Freefall

by Joshua David Bellin

  “We will go together,” she says. “And whatever happens, we will face it as one.”

  I’m about to object when she closes my mouth with a final kiss and then lifts the mask to my face. I breathe in, and I was right: There’s no comparison between the thing that keeps you alive and the thing that gives you a reason to live. Trust me, even if it’s only for a few seconds, you should choose the latter.

  We step out into the shadow of the Freefall. The Centurions react instantly to our presence, halting in their tracks and scuttling off the ship. A thin squealing reaches my ears, far less noise than they’d produce in Earth’s atmosphere, as their missiles lock onto the two human beings foolish enough to confront them.

  I guess I have my answer to that question too.

  Sofie doesn’t budge, doesn’t try to run. Instead, she calmly raises her hands in the gesture she used in all the videos and all the rallies on Earth. Only this time her left hand is linked with my right, and the two of us stand there, hands held high. I feel her life force flow into me the instant before both of us die. Personally, I could care less about that. I’d rather die now, holding the hand of the girl I love, than live long enough for her to let go.

  The Centurions prepare to fire.

  I’m about to get my wish.

  There’s a brief burst of flame, doused instantly as it consumes the scant supply of oxygen. It’s followed by another explosion, and another. I throw myself in front of Sofie, as if I could block a missile. But we’re still alive, our hands linked, our bodies untouched. It takes me a minute to realize what’s going on.

  Three of the Centurions have been reduced to scrap.

  They’re firing on each other.

  “What’s happening?” I shout above the roar of another explosion. Sofie shakes her head, her eyes wide with wonder.

  The Centurions are firing nonstop, their missiles aimed at whichever of their number is the closest target, each machine consuming one or more of its companions before disappearing in its own ball of flame. Several of the creatures retreat from the field of battle, but not to go after us—instead, they fling themselves into the abyss beneath the Freefall, too deep for me to hear them hit bottom. Some go up in flames without anything striking them, which must mean they’ve got an auto-destruct. Others plunge claws into their own bodies, toppling to the ground with their biomechanical innards torn free. It’s a totally bloodless battle, though the ones who’ve eviscerated themselves ooze a dark fluid that soaks into the spongy stone. And it’s over in a matter of minutes, the field entirely cleared of everything except scorched remains and broken bodies.

  Sofie and I step out into the carnage. We’re still holding hands—clutching them as tightly as possible, to be exact—though we’re no longer raising them in the victory gesture. Maybe, with the Centurions decimated, we should be.

  Or, then again, maybe we should keep them right where they are.

  A military cruiser rolls into the shadow of the Freefall. Its logo has been painted over, leaving a gray square on its night-black side. I’m half-convinced my eyes deceived me before and the cruiser was the one that fired on the Centurions. Except its cannon is retracted, and something waves from the space where the muzzle would be.

  A white flag.

  “Surrender,” Sofie says. “They surrender.”

  “To who?”

  The cruiser stops a few paces in front of us. Its door opens, and two people climb out, wearing oxygen masks but not the JIPOC uniforms and military-style helmets of Conroy’s goon squad. Grown-ups, not the teenage guards I expected. They take a step forward, and I see that their hands are linked like Sofie’s and mine.

  I know them.

  I’ve known them all my life.

  The tall man with salt-and-pepper bristles and a dark gray business suit looks a lot like me, or so everyone says. There’s one picture of us playing catch where, if you took away the suit, he could even pass for an older version of the renowned Cam Newell. Except in that picture I must have been all of four, with my oversize plastic mitt and my maroon-and-gold CanAm Clippers T-shirt reaching practically to my knees.

  The other person is a woman, small and with long blond hair pulled back in a loose bun. Like her husband, she’s wearing the attire that never left her body on Earth: a white lab coat with her name stitched on the pocket, a pair of glasses strung around her neck. Her eyes are brown like mine, and thanks to medical nanotechnologies, they don’t need the glasses. I always assumed she wore them because they made her look like the total brainiac she is.

  I haven’t seen either of them since I left Earth. I barely saw them the final year I lived there. They were busy, like all the grown-ups in my life. Busy in their office and lab, spending days and nights outfitting the ships and perfecting the technologies that were supposed to save us for the long years of our interstellar flight. Our most recent communication made it pretty clear they wished they’d never wasted their time saving me.

  You can call them Samantha and Robert. Sam and Bob among friends, if they have any.

  Me, I called them Mom and Dad.

  Otherworld

  Earth Year 3151

  Day

  I consider all the things I could say to them. Beginning with Any luck renting out my room? And So what’s it like helping an evil corponational dictator kill innocent people to save your own useless necks? You know, conversation starters.

  But my impeccable Upperworld grooming takes over. That and the fact that I don’t want to come across as too much of a jerk in front of Sofie. And that I genuinely want to know what the two of them are doing here, driving a surrendered military cruiser onto a battlefield littered with the bodies of dead monsters.

  So I go with something neutral. “Hi, Mom and Dad.”

  “Cam,” my mom says in her soft voice. “How are you?”

  Why do grown-ups always ask questions it would take a novel to answer? “I’m okay.” Sofie gives my hand a squeeze, which reminds me of the required etiquette. “Mom, Dad, this is—”

  “Sofie Patel,” my dad says. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last.”

  That throws me. It throws Sofie, too, if her silence is any indication. All of a sudden I feel self-conscious holding her hand in front of my parents, which is fairly ridiculous considering what they’ve put me through. But Sofie picks up on the awkward vibe and, giving my hand one more squeeze, lets go. “Mr. and Mrs. Newell—”

  “It’s Park,” my mom says, deciding to increase the awkwardness. “Data Recruitment Specialist Samantha Park. I prepped you for deepsleep, Sofie. So I suppose you could say we’ve already been introduced.”

  That’s met with another silence. My mom was always much better with unconscious people.

  “I’d like to suggest we continue this conversation inside,” my dad cuts in. “Before the sun gets too high.”

  He leads us to the Freefall. An airlock’s open. Old Bobbo does the thing corponational wheeler-dealers get really good at doing, ushering us ahead with one arm while he corrals us with the other. Kind of like a hug, except without the warmth, and with the primary purpose of showing who’s in control. My dad, the smooth operator. What he and my mom ever had in common—other than helping out evil corponational dictators—is a mystery likely to outlast the ages.

  “Let’s find someplace quiet,” he says. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  • • •

  Last time I was inside the Lowerworld starship, every place was someplace quiet. But not anymore. In the time we’ve been gone, the passengers of the Freefall have finally come out of deepsleep.

  All half million of them.

  Well, okay, I’m not actually counting. But for whatever reason—maybe something having to do with Griff’s death, maybe nothing but random luck—the pods are behaving the way they were supposed to, and those who woke up first are busy clearing out the bay and waking up others. No sooner have we entered the ship than we walk smack into a crowd that spills from the pod bay into the corridors
, multihued clothing and jewelry and skin colors swirling all around us. I’m not surprised by the attention Sofie gets, but I’m blown away to find that some of it spills over on me. People smile, pat my arm, touch their fingers to their foreheads in greeting or salute. Some smother me in hugs. One or two even bow, which is totally embarrassing, though not so embarrassing that I ask them to stop. I walk through the masses of the Lowerworld like a hero returning from war.

  Sofie never leaves my side.

  It takes a while, what with everyone wanting to touch us and chatter a few words I can’t understand in our faces, but eventually we make our way through the mob and escape to the command center, the place where Conroy and Griff put us in chains. My dad acts like he’s holding one of his infamous staff meetings, smiling at everyone as we settle into chairs and making small talk about nothing in particular. The man would probably comment on the weather if it wasn’t the kind that can kill us. There’s no conference table, so we end up sitting in a circle with our knees practically touching. The last thing he does before planting himself next to my mom is give my shoulder a fatherly squeeze. My good shoulder, fortunately.

  Then he gets down to business.

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” he says, leaning back and finding a way to look both me and Sofie in the eye at the same time. “With Chairman Conroy’s decease, the chain of command has been broken, and the JIPOC board of directors hasn’t authorized anyone to conduct business on behalf of the citizen-shareholders of the Otherworld Colonization Limited Partnership. In that respect, any decisions we arrive at today and moving forward aren’t likely to be considered binding.”

  I shrug. Judging from this gobbledygook, our centuries-long voyage hasn’t changed my dad one bit.

  “Moreover,” he says, “there are many aboard the Executor who would prefer to have nothing to do with the Lowerworld—”

  “There’s a shock,” I cut in.

  “Cam,” Sofie says. My mom tilts her head and looks at the two of us, smiling faintly.

  “And in the absence of clear guidelines”—my dad goes on as if I didn’t say a word—“it’s going to take some time to figure out how best to represent the interests of all parties. Everything’s been thrown out of joint by the events of the past several weeks.”

  “Not to mention the past several hundred years,” I say.

  My dad looks blank.

  “On Earth,” I add. “You remember that place?”

  “Cam,” Sofie says again, and this time she sounds peeved. But frankly, so am I.

  “You can go on talking like this is some kind of deep-space team-building retreat,” I say to my dad. “But there are plenty of people on the Freefall who want nothing to do with the Upperworld, either. And with much better reason. Even if we had a rat’s chance of surviving on this dump, whose interests do you think are going to win in the end?”

  My mom’s smile shifts. My dad clears his throat.

  “It’s not quite as dire as all that, Cam,” he says. “Yes, we’re still a world divided to a great extent. And yes, there’s much work to do. But we’re not the same people we were on Earth. The instinct to survive generally trumps ideology, and the passengers aboard the Executor are finally starting to realize that we’re going to need to band together if we’re to survive.”

  “Not according to their esteemed leader,” I say.

  “Pete Conroy was losing support before his decease,” my dad says. “Which probably explains his ill-advised attempt to take the Freefall. The Executor is dying, Cam. Leave aside the loss of functionality in-flight, it was critically compromised in the assault that recovered Miss Patel. That attack not only inflicted severe damage on the vessel itself, but destabilized the underlying terrain to the point where the entire ship might simply be swallowed. For the Upperworld right now, it’s literally a matter of life and death.” He smiles, and for once it doesn’t look like he’s pretending to make nice with his peons. “And no, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn of the Lowerworld’s distrust of Upperworld motivations.”

  He nods at my mom, who reaches into the pocket of her lab coat and takes out a small object. When she holds it up between her thumb and forefinger, I realize it’s a red jewel, the same kind Sofie’s wearing. My heart lurches sideways as the gem catches the light.

  “We were followers of Sumati’s in the early days of her movement,” my mom says to me, and the hunk of muscle thumping inside my chest lurches even more. “I grew up in MicroNasia, before my parents were transferred to SubCon. That’s where I met your father, Cam.”

  I lean forward in my seat, eyeing the jewel as calmly as my out-of-control heart will allow. This is all news to me.

  “I accepted my first corponational post working for the SubCon Division of Data Recruitment,” my mom continues. “It’s where I did the basic research for deepsleep, which had become a top priority as the colonization effort picked up steam. Everyone in the Upperworld was looking exclusively to modifications and enhancements of bodily processes, but I’d discovered mystics in SubCon with the ability to enter dream-states where the brain effectively convinced the body to shut down, and I thought we might start there before turning to nanotechnologies. My research led me to Sumati. She became my teacher, and I became a recruit to her cause.”

  I feel like I’m hearing the voice of a ghost, or of someone who died a millennium ago and was reborn as this complete stranger in front of me. “You didn’t think I should know any of this?”

  “We felt the knowledge could put you at risk,” my dad says. “After your mother was recruited to complete her research in the Upperworld, I relocated with her to CanAm, where we were married. My job as vice president of operations for Otherworld Colonization put me in a perfect position to work for Sumati behind the scenes, placing members of the revolutionary movement in sensitive areas within JIPOC. I helped them emigrate to the Upperworld, cloaked their genetic histories, altered their identities when necessary. It was dangerous work, and we thought you’d be safer if you knew nothing about it.”

  “Griff’s dad,” I say. “You were the one who brought him and Griff here.”

  My dad nods. “I also arranged for the work that was done on Sofie’s personal file. Sumati knew by then that she had few years to live, and she considered it her top priority to find a replacement.” He smiles at Sofie. “She was quite insistent that it be you.”

  Sofie sits silently by my side, tears painting trails down her dirty cheeks. I grip her hand and turn to my dad. “Did you know Griff’s mom, too?”

  He nods again.

  “And so you know what Griff did to the ships.”

  He takes a heavy breath. “His father suspected. But Griff covered his tracks too well for us to pinpoint him as the source. It was only last night, when we unexpectedly recovered control of Peter Conroy’s creations and were able to watch a video feed from one of the Centurions operating beneath the planet’s surface, that we knew what Griff had done—and what had become of him.”

  I shove down the image of Griff’s dad watching his son’s death on a video screen. “Griff said his dad was working for Conroy. That’s why he sabotaged the ships.”

  “It’s understandable that Griff would believe that, given the need to convince the chairman of our loyalty to JIPOC,” my dad says. “But I can assure you he was wrong. When Griff’s father received his orders to reset the Lowerworld ship’s gravitational drive and institute the Juggernaut programming for its pods, he came to us for help. Together, we developed a plan to protect the Freefall, its passengers—and its leader.”

  Once more, my mom holds the jewel up to the light. Maybe it’s an effect of my own pounding heart, but I can swear the gem pulses between her fingers.

  “Griff’s father defied the chairman’s orders,” my mom says. “Had Griff not intervened, the Freefall would have carried out its planned route to Kapteyn b. But as an extra precaution in case we were found out, I implanted a chip similar to this one when I prepped Sofie for deepsleep
. It’s a homing beacon, and much more. Most important, except in the case of severe bodily injury, it provides a form of life support to her.”

  “So when Conroy disengaged her deepsleep—”

  “I’d visited her beforehand, under the chairman’s orders,” my mom says. “He’d been digging into my past, and he thought he could blackmail me. Once I’d determined that her implant was functional, I supplied him with the means to power off her stasis field. What he didn’t know was that I’d equipped Sofie with a backup, one that prolonged her deepsleep until she could be restored through the normal pod technology.”

  The whole time we’ve been talking, Sofie has kept quiet, as if she’s taking it all in. Or maybe she’s been reluctant to interrupt the Newell family reunion. But now she speaks, touching two fingers to her own jewel. “You did this—for me?”

  “We did it for the revolution,” my mom says. “For Sumati, and the Lowerworld, and all who fought and died in the name of justice. But yes, Sofie, we did it for you, too. For you, and for our son. Our people are going to need both of you in the days ahead.”

  I sit back, staring not at the technology that saved Sofie’s life but at the woman who developed it. Everything I thought I knew about her just went out the window, and I feel like a little kid again, with a whole world to learn from scratch. It makes me wonder if, all those years ago, she was spending time cooped up in her lab not for people like Conroy, not for the salvation of the planet, but for me. To give me a chance to live a life, even if it meant a life lived a thousand years too late.

  But it is too late. Too late for this planet, too late for us. There are no days ahead. As a scientist, she has to know that.

  “Thanks for trying, Mom,” I say, and I do mean it.

  She smiles, brushing away what I think is a tear. When she reaches out to touch my cheek, I flash back to the time when I really was a little kid, before the colonization heated up and she and my dad were never home, or—I realize now—before they got worried that I was old enough to catch on to what they were up to. I remember the two of them coming into my room, just before I went to sleep, and sitting on either side of me to tell stories. I don’t remember their exact words. I don’t even remember what the stories were about. But I do remember the warm echo of their voices as they traded back and forth, filling in each other’s silences, turning the tales into a single tale that included me. My heart aches, though it’s different from the ache of things lost: my two best friendships, my two best friends’ lives. It’s more the kind of ache you get when you’re out on the road and you think you forgot something back home.