Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  “Shut the hell up!” the guard hollers. He spins to face me, his eyes covered by the visor of his blast helmet.

  I shrug, or come as close as I can with my hands pinned to the seat. “The truth hurts, my man,” I say. “But it’s a good pain.”

  He stands and takes a step toward me, gun drawn.

  I should have left the speeches to Sofie.

  But before he can come any closer, a flash of light envelops him and he crumples over the top of his seat, his body convulsing before rolling limply to the floor. That’s when I see that the other guard’s got his gun out too, and I realize what he’s done. A moment later he stands, nudges his dead companion with the toe of his boot to make sure, then comes for me.

  I tug as violently as I can against the restraints, but they don’t give at all. Whatever it was about my little ethics lesson that drove this guy insane, I’m not going to be able to escape him.

  He’s a step away when he jams his pistol into its holster and slides back his visor.

  “You should have seen the look on your face, my friend,” he says with a laugh. “Like you were about to poop your pants.”

  I thought I’d gotten used to accepting the impossible, but I guess I was wrong. Because even though I see the red hair and the face full of freckles that jump out at me from beneath the oversize helmet, I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

  It’s Griff.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  He unlocks my shackles and helps me stand, and together we move to the front of the vehicle. The dead guard’s body he shoves to the side, but he doesn’t look freaked out by it. He keeps cracking up like we’re playing some crazy vidgame in his room back on Earth, and my amazement at seeing him here turns to worry that there’s something even more seriously wrong than it appears.

  “Check this out,” he says, sitting in the driver’s seat and clicking the commlink back on. “Commander Conroy, do you read? This is Trainee Griffin reporting. Do you read?”

  “What is it, Griffin?” Conroy’s voice comes over the link.

  “Systems malfunction, Commander Conroy,” Griff says. “Unable to operate Juggernaut Team A remotely from battle cruiser Maverick. Please stand by for diagnostics.”

  His fingers play over the cruiser’s front console, but nothing happens, which I suspect is because the buttons he’s pushing are completely random. I notice through the visualization screen that the Centurions have frozen in place on the side of the Freefall, their weapons pointing aimlessly at the bright sky. The CanAm cruiser rolls into view, and Conroy’s voice sounds again over the link.

  “Well, Griffin? What’s your report?”

  “Remote weapons systems controller aboard battle cruiser Maverick reads as nonfunctional, sir,” Griff says in a serious voice, though he’s smiling like a lunatic the whole time. “It’s possible the system matrix overloaded during the previous attack on the Executor.”

  “Goddamn it, Griffin,” Conroy’s voice snarls through the static. “You told me you had these vehicles up and running. Explain yourself, trainee.”

  “Running secondary diagnostics, sir,” Griff says, with a wink that leads me to believe there is no such thing. A minute later, despite the fact that he’s done nothing to the controls and nothing new has popped up on his screen, he continues. “It appears that my original analytics have been confirmed, sir. Complete weapons systems failure aboard battle cruiser Maverick due to inadequate matrix reload.”

  “I’ll have your ass for this, Griffin,” Conroy snaps.

  “Might I suggest, sir, that you activate Juggernaut Team A via the interface aboard the battle cruiser Imperial?” Griff says, still in that ultraserious voice. “Your own cruiser, sir?”

  “I know bloody well it’s my own cruiser,” Conroy returns. “Trainee!” he spits, presumably at the guard operating his vehicle. “Prepare to activate Juggernaut Team A.”

  “What the hell are you doing?” I whisper to Griff.

  “Take it easy,” he whispers back, though the link is down and there’s no need. “Watch the screen.”

  I do. The Centurions bristle over the Freefall’s nose like poison quills on some long-dead sea creature. Conroy’s cruiser remains in our sights, and though I can’t see inside to whatever the guard’s doing, I imagine him diligently pressing the buttons that will send Conroy’s biomechanical monsters swarming into the Freefall’s pod bay. I can’t believe Griff is going to be a part of this, but then, I can’t believe Griff is on this cruiser at all. Or that he killed someone. Or that he’s bullshitting Conroy into believing he’s on his team. I hold my breath, hoping I know my second oldest friend a lot better than I knew my first.

  “Pow,” Griff whispers, and I flinch as if it’s an actual explosion from the Centurions’ guns.

  But it isn’t. The machines do absolutely nothing. Neither does the Imperial. In fact, the CanAm battle cruiser does less than nothing.

  If, that is, spinning in a wild circle counts as less than nothing.

  “Griffin!” Conroy’s voice howls over the screen. “What in the hell have you done to my cruiser?”

  Griff’s laughing so hard tears stream down his face, but he manages to rein in his voice when he answers.

  “Apologies, Commander Conroy,” he says. “It appears the Imperial’s systems are nonfunctional as well. As you know, I revived your cruiser via the matrix aboard the Maverick. It appears that was a mistake on my part.”

  “You’re damn right it was a mistake!” Conroy yells. With his cruiser spinning as wildly as it is, I don’t see how he—or anyone—can hold on to his lunch, much less process Griff’s increasingly ridiculous responses. I think of Sofie, spinning along with the others, her only advantage—maybe—being her ability to calm her nerves through meditation. “Now shut the damn thing off!”

  “Attempting to shut off battle cruiser Imperial, sir,” Griff says in that deadpan voice. He smiles at me and fingers the controls.

  “Listen up,” he says in a whisper. “In about two seconds, the Imperial is going to fill with methoxypropane. All the cruisers have that as a fail-safe in case the vehicle’s taken over by an enemy combatant or the crew just plain loses it.” He laughs quietly. “The Prophet will control her breathing to prevent the worst effects of the anesthesia, but the rest of them should be flat on their asses in a couple of minutes.”

  “The Prophet?” I say. “You mean Sofie?”

  “Later,” Griff whispers. “Just be ready to move when I give the word.”

  I watch through the viewscreen as the Imperial slows its frantic spinning and finally comes to a stop. There’s a pause where I think I should see something happening, but all I see is the cruiser sitting motionless, the way kids do when they’ve spent too much time on the merry-go-round. Finally, a weak voice—maybe Conroy’s, maybe not—comes over the link, but it’s slurring its words, making no sense at all. The voice trails into silence, and Griff slams his hand against the control panel with a laugh.

  “Let’s go,” he says, revving the engine and heading for the Imperial.

  The Centurions spring into motion as our cruiser approaches, clambering off the Freefall and lining up in twin ranks in front of Conroy’s vehicle. They open a space for us, pivoting neatly like Peace Corp. soldiers while we roll through to the Imperial and lock onto its door. The realization that Griff is controlling everything—including the Centurions—sinks in slowly. He must know where my thoughts are headed, because he smiles and taps his jumbo-size helmet, and one of the creatures tips forward and does a headstand.

  “I call ’em Terra Tanks,” he says. “Much better branding than Centurions, don’t you think?”

  Griff hands me an oxygen mask, and we enter the CanAm cruiser. We find what he predicted: the bodies of Conroy and one of his guards sprawled in their seats, heads lolling and tongues exposed. The only thing he didn’t tell me was that the other guard would figure out what was going on and try to get out, because we find
him fallen beside the entrance, fingers swollen and bleeding from his efforts to pry the unresponsive door open. Griff smiles at me as he steps over the inert body, and the feeling that I’m trapped in some kind of trippy techgame grows stronger. I only hope I can figure out the rules, and fast.

  “Where’s Sofie?” I say, just before I see her lying on the floor in a corner of the cockpit.

  I run to her, falling at her side to cradle her head in my lap. For the second time in a day, I think she’s not breathing—but then I see that she is, very slowly and shallowly, her breaths coming at the rate of maybe two a minute. Her pulse feels similarly sluggish, with large gaps between beats. I wonder if this is what I missed last night, when I was so desperate for her to live I overlooked the signs of life. But how she survived having her deepsleep turned off remains as much a mystery to me as it was to her.

  I lift her in my arms. Her body’s warmth and solidity give me hope. Griff stares at us for a second before nodding and leading the way back to his cruiser.

  As soon as we get there and Griff unlocks her cuffs, Sofie takes a deep breath and her chest rises and falls at a normal rate. I place her on the cruiser’s rear bench, watching anxiously until her eyelashes flicker and her eyes open. When she looks at me, I find that I’m the one without breath. I tear off my oxygen mask to speak to her, but she silences me with the intensity of her gaze. She reaches up to touch my cheek, the lightest of caresses with the tips of her fingers. I swallow whatever I was going to say and simply look into her golden eyes, vowing never to let her go again.

  “All right, you two,” Griff says. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  I turn to him, smiling like an idiot. Griff’s got a strange, distant look on his face, as if he’s gazing back over the eons since he last saw her.

  The Prophet. He must have known her on Earth. And he never let on.

  “Richard,” Sofie says, her voice huskier than usual, probably from the gas. “I have no words to thank you.”

  Griff colors, red under red. “The contract we signed wasn’t just for Earth. It was for all time.”

  I wait for him to say more, or for Sofie to say something else, but they both sit there staring at each other.

  Uncomfortable silences. Not so much my thing.

  “Griff’s with the revolution?” I ask.

  “He was one of our Upperworld operatives,” Sofie says. “Cons Piracy put us in touch with him, and we were happy to add him to our team. As you can see, he possesses unsurpassed technical skills to go along with his . . . unique personality.”

  Griff guffaws. “Like I told Her Holiness back on Earth, no one suspects a total screwup like me. These corponation big shots, they figure anyone who’s not as well-dressed or well-connected as them must be some kind of moron. So when Conroy tapped me to keep tabs on you, Cam”—and he nods my way—“he thought he was getting a carbon copy of my dutiful old dad. He didn’t know he was getting a world-class double agent,” he finishes with a laugh.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “Was that then, or now?” It sounds stupid right out of my mouth, but space travel can mess up your sense of then and now in a major way.

  Sofie laughs, the trill I first heard in New York. It’s electric, being this close to her, the fight we had an hour ago seeming like it’s vanished along with the mist. Her hand rests on mine, and when I put my other hand on top of hers, she doesn’t pull away.

  “It appears I missed quite a bit while I was sleeping,” she says to Griff. “When did Chairman Conroy assign you to spy on your best friend?”

  To my surprise, Griff doesn’t answer. And his laughter, in fact his whole laughing face, goes dead like a light blinking out. He’s staring at me and Sofie, and what replaces the laughter is an expression I can’t remember seeing on him before, some combination of anger and distrust and malice that doesn’t match the Griff I know.

  “Hold on a second,” he says, and sits at the Maverick’s controls. The vehicle springs to life under his touch, backing away from Conroy’s cruiser. Griff guns the motor and speeds off as if he’s at the wheel of an emergency vehicle, before slamming on the brakes and spinning sharply to face the CanAm cruiser. Through the screen, I see the Centurions scrambling away from the Imperial, taking up positions again on the Freefall. Griff half turns in his seat and shoots us a grin, but it’s got that same ugly tinge to it.

  To be honest, it scares the hell out of me.

  “Did I mention that methoxypropane is highly flammable?” he says. “That’s why it only has military applications these days. Not that it makes much difference. The firepower on this beauty would punch a hole in a starship. But you already knew that, didn’t you, Cam?”

  Sofie goes rigid at my side. In the second it takes her to leap to her feet, I’ve picked up on her horror and follow one step behind.

  We’re both too late.

  The Maverick’s cannon booms, and Conroy’s vehicle explodes in a ball of light. Ordinarily the atmosphere wouldn’t hold the blaze for long, but there’s enough flammable gas in the CanAm cruiser to produce a towering pillar of fire that shoots from the ground as if the planet is venting flame. Our own vehicle rocks from the blast, and through the Maverick’s viewscreen, I see blackened pieces of the Imperial raining down on the plateau. When the fire and smoke clear, there’s nothing of Conroy’s cruiser left to see, nothing but the black scorch mark it deposited on the spongy ground.

  Sofie grabs my friend’s shoulders and shakes him, hard.

  “Richard!” she screams. “There was no need for those men to die!”

  For a moment his face looks stricken, like a kid bawled out by his mom. But then he shoves her from him and stands, backing us away with his gun.

  “I’m on my own orders now,” he says. “Not Sumati’s. Not Conroy’s. Mine.”

  His gun swivels, pointing straight at Sofie.

  “Such a cozy pair,” he says. “Why don’t you tell Cam the real reason you let him tag along back on Earth?”

  Sofie faces Griff with the same calm expression she showed Conroy. “You cannot threaten me, Richard,” she says. “You know that.”

  “No?” The gun twitches to the side, so it’s on me. “What about now?”

  Sofie’s face changes. It’s like the first time I saw her up close, back in the United Nations building: crouched under the table, her eyes wide, her cheeks covered with her teacher’s blood.

  “Richard,” she says, and her voice shakes.

  A searing pain shoots through my leg at the same moment I hear the buzz of Griff’s gun. I fall to one knee, the muscles of my thigh cramping and quivering. I bite down on my tongue and taste blood. Through eyelids I can’t seem to master, I see that Griff’s face remains relentless.

  “One shot for each lie,” he says. “And that one was at the lowest setting. How many do you think he can take?”

  “Richard,” Sofie says quietly. “Please.”

  The next shot hits my other leg, and I’m slammed to the ground by the force of the charged particles. Sofie throws herself between me and Griff, her arms held out as if to protect me.

  “If I shoot you at full power, he dies too,” Griff says. “Now, why don’t you tell him the truth, Your Holiness?”

  Sofie looks back at me, and there’s a haunted quality to her eyes. Then she kneels and bows her head. “Where do you want me to begin?”

  “That’s more like it,” Griff says. “I’m thinking you should begin with the village.”

  And Sofie speaks, telling a story I’ve never heard before.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  I was born in ExCon,” she says. “My parents were high-placed officials there. Though they were native to SubCon, they had been recruited by corponational headhunters seeking local talent to track and apprehend radicals throughout the Lowerworld. Sometimes, when they discovered large pockets of resistance, they adopted more permanent methods to eliminate the threat.” Her eyes lower, but not before I
see the tears. “The village you visited was not mine. It was one of many similar places, one of many like those my parents ordered to be destroyed. Throughout my childhood, they toured such sites with me to inure me to their horrors. To groom me to take over their work when I came of age.”

  My body isn’t entirely my own, but I force the words past my teeth. “You told me they made you a slave.”

  “They did,” she says fiercely. “From the time I was old enough to speak, my parents arranged for me to be featured in worldlink promos for their campaign against the Lowerworld. Under their hands, I faced lenses and spoke of my hatred for my own kind, my thankfulness that I had been rescued from Terrarists. My mother and father made me a slave to the Upperworld as surely as any who labored in its mines or factories. The only difference was that I did not know what I was until I met Sumati. Until she set me free.”

  I remember Aakash saying something similar, and I know what Sofie means. I know it because the same thing happened to me when I met her. But how could I have been set free by a lie? “Did Aakash know?”

  “None but Sumati knew my past,” Sofie says. “And she knew how dangerous it could be to the movement if others found out. She gave me a name and an identity that she hoped would shield me from exposure, by my parents or anyone else.”

  “Are they here?” I say quietly. “Were they chosen for the colonization?”

  She shakes her head. “When they failed to recover me, their superiors determined that they were too great a security risk. Sumati offered to help me find them, but by the time we made the attempt, it was too late.”

  A silence hangs over us, heavy with ghosts. It’s only when Griff prods her with his pistol that she speaks again.

  “In the second half of the year 2150,” she says, “we had put out a call to our Upperworld operatives for a—a recruit. To help us with a new initiative we had developed as the date for the starships’ departure approached.”

  “An ‘instrument for accelerating revolutionary imperatives’ were your exact words,” Griff throws in.