Lowerworlders. Or Upperworlders who lost out in the lottery. You don’t think someone out there would see this as payback?”

  I’m shocked by his tone, though of course the same thought has occurred to me. There’s no way any of this was an accident. It had to be sabotage—an incredibly well-planned, incredibly thorough act of sabotage. But before I get a chance to say that, Griff breaks out in another laugh.

  “Screw and thou shalt be screwed, as the Good Book says. That’s from Saint Fat Cat’s First Epistle to the Piss-poorlings, by the way. You can look it up.”

  And I bust out laughing, louder and longer than I have in centuries.

  • • •

  I’m out of sick bay in four days. More evidence of the sorry state the ship’s in: If our medical nanotechnologies were working, treating a shoulder wound should have taken more like four minutes. The PMP insists on running some psychometrics before I go, and I put up with them patiently. I’m not sure what exactly he thinks happened out there—whether he has some nutty idea that I sliced open my own shoulder to get attention, or just for kicks—but he tells me it’s routine to test people’s mental state after all that time in deepsleep, and I don’t make a fuss. He’s been suspiciously quiet about the “organic compound” they removed from my eyes, so to paraphrase Griff, he either doesn’t know what the stuff is, or he knows all too well. But making a big scene about any of these irregularities will earn me more time in sick bay, where he’ll probe deeper, and that’s the last thing I want. Plus, plain and simple, I’m dying to get up and get out.

  Once I’m cleared to go, I have pretty much all the free time I want. I’m supposed to check back in with the PMP for weekly psychometrics, but that has the sound of something no one’s going to hold me to. I’m assigned a cubicle in the ship’s living quarters, a personal space not much bigger than the one in sick bay, but I’m not complaining about that, either. At least no one’s prying. My living area is stocked with nothing but a neatly pressed jumpsuit and a selfone that won’t work on this planet. Not my phone from Earth, either, but that’s a long story. My parents could stop by for a visit, I suppose, but with the way it ended back home, I doubt they will. And I’m right: They don’t. They do, however, send me a very nice note—handwritten, since all the personal comm devices are on the fritz too—in which they spell out what they told me on Earth: They want nothing to do with a disgrace to the Newell family name like me. Considering the good times we shared when I was younger, their abandonment makes me sad, I guess. Until I remember that I’m the one who abandoned them first, and with very good reason.

  At this point, the only thing I have to worry about is Adrian’s dad, who’ll get word of my release eventually and add me to the roster for patrols. But it might take a while before that happens. He’s a busy man, busier than ever now that his nice neat colonization has gone up in flames. Until he tracks me down, I’m essentially a ghost aboard the ship, not officially here. I can’t leave the Executor’s confines—no one can except the patrols, which go out every night to try to figure out where the hell we are or, failing that, at least to determine the identity of the things outside—and obviously there are places on board I’m not welcome. But other than that, I’m on my own clock and my own recognizance.

  Griff’s busy helping his dad on the day I get out, so I stroll over to the pod bay by myself. That’s another bug in the system: The monorails that were supposed to shuttle us around the Executor are nonfunctional, which means people have to walk everywhere. The ship’s strangely empty, with few fellow pedestrians out in the halls, most of them teens like me, the only difference being that all of them are wearing their identical gray JIPOC helmets. Turns out my friendly neighborhood PMP was exaggerating more than a little when he told me everyone arrived safely: Many of the pods didn’t wake their occupants automatically the way they were supposed to, so the PMPs and AMPs, the ones who woke up, are busy rousing people from deepsleep. And lots of passengers, adults especially, are having a rough time with reentry and are stuck in sick bay, most of them coping with the mental stress of being alive long past the point they should be dead. Some of them, Griff tells me, actually are dead. Plus, if his sources are right, there’s the hundred or so pods that went missing. To no one’s surprise, Conroy won’t comment on them.

  I expect to find the Peace Corp. guarding the bay, but they’re nowhere to be seen. I guess after we boarded, they were one more group on a very long list of expendable personnel. Without the Lowerworld to worry about, the Executor didn’t need them anymore.

  I take my time exploring the bay. It’s an enormous, canyonlike cavity, practically a city of its own, though a city where no one does anything but sleep. Docked pods climb the walls in rows of thousands, arching so high they get lost in the darkness that gathers beneath the silicone shell. Every so often, a pod drifts from its spot, then goes sailing down the hall to sick bay, where the medical staff are waiting. The pods’ homing technology, at least, seems to be working. I search the rows for a cluster of empty slots, something to show me where my own pod and the hundred others ejected, wormed their way outside the hull, and drifted off into space. The bay’s far too big for me to find a gap.

  It chills me to think what might have happened to me, what did happen to the missing hundred. If my pod hadn’t responded to something on this planet—the presence of the other pods, the traces of water that our science guys swear lie deep underground—I’d have become a wandering spirit like the rest, lost in interstellar space for all eternity. Or worse, I could have been stranded on some other planet where I was totally alone. Truth be told, with so many people relying on a technology we couldn’t road test beforehand, it’s a miracle any of us survived. A miracle that of all the hundreds of thousands of pods, only a handful malfunctioned as badly as mine. A miracle that Adrian and Griff found me right before I became a deep-space predator’s bite-size man snack.

  I wish I was in the mood to be thankful for miracles.

  From the pod hangar, I make my way to the main concourse, which connects the Executor’s populated areas to the ship’s guts, the mechanical rooms no one enters. Though narrower than the pod bay, the concourse is broad enough to park a battleship. Now that I think of it, I’m surprised Adrian’s dad didn’t think to bring a couple of those along. There’s almost total silence in the concourse, with no moving vehicles, no squeaks or beeps from the robotic service stations, no sound of power tools being operated. Most of the
overhead lights are on, but all of the doors are frozen in the open position, and the screens that are supposed to flash warnings and instructions are nothing but flat black squares. I peek into dining halls and common rooms, hear the whir of exercise equipment in use—basic stuff, stationary bikes and ellipticals—along with the buzz of handheld weapons being fired at the shooting range. I don’t talk to anyone, and no one talks to me.

  It’s evening by the time I reach the observation deck midway between prow and stern. Through the glass-lined panels, shielded to protect the ship from radiation, I get my first good view of the planet where the Executor has deposited us.

  It’s not a pretty sight.

  Spongiform rock rises in piles like tortured slag heaps. Bubbling vats of sulfurous mud shroud the valleys in fog, while volcanic cones spew yellow sludge as if they’re puking the planet’s guts. Here at the ship’s midpoint, I can feel the floor quivering from all the geologic activity. Pale stars sprinkle the sky, and another heavenly body, much brighter than the stars against the gathering dusk, rides above the waves of mist. A distant moon or neighboring planet, from the looks of it. Even this late in the day, the rays of whatever star this planet circles glance sharply through the haze, warning me of a skimpy atmosphere unprepared to guard human bodies from UV. I was luckier than I knew that my two oldest friends went to check on Adrian’s shooting skills before the sun rose, because I’d have been a piece of crispy bacon if they hadn’t. Anyone who goes out before dark has to suit up in full radiation gear. Atmospheric pressure is roughly Earth-normal, but the science guys tell us there’s not much in the way of oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, and the other gases we need to survive. That would explain why there’s no visible water, no sign of vegetation. Teams have gone out at daytime without collecting so much as a single microbe. Unless you count the night creatures, which no one can see clearly enough at dark to identify and which have eluded the search teams during the day, this planet’s as devoid of life as the catastrologists told us Earth would be by now.