Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  “I never thanked you,” I say.

  It sounds formal. Adrian grunts.

  “No, really,” I say. “That night . . .”

  “Forget it,” he says.

  We walk through the dark and fog. The ship’s lights become misty halos, then pinpoints like stars, then nothing. Adrian seems to have a course charted, but I’m just following along behind him and his rattling cart, not sure how far we’re walking or when we’re going to start planting our flags. Mostly I’m trying my best to avoid the mud pits that appear from time to time. Not easy to do when you can’t see two centimeters in front of your face.

  “Any progress?” I say. “In figuring things out?”

  “What things?”

  I shrug, pointlessly. He can’t see me any better than I can see him. “The creatures. Where we are. What went wrong with the mission.”

  “Who says anything went wrong?”

  I almost laugh. But laughter, I’m pretty sure, isn’t on tonight’s agenda. “What we’re going to do, then.”

  “We’re going to travel around a secured perimeter extending several hundred meters outward from Airlock Alpha Eleven,” he says. “Make sure the area remains clear of unlicensed life-forms. Expand our range into enemy territory with the additional devices on this trolley. Then go back to base.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You questioning my orders?”

  “Do you outrank me?”

  “I’m acting on behalf of the chief executive officer of JIPOC,” he says. “So yeah, I think I outrank you.”

  We pick up the pace. I splash into sucking mud but keep going. With no warning, Adrian grabs one of the flags from the cart and jams the pole into the ground, then another, then another. At this rate, unless he’s got more of the devices tucked away in his pockets, we’re going to be finished with our circuit long before daybreak.

  “Look, man,” I say.

  “No, you look,” Adrian says, stopping so abruptly I almost collide with him. “This is the mission. You don’t like it, go home. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut.”

  “So that’s it,” I say. “That’s all.”

  “That’s all,” he says. “If it was up to me, you wouldn’t be here, Cam. I told my dad. I told him you and your Lower-life girlfriend could stay on Earth. Make more dirt rats to shit the place up until the end.”

  “But he obviously disagreed.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” he says, spitting the words. “Maybe he meant for your pod to jettison in deep space and float off into a black hole, but that’s another thing that went wrong with this lousy mission.”

  “You saved my life, man.”

  “I saved a piece of shit that should have died back on Earth,” he says. “If I’d known it was you, I’d have let the thing finish you off while I watched.”

  I’m glad he said it. Glad it’s finally out in the open. I realize now why, before I met Sofie, I never said or did anything that might have gotten me on Adrian’s bad side. Because I was afraid. Afraid of him, afraid of losing him. You’d think being friends since before either of us could remember would make us safe. But the truth is, being friends that long meant there were some things we could never touch. Things we’d always assumed the other would never say or do. Things that, once they were said and done, neither of us could take back.

  “So what happens if we meet another one tonight?” I say.

  “We won’t,” he says. “The sonic devices keep the things at bay.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “They do.”

  “You’ve really got this all figured out, don’t you?”

  “Go to hell, Cam,” he says.

  “Already there,” I say.

  And we walk on in silence.

  • • •

  The perimeter devices emit a beep that’s too high-pitched for human ears to detect. But the one place the creatures didn’t attack the ship was where a geologic team had planted some of the poles. So it stands to reason the monsters have better ears than we do and shy away from the sound.

  We think.

  Either that or the creatures have retreated for reasons of their own. Or they’re regrouping for a new form of attack. Adrian has no idea, and neither does his dad, and neither does anyone else aboard the Executor. Adrian doesn’t say that, but his confidence has had a false ring to it from the get-go.

  The other problem is that the supersonic signal travels from pole to pole, and its range is limited. The poles weren’t designed for perimeter defense. They’re surveying tools, that’s all. They map subsurface fissures and faults, which is why the team planted them in the first place. We haven’t reached the outer limit of their effectiveness—probably—but we will soon, and then there will be substantial spans of the ship that remain unsecured. Whether we have the technology to make more, Adrian won’t say.

  Adrian won’t say anything, actually. He communicates in grunts and gestures. So do I. The only sound is the muffled noise of his cart on the soft ground.

  We walk the perimeter, wiggling existing poles out of the ground to make sure their tips are flashing, jamming them back in, adding a new pole every so often, though not with any logic or pattern that I can tell. It’s tedious, mindless work, and it’s all done pretty much blind: Even if our flashlights showed more than a blanket of thick mist, we’d be guessing at how far apart we can place the sensors. I laugh to myself when I remember all the promotional videos we watched back on Earth, which showed colonists capering euphorically across a lush green landscape. That, of course, was based on the assumption not only that we’d be unimpeded by planetary slime and lethal life-forms, but that we’d be able to see the landscape. Adrian and I walk slowly, warily. I think I speak for both of us when I say no one feels any desire to caper.

  The night wears on. Nothing moves except mist. Bubbles of goop pop around us. My mask fogs, making visibility even tougher. My shoulder’s not holding up as well as I’d hoped: It aches from the repetitive pushing and pulling. I want to ask Adrian why I was paired with him on this particular patrol, but I know he won’t answer me. Teaching me a lesson, probably. Proving how wise and merciful the commander is, that he’d trust his son with a traitor. Whatever the explanation, I’m sure it’s no better than the one Chairman Conroy is preparing for why the Upperworld’s little family vacation didn’t turn out quite the way he had planned. I just hope the idea isn’t to lead me too far from the ship then yank off my oxygen mask. Or nail me in the back with the ion gun my partner is carrying ostentatiously at his hip.

  My partner. I laugh. My superior.

  We’ve checked the last fence post. We’ve placed the few that weren’t working on the cart, and we’ve extended home territory by as much as a hundred meters with the ones we brought. Time to head back.

  Adrian steers his cart toward the ship. He’s nothing but a shadow in the mist. The Executor, huge as it is, can’t be seen at all.

  “What’s that?” It’s the first time he’s spoken since cussing me out.

  I nearly run into him for the second time tonight. Fog shrouds the sky, and for a second I think he’s paused to look for the stars, invisible from our perspective. It’s a minute before I realize he’s not looking at anything. He’s removed his helmet, and his head’s cocked, listening.

  I hear it too.

  A whine, distant and steady. Nothing like the clacking sound of the night creatures. It’s barely a tickle inside my ear, but it must be from something big. I take off my helmet, and the whine grows to a howl. It seems to come from everywhere at once, sky and ground. The rock quivers beneath me. My teeth, my throbbing shoulder, the bones in my feet and fingers answer it, and pretty soon my whole body’s part of the sound. From the way he’s frozen, Adrian feels it too. I can’t place it, though something tells me I should.

  We both drop to the ground as the sky splits with a scream.

  Light is everywhere. The rock shakes against my stomach, pieces of it tearing free and whistling past our ears at
a speed that would kill us if they struck home. The mist has arms and legs, but it’s not the thing that attacked me. It’s tendrils of fog that snake into the sky as if something’s pulling them tight while they clutch for a handhold on the ground. With the warring darkness and light, it’s impossible to see anything. But I feel as if a mountain, or a cloud, or a moon has collapsed on us, crushing the sky flat. I can’t breathe. And then I can, and two words rip out of my chest as if they’re attached to the streaming fog.

  “The ship!”

  In a flash of light, I glimpse Adrian’s terrified face. “What ship?”

  I see what he’s afraid of. In his panic, he thinks his dad somehow got the Executor working, then sent his son on patrol before liftoff. There’s a grim satisfaction in knowing that, though this is the fate Adrian wanted for 99.9 percent of the world’s population, the thought of being left behind scares the crap out of him, too.

  “The Lowerworld ship!” I scream, a centimeter from his ear. Which doesn’t change his look all that much.

  Then again, I’m not sure he hears me. I can’t hear myself.

  Like a mountain, like a cloud, like a moon cut loose from orbit and plummeting to meet its parent, the Lowerworld ship explodes from the night sky and hangs above us in a mantle of brilliant white light. It must be moving fast, but it’s so colossal it seems not to be moving at all, filling the sky from horizon to horizon until for all I can tell it is the sky, a daytime sky pulsing with the red-hot veins of atmospheric entry. For a second I think it’s going to touch down right on our heads, and I imagine what it would be like to be crushed by something like that, something that dwarfs us the way we dwarf an amoeba. Something so unthinkably big it not only can’t see us but can’t properly be seen by us. But at last I detect an end to its length, a gap where blinding hull meets pitch-black sky, and I watch its tail soar past, its mammoth slipstream pressing us so hard against the ground I think it’s not going to matter that it chose not to crush us directly with its weight. I struggle to my feet as it thunders beyond the makeshift perimeter, reverse gravitational thrusters lighting the fog as if it’s on fire, nose searching the ground like an insect so mammoth it plans to pollinate an entire planet. When the thrusters die and it settles to its final resting place, so deep in the fog I can’t tell where it’s touched down, the rocking of its hull throws me and Adrian to the spongy terrain once more. Then it’s done and the ground lies still.

  I stand, legs quivering, and peer into the night for the place it landed. But it must be kilometers away, and with the bank of fog rising before me like a wall, there’s nothing to see. It’s traveled a thousand years, crossed star systems and more, and in a matter of seconds caught itself in one final star’s pull and found its home.

  The Freefall.

  Prototype for the Upperworld ship, named after the gravitational drive that powered our ship as well. Smaller than ours, more primitive—originally built for storage, not passengers. A backup. The ship that was considered more likely to fail.

  Sofie’s ship.

  Here. On this planet.

  I drop my helmet and run in the direction the ship landed, careless of the dark, the steaming mud, the fog. Adrian screams something behind me, but I don’t listen. All I can think of is that she wasn’t supposed to be here. She was supposed to be somewhere else, a million worlds away. She was supposed to be lost to me forever.

  But she’s not. She’s here. If she’s alive, she’s here.

  I run on, leaving the Executor behind, leaving everything behind. Running toward her. Only toward her.

  I can’t believe the universe can go from so big to so small in a single moment.

  Earth, 2150

  Upperworld

  New York Central Intercorponational Telecom Interface, the hub of the worldlink, lay less than an hour north of CanAm Capital (formerly CanAm Capital East) by bullet train. Getting there was a breeze. My parents were so busy they didn’t know I was gone. Now that Griff and I had our colonization passes and weren’t just two stupid kids out for a joyride, we could travel pretty much anywhere we pleased in CanAm, so long as we took a licensed form of transportation and weren’t trying to smuggle illegals over the border or anything like that. And Griff had swiped his dad’s credit codes, so we went in style—private compartment on the CanAm Capital Line. With something like fifty codes to his name, Griff’s dad never noticed when one of them went missing.

  I hadn’t been on a bullet train since I was a kid, when my parents took me on a tour of the Central territory before the merger. I remembered the excitement of that trip, gazing through the window at a world far bigger than I’d imagined, my mom and dad pointing out features of the landscape while I gobbled junk food courtesy of Universal Comestibles. The great thing about flying at five hundred kilometers per hour is that everything outside your window flashes by too fast to see the chinks in the Upperworld’s armor. The buildings gleam, the smog diffusing the sunlight so it looks like you’re hovering in a cloud, whereas at ground level you swim in hot, putrid air as thick as a blanket. What used to be the seat of the national government—the Capitol One Building, with its dome and rotunda, the Linked-In Memorial, with its cryptic financial advice from Our Funding Fathers chiseled into the white marble portico—is walled against the intrusion of Lowerworld Terrarists, but even that solid gray barrier has a soothing look when you’re rocketing past it too fast to think. The marshy areas where the ocean has nibbled the coastline sparkle in the sunlight, and the river looks clean too, even though you know it’s only because of CAPA (CanAm Purification Authority) that you can drink the stuff at all. Riding by bullet train, you forget that the Upperworld is practically as unlivable as the Lowerworld, the only difference being that we can retreat behind walls and afford sewage treatment and Freshen Air Portable Purification Systems and all that. Riding by bullet train is like living in a worldlink video, or a dream.

  As soon as we hit the streets of New York CITI, exactly forty-five minutes after we blasted out of the CanAm Capital depot, we were back to a reality check. CanAm shut down most of the metropolitan areas in the past fifty years—too inefficient to run hundreds of cities when you can cram your entire population into three—but it keeps this ancient, crumbling metropolis open for two reasons: historical significance and the CITI itself. Maybe only the second reason. New York used to be the site of political conventions, when there were still politics. Me and Adrian and Griff used to crack up when we’d watch the old campaign videos archived on Two Worlds sites, the Team Party versus the Greed Party, the Plutocrats versus the Publicans, and nothing to show for it at the end of the day except more taxes and gridlock and grandstanding. These days the place is a museum. Filth breathes from the sewer grates, the rivers, the empty doorframes of abandoned warehouses and high-rises. The island’s half underwater, with oily craters pockmarking what’s left of the streets, some of the holes so deep they show through to where subway cars lie submerged like marine fossils. Girders climb aimlessly into the sky where some development genius had the idea to build another skyscraper then ran out of capital or tenants or dry pavement to build on. I’d never thought of it this way, but now I wondered what all this decay would look like to someone from the Lowerworld viewing us on a worldlink screen. If, that is, they could afford screens down there, where all they seemed to have was mud and trash and disease and Terrarism.

  And her.

  “Where to?” I asked, looking up and down the street. A corroded sign attached to a leaning metal pole announced that we were standing on what had once been Park Avenue.

  “Follow the crowd.”

  Most days, New York CITI’s a ghost town. But today the streets were crawling with privacars on their way to the symposium. They looked important, sleek black limos with tinted windows and corponational logos. There was no foot traffic to speak of, only the few others who’d exited the train with me and Griff, but there were hundreds of Peace Corp. officers in their white uniforms and black visors, guns held stiffly across
their chests. They lined the roadways, perched atop buildings, drove alongside the limos in armored transports. Helicars flew overhead. The mutter of the officers’ voices speaking into comm devices was far louder than the whispered hum of electric vehicles. Every time we passed one of the soldiers standing at street level, I felt his eyes following me.

  In an hour’s walk, we arrived at the old United Nations building, a teetering, razor-thin slab of cement overlooking the toxic East River. The burned-out hulk of a skyscraper crouched beside it, fragments of green glass clinging to shattered windowpanes. Gazing at this sad ruin of some twentieth-century dream of international harmony and cooperation—most people in the Upperworld called it the Benighted Nations building—I wished the symposium had been held on the opposite side of the island, at the glistening CITI complex, the only part of old New York that CanAm kept in good repair. But the limos pulled up in front of the UN facade, disgorging their passengers into the waiting ranks of Peace Corp. officers. A far greater number of people were climbing out of privacabs that must have come from the nearby heliport. Griff and I edged closer, and I couldn’t help staring at the crowd.

  According to Two Worlds History, twenty-first-century CanAm had toyed with the idea that people from incompatible genetic backgrounds could coexist. But that had blown up in their face, especially in the borderlands near MexSanto, where the damage had gotten so bad they’d had to build a wall and then shut down CanAm West for good. For a while they’d tried the half measure of concentrating like-skinned people in separate urban areas, but that had made a serious dent on profits. So in the past fifty years, most people with genetic histories outside designated parameters had been deported by INTERCOLPA to Lowerworld prisons and resettlement camps. You’d see the occasional darker-hued person in CanAm, mostly traveling bigwigs and their servants from the Lowerworld, but nothing like the flood I saw before me now.

  There were people in strange clothes and hats, people with all colors of skin, dusty brown and pale gold and near-black, people babbling to each other or themselves in languages that sounded like they were talking through their noses or deep in their throats or, sometimes, with parts of their body that had nothing to do with speech, like their hands or their eyes or their shoulders. Robes flowed, turbans bulged above dark, curly hair. Some of the women had hair practically down to their calves, and sometimes it was twined with beads or small stones that twinkled as their hair swung. Others had their entire bodies wrapped in dark cloaks, black or chocolate brown, only their eyes peeking through a horizontal slit. One of those women wore glasses, with narrow robotic-looking frames, so I wondered if there was a person in there at all. Some men had enormous, bushy beards, while others had hair almost as long as the women’s, thick twisted locks that looked none too clean as they burst free from shapeless, braided hats balanced on their heads. Even at the edge of the crowd, the smell of bodies and breath was overpowering. No one paid attention to us, two of the few light-skinned people in the pack, wearing T-shirts and jeans. But I definitely felt like we were the spectacle here, the ones who didn’t belong.