Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  “You’ll watch him die first,” he says.

  The creature’s blade drives deeper into its victim’s back, the tip bursting from the area around his heart. With a flick of its mechanical arm, it flings him aside, and he crashes to the floor, lying motionless in a pool of his own blood.

  “And now the girl,” Conroy says. He touches the crest on his uniform once more.

  I try to run, but it’s no contest.

  I’m grabbed by the ankle, lifted into the air, shaken until my pistol flies free. Another of the creature’s appendages clutches me by the throat. Conroy strides toward the room where I last saw Sofie, his mechanical pet following with me in its grip. I realize he never had any intention of shooting me out in the dark. That would have deprived him of the satisfaction of watching me held utterly helpless while he flips the switch that ends Sofie’s life.

  She’s there, standing within the ring that generates the deepsleep field, looking exactly as she did when I left her. Exactly as she did on Earth, with one exception. Sofie was never this still on Earth. Even in meditation or prayer, even in moments of reflection before she acted, she bristled with an energy all her own. I know what Aakash meant when he described Sumati’s visit to his jail cell. I wish I could see Sofie as she was. I wish I could bask in her life force, feel it flow through me one more time before the end.

  Conroy taps his badge, and the vise around my throat constricts. My brain sends a frantic message to my hands to claw the noose free, but my hands are held by another of the creature’s arms. Lights dance before my eyes, and through them I see him smile.

  For a moment he looks exactly like his son.

  “Deepsleep is an amazing product, don’t you think?” he says. “It can keep a body alive for a thousand years, and it can snuff that same life out in a matter of seconds.”

  I almost rise to his bait, but I manage to hold my tongue. Sofie wouldn’t want me to beg for her life.

  “A death for a death,” Conroy says. “You took my son from me. Now I take her from you.”

  He presses a button on the mechanism that produces Sofie’s deepsleep field. I want to scream. The aura wavers. There’s the whine of dying machinery. The aura blinks once, twice, like a bad bulb. Then it goes out, and Sofie slides to the floor in a sea of purple.

  Just like that. It’s over.

  “Tomorrow at dawn,” Conroy says, “you die as well. A public execution for a traitor to the Upperworld.”

  He dismisses me with a wave of his hand, and his machine wheels to follow him back to the main room. I jerk my head, the only part of me that can move, trying to wrestle free. But it’s useless. I’m suspended above the ground like a puppet in my metal rack.

  Then I’m not.

  Feeling rushes into my arms and legs as I hit the floor. Conroy’s back is turned to me, and I push up onto my knees, dizzy from lack of breath. I don’t know why the pod creature’s freed me, and I sure as hell don’t care.

  I had one purpose when I entered this ship. Now I have another.

  But I’m too weak to carry it out. I lunge clumsily for my fallen pistol, my legs tangling. Conroy spins, his own gun in hand.

  I look back at the room where Sofie lies. I’m glad we’re about to die together.

  Then the machine that held me lashes out, grabbing Conroy’s neck with its claw, lifting him from the floor above the body of its last victim. The gun falls as his hands scrabble at his throat. His legs kick spasmodically, his eyes bulging in panic.

  I can’t understand what’s happening. The pod ascends the staircase, legs clicking against the metal. When it reaches the catwalk, it freezes, standing like a sentinel against the night window, its shell rimmed in stars. The only movement comes from the frantically kicking legs of Chairman Conroy. They’re starting to slow when the creature releases him, his limp body tumbling down the staircase to land in a heap beside Aakash. I can tell he’s still breathing, in shallow gasps.

  I let him lie there. Sofie remains where she fell, nearly buried beneath her robe and my own tears. I hurry to her side and touch her wrist.

  But there’s nothing to feel. No pulse, and when I lower my ear to her mouth, no breath. She’s gone.

  I lift her in my arms. She’s lighter than I expected. Almost weightless, as if her spirit was the only thing that gave gravity a claim on her body.

  I don’t look at Conroy or the thing that stands on the catwalk. I clasp Sofie to my heart as I walk from the chamber to the waiting cruiser, which accepts us like weary voyagers who’ve lost their way home.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Night

  Outer darkness seals in the light as the cruiser carries me and Sofie back to the Freefall. I try to revive her, using the techniques we learned in ColPrep, but there’s no flicker of response. If this was one of the stories they used to tell in the Lowerworld, a single kiss on those lush red lips would wake her up. But that would require me to be a prince, and princes haven’t existed for hundreds of years.

  Plus, I already kissed her once. And we saw how well that worked.

  When it’s obvious she’s dead and I’m exhausted from trying to breathe life back into her, I consider exiting the vehicle, stripping off my jumpsuit, waiting for daylight. Vanishing in a wisp of brightness and ash, now that she’s gone. I consider it so strongly my finger presses the button to release the door.

  But the cruiser won’t let me. The door stays closed. For whatever reason, though Aakash was able to bring the vehicle to life and point it toward the Executor, it’s been on autopilot ever since.

  Numbly I pick up Sofie’s body, searching for a place to lay her down. It’s a long ride back, and I can’t bear to see her looking so alive when I know she’s gone. Can’t stand to think that in mere hours, she’ll be cold and pinched and the processes of death will show themselves on her face.

  I stumble into the rear of the cruiser and freeze.

  Sitting on the floor is an open pod.

  Horror shoots through me, my bleary mind convincing me it’s the thing that killed Aakash and attacked me and Conroy. But then I remember: It’s a regular pod from the Freefall, loaded aboard the cruiser to carry Sofie if we recovered her in deepsleep. The interior of the pod looks intact, none of the hardware removed or tampered with that I can tell.

  I don’t know what impulse makes me lay Sofie’s body inside the pod. Right now I feel as if I don’t know anything anymore. All I know is that I’m heartsick and exhausted, and light as Sofie is, I can’t carry her any longer.

  I arrange her hands on her chest, the way I saw them do in secret Lowerworld burials, where they put people in the ground instead of incinerating them like you were supposed to. The calmness of death sits on her features, but it hasn’t destroyed her beauty. Her black hair remains lustrous, her lips slightly parted as if she’s about to launch into another story. The jewel on her forehead flashes crimson against her pale brown skin. Yet her chest doesn’t rise and fall, her blood doesn’t stir. When I told myself I’d never see her again, I should have added one word.

  I’ll never see her again alive.

  Tears well in my eyes. I bow my head and let them fall. I’m not sure if I’m crying for Sofie, for me, or for something else. For Adrian, and the friendship we once had. For Aakash, the last leader of a failed cause. For a civilization, a people, a world coming to an end. For the darkness that will soon cover everything.

  I’m crying for her, I decide. Nothing else matters if she’s not here.

  A whirring sound startles me. I look up to see the door to the pod slide closed, sealing Sofie from me. It happens so fast I can’t stop it, even if I knew how. I press the button, but without the tracker to help me, it doesn’t respond. I say her name, but nothing doing. In frustration I hammer on the shell, producing only a series of dull echoes. Whatever the pod’s up to, it won’t let me in. I lay my hands on the cold metal and close my eyes, willing it to unlock its secrets.

  Then my fingertips feel a hum
, and I open my eyes. Tears blur my vision, but there’s no mistaking what I see. At the sight of it, the tears fall harder, and I can’t tell if they’re tears of wonder or grief.

  The sealed door is outlined in light.

  The deepsleep has switched back on. It’s shining inside the pod, the yellowish-white aura I last saw before Conroy ended Sofie’s life. Maybe, when I laid her body in the pod, it responded as it would have if a living body had been placed there. When we gave the pods a trial run on Earth, I remember lying down in my own, the hum of light surrounding me for a split second before sleep descended. Then there was the second time, the time that lasted a thousand years. For those thousand years, I might as well have been dead. For all intents and purposes I was, until I woke up.

  But with Sofie it’s different. You can wake a dead body that’s only sleeping. You can’t wake a dead body that’s truly dead.

  I press my face to the pod, trying to peek through the sealed door. The aperture is far too narrow for me to see anything but a crack of light like a delicate vein beneath the smooth metal skin. I leave my tears on its surface, but with the door closed, I can’t hear the throbbing of the deepsleep aura. All I can hear is the faint hum as it rocks Sofie’s body in her cradle of death.

  I try the release button once more, with the predictable non-result. I could pound on the shell, scream at the pod to stop playing this pointless game, but that would be every bit as pointless. It won’t listen, and I’ve run out of things to say. Exhaustion from the day’s events has stolen over me, and I know it’s only a matter of seconds before I surrender to sleep.

  I lie on my back, hands folded neatly on my chest, the way I left Sofie. Close my eyes. Think of her. Hold the picture firmly in my mind, until the edges blur and darkness carries everything away.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  I wake after a dreamless eternity to find the cockpit flooded with light, the Freefall looming out of the mist. I don’t feel much like living, but it seems my body refuses to die, at least not permanently.

  I rise, stretch stiff joints, place my hand on the pod. It hums the same as last night. I press the button, expecting no reaction, getting what I expect. I speak her name, just to speak her name. Just to feel a tiny bit less unutterably lonely.

  The Lowerworld ship opens its arms to welcome us back.

  Now that we’re inside, the battle cruiser’s doors release and I’m free to exit. Unloading Sofie’s pod gives me a moment’s hesitation, but while I’m standing there trying to muster the strength to push something that weighs well over a hundred kilos, the pod rises on its own and floats to a rest in the loading bay. No sooner have I walked down the ramp to join it than the cruiser backs up, wheels in a tight circle, and opens the airlocks so it can leave the ship. I guess now that its mission has failed, it’s got no reason to stay. I watch through a porthole as it drives off into the blinding light. Part of me wishes I could go with it, now that my mission has failed as well. But the much larger part of me knows I belong here, until the end. Whatever and whenever that might be.

  First order of business, though, is to revive myself. I don’t know if Conroy’s dead or alive, but I do know that if he’s alive, he’ll come after me—and if he isn’t, some flunky or another in the chain of command will. The Centurion line’s obviously not responding quite the way the chairman planned, but Griff’s dad managed to get other weapons systems aboard ship in working order, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the Executor has some nasty surprises up its sleeve. I need to replenish my body, then get down to arming the Freefall’s defenses, if it’s got any. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Conroy or some other licensed hit man from the Upperworld—say, my dad—waltz in here without a fight.

  Why I’m determined to fight when there’s nothing left to fight for, I can’t say. I guess hope is just another of those things. It refuses to die. At least not permanently.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say to the closed pod, the first complete sentence I’ve spoken since last night. “My love,” I add, and my heart swells as I say the words, before folding back into grief and shame that I can’t say them to her living face.

  The dispensary supplies my needs. My throat’s sore, my muscles weak. But I’m as fresh as I’m going to get.

  I’m also dismayed when I discover the state of the Freefall’s defenses.

  Basically, it has none. Or none that I can figure out, anyway. The command center that sits forward of the cargo bay lets me in, and I scan the consoles, looking for something I can use. But there are no external cannons, no energy shields. No robotic weapons systems. That makes perfect sense, from a corponational point of view: You don’t waste high-tech artillery on a supply barge. Probably the single battle cruiser Aakash located was meant for the Executor, a mistake in someone’s procurement order or shipping manifest rather than an intentional passenger. The hull’s sturdy enough to withstand all but a direct hit from an asteroid, but I saw what happened when the cruiser took out the Executor’s cannon. If Griff’s dad has gotten any of the ship’s military vehicles into fighting trim, the Freefall doesn’t stand a chance.

  On Earth, the only weapon the Lowerworld had was the old-fashioned kind: people power. With Sumati and then Sofie to lead us, we marched, mobilized, moved mountains. But even if I could rouse the crowds that lie asleep in the pod bay, human bodies aren’t going to hold against an armed assault.

  I’m on a ship with nearly a million passengers. But I’ve never felt more alone.

  I return to the spot where I left Sofie. To check on her, I tell myself. To delay the inevitable, I know. The moment when I’m going to have to leave her for real, to try to protect the ship that’s become her grave, not knowing if I’ll be able to come back.

  Her pod sits open.

  I’m as shocked as I was last night when I found the pod in the cruiser. This time, though, surprise turns instantly to fury. My only thought is that someone from the Executor has been here already, that they’ve forced their way onto the Freefall and desecrated Sofie’s tomb. Why, I can’t imagine. Unless the plan is to hold a mock execution aboard the Executor in front of a cheering mob that doesn’t know she’s already dead.

  The Upperworld wouldn’t let her live in peace. Now they won’t let her die.

  Teeth clenched to stop my heart from exploding out of my chest, I rush to the pod, expecting to find it empty.

  But it’s not.

  Sofie lies there, hands folded, eyes closed. The deepsleep aura has switched off, showing me her perfect features, her radiant skin. In the brightly lit bay, the luminescence that swaddled her in deepsleep seems to pour from her, making her hair and nails and parted lips shine. She looks so much like the Sofie I’ve dreamed of for so long, the Sofie I fell in love with on Earth, it’s a second before I realize she shouldn’t look this way. Shouldn’t look so tranquil and beautiful hours after I witnessed her death.

  Her eyelids flutter, and she draws breath in a gasp.

  I jerk back instinctively, then lean forward as her breathing steadies, her chest rising and falling in the gentle rhythm of sleep. The sickening thought leaps into my mind that this is one of Conroy’s reprogrammed pods, that I’m about to watch her transform into a twisted slave of metal. I tell myself I’ll end her life before I let that happen to her. But my will is paralyzed, and my hands won’t move. I feel like the Freefall itself, tumbling through space, drawn by my soul’s utmost gravity.

  Then her eyes open. Golden, focused. They tighten in momentary confusion when they see me, but they lose none of the intensity that first spoke to me across worlds.

  “Cameron,” she says.

  She smiles. The red jewel on her forehead flashes.

  “How . . . ?” I ask, barely a whisper.

  She doesn’t answer, other than to lay her hand on mine.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  I help Sofie from her pod, offering an arm to steady
her. She’s less disoriented than most people who’ve spent countless days asleep—not to mention one day dead—but she does stumble when she takes her first unassisted step in a millennium. I watch her closely, not only because I’m afraid she’ll fall. More because I’m afraid she’ll vanish before my eyes. I long to hold her, to feel her solidity and warmth. I ache to ask her all the things I’ve been asking myself, all the things I could never understand: why she left me, whether she felt anything for me on Earth or if I was nothing but a pawn in a game of galactic intrigue she couldn’t afford not to win. I’m this close to asking her too.

  But I get a hold of myself. The last thing I want to do is pick a fight with the girl I’ve loved forever the minute she returns from the dead.

  The next to last thing I want to do is tell her what I know I have to.

  “You’re wondering where we are,” I say.

  She turns to face me. Her eyes are placid, the way they were on Earth even when Upperworld big shots were raining accusations on her.

  “We’re on the Freefall,” I say. “It misfired, along with the Executor. I don’t know the name of this planet. No one does. Somebody sabotaged the ships, and we all wound up here, wherever here is.”

  She nods calmly, as if this is pretty much what she expected to hear. As if I’m the guy she pretty much expected to tell her.

  “Conroy had something to do with it,” I add. “He was planning to use Lowerworlders as a private army. But that plan fell through too.”

  Sofie nods again, businesslike. “We had been warned of such a possibility,” she says, while I thrill at the sound of her voice. “In the months prior to departure, Cons Piracy uncovered plans to use our people in a pilot program code-named Juggernaut. Apparently the program was delayed on Earth and reserved for outer space.”