Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  My excitement from moments ago ebbs considerably. It seems this planet is determined to kill me. But not before it toys with me first.

  I can’t go on without my probe. But I can’t search for it either. I can’t walk any farther, knowing I might step off the edge. If I’m reading the beacon right, it’s telling me there are other pods in the immediate vicinity, but I can’t see them. They could be at the base of the cliff, wrecked. Or intact. It could be the Freefall got smashed up on landing or ended up lying at the bottom of a canyon. The people I’m trying to reach might be down there right now, looking around at the invisible landscape, not knowing and not caring where I am.

  So I do the only thing I can do.

  I crawl.

  With the beacon clutched in one hand and the other hand feeling for a drop-off in the ground, I creep forward on my knees, hoping the pods are on my level, hoping I’m creeping toward them and not away. It’s nearly impossible to tell at this point how close they are, with the beacon lit up steadily. Maybe they’re all around me and I can’t see them. Hopefully, if I move too far away, the beacon will tell me that. Or the sun will come up while I’m knee-walking around, and I’ll finally be able to see.

  Or this might happen too.

  I might hear something rattling right beside my ear.

  Apparently, I’m not the only organism with the sense to figure out there’s something it wants aboard the Lowerworld ship.

  I drop the homing device and stand, reaching for the gun at my belt. The solid wall of night budges, moves. It’s got legs. They propel it in a long, elastic spring over my head, land on silent footfalls behind me.

  It wasn’t wind that knocked me down a moment ago.

  The thing paces beyond range of the red beacon, rattling deep in its throat. As with the first time, I can’t make the movement resolve into a solid form, my frenzied brain telling me it’s shaped of mist and shadows instead of flesh. That’ll change, I know only too well, if it manages to lay paws on me. I get the fuzzy impression that it’s a quadruped, its shape more horizontal than vertical. The clacking noise it makes might not be vocalization at all but teeth or claws. Its color is a thing of uncertainty too, but I’m going to go with yellow or gray. An unhealthy color, a queasy color. Maybe that’s the mist.

  It stops moving and, I think, sits on its haunches to stare at me. I can definitely see eyes, or two faintly glowing yellow circles where eyes should be. Its strange wariness makes me wonder if this is the same one that attacked me the first time, the one that got scared away by Adrian’s gun. Maybe the terrain between our two ships is its home range. Or maybe this particular specimen has an affinity for guys who stroll into the mist looking for lost friends and lost loves.

  I wave my gun at it, but I have no confidence in my aim. The homing device lies at my feet, its glow too weak to be useful. I need a light source I can point at the thing. I can’t hit what I can’t see.

  Then I remember the flares.

  The plan, to the extent that there was a plan, was for me to use the flares as a last resort, if I managed to negotiate for Adrian’s release but couldn’t bring him back to home base. Realistically, the chance of anyone seeing my flare from the Upperworld ship was nil. And the present situation seems like enough of a last resort to me.

  The thing rattles again but doesn’t spring. Aiming my gun in the general direction I sense movement, I reach behind me, slide a flare from my pack, hold it in front of me. Turn it on. It sparks bright red in the fog, emitting a minor hum. I wave it at the creature, hoping to scare it off or at least give me a clearer view.

  The last thing I’m trying to do is give it something to lock in on.

  It’s on its feet again. I don’t know how I know, but I know. Maybe, as a night predator, it prefers the red end of the spectrum. It’s moving fast, faster than the fog, faster than me.

  Slower, though, than the speed of light.

  I fire blindly at it in midflight, the beam tearing apart the darkness like a flash of lightning. I see a rushing body, reflective enough it could be metallic, with long forelimbs and a wedge-shaped head filled with so many teeth they seem to erupt from its flesh. It screams and twists flexibly in midair, landing on legs I can’t see in the ensuing darkness. Its rattle sounds thick with mucus, maybe with pain.

  But it doesn’t run away. It comes at me again.

  I fend it off with the beam once more, but this time it darts away into the darkness without making a sound. Could be it’s wounded, or it’s realized that my weapon does it no permanent damage. I figure I’ll find out by what it does next.

  What it does next is spring at me from out of nowhere.

  I spin and fire just in time. Its heavy body collides with me, knocking me to the ground and jarring the flare loose. Pain stabs my right shoulder, and the gun drops from my numb hand, spiraling free and vanishing into the mist. I know I won’t be able to reach it before the thing springs again.

  But it doesn’t. It lies on its side, legs curled up to its belly, hide illuminated by the red glow of the dropped flare. It doesn’t move, and the rattling sound has ceased. If it’s possible to kill something that’s more shadow than substance, it’s dead.

  I grope in the dark, my fingers closing on my weapon. My shoulder hurts where the creature hit me, but nowhere near as bad as the first time. Breathing heavily, I retrieve the flare and go to inspect the thing I killed.

  It sprawls on the spongy rock, smaller than I would have guessed when it was in motion, not much more than two meters in length. At first I think its gray skin is hairless, but then I realize its skin isn’t skin. It’s some kind of metal exoskeleton, smooth and shiny, a matching breastplate and backplate enclosing a liquid shape I can’t make out in the bad light. What I took for long, spiderlike limbs are six robotic appendages ending in wicked-looking instruments, spikes and blades and a slim tube tapering to a point like a syringe. The part I assumed was its head is more like a helmet, a jagged slash topped by two flat disks and lined from front to back with sharp points that clamber all over each other in a mad rush. Teeth, or the mechanical equivalent. But there’s nothing that looks like a mouth, no opening in the helmet for it to ingest its prey—i.e., me.

  I lean closer, thrusting the flare into the body cavity to explore the milky figure inside. Much of this inner being is so sheathed in armor I can’t see it, but the parts I can see look distinctly organic: throat, shoulders, stomach. The skin, if it’s skin, is pale, almost translucent in the flare’s glow. The mixture of biology and technology is so intricate I can’t tell if this is a living victim that’s been partially digested by a metallic monster or a humanoid operator inside a robotic shell. I stare at the biomechanical thing for long minutes, wishing I could pry it open, knowing I don’t have the strength. A whisper at the back of my mind tells me there’s something familiar about it, but I’m too exhausted to remember what.

  A hissing sound close to my ear cuts through the confusion, making me think the thing’s coming back to life. But it takes me only a moment to realize the sound’s issuing from me, from my suit. I press a hand against the place where the hood of the radiation suit meets the torso, and the hissing stops, only to resume as soon as I let go. I look closely at the creature’s robotic claws and see a scrap of gray material impaled on one of them, like a tiny victory flag my dead assailant is waving in mockery.

  I have exactly one thought.

  Shit.

  My suit’s been compromised. I’m leaking oxygen. The supplemental kits I brought should take care of that, but they won’t prevent me from being assaulted by the light of the planetary day.

  Which, judging from the pale glow on the horizon, is less than an hour from now.

  I have a new plan. Forget this thing. The revolution can wait. If I want to live to save Sofie, I have to get somewhere inside.

  Fast.

  Earth, 2151

  Lowerworld

  You’d think that, living in Sofie’s camp and catching a few words with her n
early every day, I’d have picked up plenty of details about her personal life.

  You’d be wrong.

  No matter how much time I spent in the Lowerworld, she remained almost a complete mystery to me. I was sure other members of her camp knew things they weren’t telling me, but there was no way to ask. I could barely communicate with most of them, and talking through a TranSpeaker didn’t seem like the best way to have a heart-to-heart. As the year 2150 turned to 2151—with none of the fanfare that was surely taking place in the Upperworld, considering this was the final year those who’d won seats on the starships would live on planet Earth—I found myself more or less where I’d been since I saw her on the worldlink: watching, though from close-up this time, and waiting for her to give me a sign.

  I heard rumors around camp, of course. I heard she’d lived part of her life in the Upperworld corponation of ExCon, which was super rare for people who looked like her. But no one talked about her parents, Sofie least of all, so I assumed they were dead or as good as. The story of her meeting with Sumati at age twelve and her rise to the number two position by her current age of sixteen was common knowledge among her followers, so that much I knew. It blew my mind, though, to think that while I was playing ball with Adrian and Griff, watching crappy content on the link, and getting my head stuffed full of corponational bullshit, Sofie was traveling the world with her mentor, preparing to take over the biggest movement for justice the planet had ever seen. The biggest, and whichever way it worked out, the last.

  Back home, it would have driven me crazy to know so little about a girl who held my fate in the palm of her hand. But back home, the only girls I met were the ones in my Classification, which meant they were the daughters of my dad’s business associates, their heads as full of bullshit as mine. It was a welcome change to find a girl who wasn’t a carbon copy of everyone I knew, including me. And there was so much going on—so many opportunities for me to hope, as I’d almost said that day in her helicar, that Sofie might need me, take that as you will—I stifled any misgivings and let the movement carry me along in its irresistible current.

  We traveled by helicar caravan from place to place, never stopping to set up camp for more than a couple of days before moving on. The Lowerworld I discovered in those months was far different than I’d seen or imagined—a place so huge you couldn’t really call it a place, so varied it seemed crazy to lump it all together in a single word. We flew from one sprawling, crumbling city to another, cities whose names I’d never heard but Sofie told me had existed for centuries if not millennia: New Delhi, Riyadh, Cairo, Chongqing, Kigali. I saw styles of architecture so foreign to me I had to be taught a whole new language, spires and minarets and mosques and temples, most of them in ruins, with clay and mud huts mingled among the hollowed-out shells of skyscrapers and the far more ancient ruins that Sofie said had been among the earliest monuments of human civilization. The people I’d first seen at the UN building surrounded me in these ancient places, people with skin shades all across the spectrum and clothing to match and unfamiliar languages that merged into a steady chaos of sound—except here the scale was much larger than it had been on that single day back home, so many people crowding the streets I felt at first as if I couldn’t breathe. Some days I literally couldn’t breathe, days we were camped near one of the spitting, spewing factories or reeking landfills that dominated many Lowerworld cities. My eyes burned for days after leaving those places.

  But even through the sting and blur, I couldn’t remain blind to the things I saw around me. I saw children so wasted with hunger they couldn’t lift their heads from their straw pallets or swat at the flies that buzzed noisily in their noses and mouths, others with swollen bellies picking through garbage heaps for scraps of spoiled food. I saw men and women who’d worked their entire lives in mines or factories until they got too weak to work and were thrown out to spend their final days coughing pieces of their bloody lungs from toothless mouths. I saw corponation logos plastered on walled fortresses from which the sounds of music and laughter and gushing fountains issued, while in the streets outside, Peace Corp. troops leveled weapons at the crowds of starving people who edged close to these scenes of wanton luxury. I saw truckloads of prisoners or workers—who could tell the difference?—traveling to their next destination, with hollow eyes and manacled hands and rifles trained on any who so much as shifted position. I saw rivers that had turned red from the raw sewage spilling from one Upperworld factory or another, desert plains where the only things that moved were the plastic bags—all of them printed with corponation logos—blowing across the ground like dead leaves. I saw some sights I would have called beautiful, or at least some that spoke of beauty now long gone, graffiti-smeared pyramids and waste-filled gorges and fiery, smoke-dimmed sunsets. But I saw almost nothing that spoke of beauty still alive, still growing, still reaching for the light.

  Nothing, that is, except her. Her and the people who followed her, the people who believed she could lead them to a new and better place.

  I’d joined her camp, it turned out, at a critical moment, by far the most busy, buoyant, uncertain time anyone could remember. The assassination in New York CITI had barely made a dent in the worldlink. The official story was that a crazed Lowerworlder had fired shots in the old UN building, only to take his own life before he could be apprehended. He showed up on the link for a day or two after the symposium, a swarthy, bearded twenty-something whose tattooed face and body screamed Terrarist. Though rumors that Sofie had been the true target in New York forced her to change her routine—most obviously by suspending the large, open, outdoor meetings her mentor had begun—the failed symposium, the death of the revolution’s leader, and the activities of Sumati’s successor carved a silence so deep the Upperworld could slumber on in almost total ignorance.

  Which suited Sofie just fine. She had her own link, her own access to the world, and she used it to make sure people knew the truth. Bootlegged footage of Sumati’s death was beamed throughout the Lowerworld, and wherever it aired, spontaneous protests sprang up, all of them clamoring for access to colonization as the first step—not the last—toward restitution. When Sofie’s team applied to have Sumati’s body returned to her home corponation and the request was denied, that became another rallying cry for the movement. Coupled with Sofie’s stolen colonization memo, the image of the old woman’s limp, bloody body slumped on a table in a foreign land had an explosive effect. The crowds grew and grew, making me think at times the entire Lowerworld was on the march.

  During her life, Sofie’s mentor had lit a spark. After Sumati’s death, Sofie coaxed it into a fire, and it swept across the Lowerworld in advance of her. She didn’t have to keep lighting it. When we arrived, no matter where we arrived, we found it burning.

  With the need to maintain a low profile, Sofie’s new strategy was to meet privately with the organizers of each demonstration, integrating them into the larger movement and coordinating next steps. Her mobility amazed me. How they’d done it I never understood completely, but for years before the public demonstrations began, Sumati’s team had worked to set up a network of secret transportation routes so the teacher and her apprentice could fly from MexSanto to ConGlo, ConGlo to MicroNasia, without the interference or awareness of the corponational authorities. What had seemed like magic on the hacked channels I’d watched with Adrian and Griff was the result of countless people across the Lowerworld working clandestinely to jam worldlink transmissions, bribe low-level corponation officials, spread misinformation about the revolutionary leaders’ activities, and when it came time, get the two of them the hell out of there as the noose was pulling tight. A handful of well-placed Upperworld operatives played a role in the intercorponational game of cat and mouse, but it was the nameless thousands, Sofie said, who were the real heroes of the movement. They were the ones who risked everything—their jobs, their families, their lives—to make it possible for her to speak on behalf of the billions who would have had no voice otherwis
e. And all they asked in return was that Sofie never slow down, never fall silent.

  There was only one time during our months together that it seemed her secret network had failed. That day, we arrived in the former capital of ConGlo—a city once known as Kinshasa—to discover that we’d been ratted out, maybe by someone in the organization, and a trap had been laid for Sofie’s arrest. Fortunately, her handlers figured out something was wrong when they couldn’t scramble the TranSpeakers—the strategy they’d used to block Upperworlders, me included, from decoding Sofie’s words on the link. Her bodyguards hustled her back on board the command ship, and our caravan was in the air before the corponation thugs arrived. Once my heart stopped pounding from the close call—and after she had time to review protocol with her inner circle—I asked her if she realized how much she was risking. It was a stupid question, though by no means my stupidest. But she answered in a way that didn’t make me feel like a complete moron, even if it did make my blood run cold.

  “I risk only what Sumati did,” she said. “And should I pay the price she paid, there will be another to take my place.”

  As the new guy in the movement—and a guy from the Upperworld, no less—my own job was absurdly modest by comparison. While Sofie globe hopped, rallying supporters and dodging death, I sat in a mobile comm tent with twenty other people, monitoring worldlink transmissions for evidence of a change in the Upperworld’s position regarding colonization. Important work, I told myself, but pretty tame and, to be honest, dull. The only time it got a little dicey was when I stumbled on a spot featuring my own parents talking to some corponation propagandist about how they’d worried throughout my childhood that I’d get mixed up with the “wrong people,” but how they were sure I was “treatable.” Fortunately, the feed for that one broke up in about twenty seconds, and after I took a deep breath, I got back to work.