Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  Such as it was. Sofie had put me on this assignment because my background supposedly gave me insight into Upperworld thinking, which meant I might be able to read between the lines of the purposely vague and evasive statements that flowed out of corponational headquarters. Truth was, though, it all sounded like double-talk to me. I’d heard it all my life: It is in the financial interests of corponational stakeholders and affiliated parties to expedite an orderly, equitable, and secure colonization protocol. But even now that I saw such mumbo jumbo for what it was, I couldn’t see through it to the anxieties that might be driving it. It made me wonder sometimes if the Upperworld had any anxieties, if they were so in control of the situation they could safely ignore the protests igniting around the globe. Maybe Sofie and her retinue would wake up one morning, ready to cruise into another powder keg of a rally that would bring the Upperworld to its knees, only to discover that the starships had already lifted off. Which, when I thought about it, filled me with the same mixture of feelings everything did these days: concern that the movement might fail, and hope that no matter what world I ended up on, I’d end up on it with her.

  I never said anything like that to her, of course. But the more days I spent with her, the more I felt a nervous excitement every time she walked into the room, as if this time would be the time.

  For what, I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I desperately wanted to find out.

  And that was the other thing that drove me crazy about my mind-numbing job in the comm tent, monitoring chatter from overseas: It kept me on the fringes of the movement, away from the action, away from her. I’d known from the start that I wouldn’t be welcomed into Sofie’s inner circle right away. I knew people had trust issues with me. Her head bodyguard was the worst, staring at me all the time as if I was the one who’d pulled the trigger in New York CITI—or, at least, as if I should have stood in the path of the bullet. But though I knew it made a certain sense to keep a guy like me at a distance, I also felt I’d earned a heap of trust that day in New York, when I was the one storming the stage while everyone else was scrambling for the exits. If you wanted to talk about risk, I’d risked my spot on an Upperworld starship, risked my friends and family—for what that was worth—and, if a Peace Corp. drone locked onto our camp, risked my life. Was it too much to ask that I get a chance to be with Sofie, to hold her hand like we’d done in the helicar, to feel her fingers on my arm one more time? To tell her what I felt—no, prove to her what I felt—before I lost my chance forever?

  I couldn’t let that chance get away.

  Which was why my heart beat like crazy when, one morning three months into my new life as a member of Sofie’s camp, she drew aside the screen to my personal tent and slipped inside.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  The first light of the planetary day shows me how far I am from shelter, how close I am to death.

  The Freefall’s here, all right. It lies like a toppled tower spanning a bottomless gulf, the same one that almost swallowed me. I can see it in the pale shimmer of dawn, the gleaming shell rising high above the mist, the thousands of lights twinkling invitingly all along its hull. It beckons to me, a gigantic life-support system just waiting for me to crack into it if I can get there on time.

  Which I can’t.

  I can see it, sure. But I can only see it because a.) I have binoculars, and b.) the Freefall’s enormous. So enormous that, viewed from afar, it looks less like an object sitting on the ground than like the curve of the landscape. The binoculars give me a reading on the distance: approximately fifteen kilometers away, or at least an hour if I was a marathoner. But even on my best day, I could never keep up that pace for long. Factoring in my suit’s weight and the treacherous terrain and the gravitational pull and my current state of exhaustion, I estimate five hours travel time minimum.

  I quickly weigh my options. The sun will break the horizon at any minute. The gully might shield me from its rays for a while, but eventually they’d fall on me. Plus, I don’t have the equipment for rock-climbing. I’ve also got nothing to patch my suit. My only hope is that if I start moving immediately, I’ll find my way to the ship’s interior—or, failing that, its shadow—before the ambient radiation makes me very sick, if not very dead.

  I stoop to pick up the tracker before heading for the ship, then stop.

  The red light of the homing device continues to glow steadily on the ground where I dropped it. From what little I remember of the clerk’s instructions, that makes no sense—it shouldn’t be responding this way if the Freefall’s pods are inside the ship, kilometers away. It’s acting as if the pods are right here.

  But they can’t be. There’s enough light by now to see the area surrounding me, and I can’t see them. All I can see are the remains of the biomechanical creature.

  Which, now that I see it in the early light of day, sparks the memory I couldn’t quite come up with last night.

  I move close, lean down to inspect it. As soon as I do, my heart beats a rhythm of fear and dread.

  It’s a pod.

  Or not exactly a pod. But the way a pod might look if its inhabitant was fused with the machinery. The backplate and breastplate resemble a pod’s outer surfaces. The multiple mechanical arms are like a pod’s innards, if they were pulled out to expose the devices that deliver nanotechnologies to the sleeping passenger. The helmet is a mystery, but still. I lean closer, squinting through the maze of metallic teeth, and then I see it.

  There’s a word etched into the helmet. An acronym, actually.

  JIPOC.

  I stand, glancing anxiously around me, convinced a whole squadron of the things is going to appear from underground. Almost hoping they do. If they did, they’d show me a way out of the sun.

  I hunt for the way myself, and it’s not long before I find it.

  A hole in the ground opens onto a diagonal shaft, tunneling downward at a twenty-degree angle. It’s more than broad enough to accommodate me. After all, it accommodated them.

  I push my hood back and wriggle face-first into the hole, keeping the flare in front of me to provide light. The subsurface stone is cool on my face, even cold, and I know I’ll be safe from the UV down here. Whether I’ll be safe from other things, I’m less certain.

  It’s a short crawl before I drop into a larger chamber. The air is downright frigid, but I should be okay in the radiation suit. The flare isn’t strong enough to show me much more than a collection of humped shapes like stones or burial mounds. But I’ve got my flashlight. I take it out and shine it around the room, and then I see.

  They are pods. Not as many as I expected, but other tunnels branch off from this one, so possibly there are other chambers. I count eight pods, looking precisely the way dormant pods should look, their shells folded neatly in a two-meter-long oval. When I shine my flashlight on the nearest one, I can see the hairline seams where the thing is designed to open when the sleeper wakes, the recessed button that operates the opening mechanism from outside. I step closer, tracing the part of the shell that carries the JIPOC crest and acronym. I can easily imagine this part as the shape of the biomechanical monster’s helmet, as if the head’s been tucked, turtlelike, between the other sections of the shell. The rest of the pods carry precisely the same symbol and lettering.

  And the things are asleep. At least, they don’t stir when I shine the light on them, touch them, press my ear against them to see if I can hear the living being within. I can’t, but I can hear the faint hum and feel the vibration that means the deepsleep aura is engaged.

  Shakily I sit, removing my gloves. I can wait here until nightfall, but I’m going to have to be careful. At the first sign of the things waking up, I have to be gone.

  My mind races, and though I can’t remember the last time I ate anything, the clenching of my stomach has nothing to do with hunger. I can understand what these things are: the missing pods from the Executor. I can understand why the creatures come out at ni
ght: They’re triggered by darkness, their human components unable to tolerate the radiation of the planetary day. I’m guessing I didn’t actually kill the one aboveground, but that I merely crippled it, preventing it from folding back into deepsleep when it sensed the sun rising. I can even understand why they’ve moved themselves to this remote cavern, far from the Executor: The supersonic devices we planted around the ship did upset them, forcing them to find other places to hibernate. It was only because me and Adrian had run well beyond the perimeter that they were able to attack him there.

  What I simply can’t understand is how any of this happened.

  The pods were meant to protect us in a state of suspended animation on our journey, allowing us to rise from deepsleep undamaged, unchanged. They weren’t supposed to fuse with their occupants, turning sleeping passengers into these grotesque hybrids of human and machine.

  Could this be what happens when the deepsleep goes bad? Could it be what might happen to Sofie if I don’t deliver on my promise to Conroy?

  But no. I can’t believe this is an accident. It has to be by design. The only question is whose.

  I think back to my first encounter with the night creature, the blade that skewered my shoulder, the burning, blinding fluid the PMP extracted from my eyes. He called it an organic compound. Could it have been some kind of nanoserum, accidentally delivered by one of the creature’s appendages when it attacked me? Not so much a toxin as a treatment? Maybe the very thing that, administered over the course of the ship’s journey, transformed a sleeping human being into a mechanical nightmare?

  And if it did, could it be that Conroy knows about this? His PMP was the one who identified the compound. His strategy for scaring the things off with the perimeter devices couldn’t have been a lucky guess. His belief that I could negotiate with them, that they weren’t brute animals incongruously roaming a barren planet, suggests that he knows or at least suspects what they really are. Could he have been responsible for what happened to them? Unless the nondescript commissary clerk is a criminal mastermind during her lunch break, the chairman of the board of JIPOC would seem the most likely suspect to hatch a swarm of interstellar monsters.

  But why? And if he was responsible for them, how did they get so badly out of his control?

  I can’t puzzle it out. My brain feels like it’s stuck in neutral, and I realize I haven’t slept—if you can call this “sleep”—since I got my clock cleaned by Adrian. Who I still don’t expect to find aboard the Freefall, because whatever produced these creatures, they don’t seem like the negotiating type. But the other things I might find aboard the Freefall are my main objective now, in fact my only objective. I don’t need to solve this mystery to save Sofie. I just need to stay alive long enough to find others who are willing to fight with me.

  I take out a food pouch and a sac of water, quickly gobbling and slurping down the unappetizing meal. Then I lean back against the nearest pod, holding the tracker in my hands. My plan is to take a short nap and be up long before they wake, but in case I don’t, maybe I’ll get lucky and feel this one coming out of hibernation. Why I think I should get lucky at this point is beyond me. Hope springs eternal and all that.

  I close my eyes. Darkness enfolds me, shot through with specks of light like stars. The pods purr around me, but I can’t help amplifying the purr into a rattle, and sleep’s in no hurry to come. I feel totally alone, the entire universe my ocean, and me one small ship in an endless sea.

  If I were to dream, I wouldn’t dream of them. I’d dream of her.

  I don’t dream.

  Earth, 2151

  Lowerworld

  When the girl you’re dying to be alone with strolls into your tent first thing in the morning, what do you do?

  If you’re me, you thank your lucky stars you zipped up your pants.

  She’d never visited me before. She’d stuck her head into the comm tent from time to time, not looking for me in particular. It was always me tracking her down, grabbing a word with her after her nightly story sessions, passing her my reports and getting a minute or two of her time while she flipped through my linkpad. I was so shocked to hear her voice outside, to see her hand—not her bodyguard’s—lifting the tent flap, it’s a miracle I had the presence of mind to zip up. I wondered how her face would have reacted if I hadn’t.

  “Cameron,” she said. She was dressed like always, her hair in its usual braid, her lips and eyes made up, but I thought she looked tired and more somber than usual. I was so far out of the loop I couldn’t remember what she’d been doing this past week, whether she’d had a particularly brutal travel schedule. “Are you busy?”

  “Not especially,” I said. In fact my agenda was no different from any other day, which meant I was either insanely busy or wasting my time, take your pick.

  She smiled a little, but she still looked distracted. “I would like you to come with me,” she said. “There’s something I need to show you.”

  The word “need” was all it took to shove everything out of my mind and get me off my butt. Any thought I might have had that this was more than a business excursion, though, was squashed when I exited the tent and saw her bodyguards standing there like always, the original five plus the two replacements. Still, I didn’t hesitate. This was the first time I’d been alone with her since leaving the Upperworld, even if “alone” meant me, her, and seven guys who could kill me with their bare hands.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as we hustled to her helicar.

  “Not far,” she said, and that was all I could get out of her. So I settled in and let the car take us away. We sat in silence as the dusty emptiness of the SubCon countryside flowed beneath us.

  In less than an hour we landed on the outskirts of a small village, the mud-hut kind I’d seen many times in the past three months. But the second the helicar door opened, I knew this place was different. For one thing, the huts had been fenced in, surrounded by a two-meter-high barricade of barbed wire. For another, the smell that hit me when I stepped out of the car was like a solid wall: piss and decay and something worse, something I couldn’t identify and didn’t much want to. There was no one in the mud lanes, no sound of children playing like there always was even in the worst of these places. I hesitated as Sofie and her bodyguards forged ahead, and she saw it, because she held up a hand for them to stop.

  “Cameron.” Her voice was soft, but her eyes probed me. “Are you coming?”

  “What is this place?” I asked.

  “Please,” she said. “We won’t stay long.”

  She raised a fold of her robe over her nose and mouth. I took out the cloth mask they’d given me when I first joined them and held it over my own face. Then I followed her to the fence, waiting while her bodyguards made an opening with wire cutters and peeled a section aside. With them remaining behind, Sofie and I walked to the closest of the mud huts.

  The smell was so bad inside I couldn’t breathe even with the mask. It was too dark to make anything out at first, but then I saw, huddled on the floor like piles of wood, the bodies of people reduced to nothing but skin and bones. They weren’t moving, and they were clearly dead. The air was completely silent, not even the flies wanting to take part in the feast. When I could finally bring myself to look at the people’s faces, I saw that their eyes were open and their noses and mouths were smeared with something black that shouldn’t have come from inside human bodies.

  I ran from the hut and leaned over, trying not to throw up, afraid that if I did, the same black stuff would come out of me. I don’t know how long I stayed like that before I felt Sofie beside me. I looked up at her, watching her through a blur of desert light. Her face was calm, and when she spoke, her words were dispassionate, like she was reading from a report.

  “One of the Upperworld transmissions you intercepted yesterday contained directions to the SubCon Central Office, instructing local authorities to place this village under close supervision,” she said.

  “One of the o
nes I intercepted?” I couldn’t remember reading anything like that, there’d been so many, all of them blending into uniformity.

  “The transmission originated from ExCon,” she said. “We have learned to treat all such communications with suspicion.”

  “What happened to them?” I said.

  She looked at me sadly, but instead of answering, she asked another question. “Do you know where ExCon got its name?”

  I shook my head. All I knew was that it stood for Exceptional Content, since that was what they did, provided the most popular worldlink games and videos. But Sofie wouldn’t have asked if there wasn’t more to the story.

  “Its original name was Extermination Control,” she said. “Its charge was to develop seamless and untraceable means of relieving population pressures. Its video empire was built on the blood of countless victims who died never knowing what poisoned them, or why they were deserving of such a fate.”

  I stared at her, at a loss for what to say. “How do you know about this?”

  “I lived much of my life in ExCon,” she said. “I found ways to discover the truth.” Her arm swept the circle of silent huts. “The officials who orchestrated this attack are too cowardly to leave a garrison to defend their handiwork. They think no one will come prying until all of the evidence has been destroyed and their propagandists have had a chance to blame the deaths on a Terrarist attack. But we have been here, and so we know.”

  I fell to the dusty ground, holding my head in my hands. I’d watched ExCon videos, played ExCon games. The excitement I’d felt when Sofie arrived at my tent this morning had turned into the conviction that if this was supposed to be some kind of date, it was definitely the worst date of all time. “Why’d you have to show me this?”

  She squatted beside me. “It was your diligence that led us to this place,” she said. “Is it not best that you see?”

  I shook my head, unable to answer her. She rose and took a step away from me, then stood there, arms wrapped around her middle. The wind blew her robe as dark clouds gathered overhead, but I knew the stink of the place couldn’t be blown or washed away.