Children of the Divide

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  The audio wasn’t great, especially from the person on the other end of the call, but Benexx didn’t really need it anyway. Even with the bifurcated picture and tinny sound, ze recognized Captain Feng easily enough. Jian talked about him often, well, complained about him often. Which was fair enough; ze’d been doing more than zer fair share of complaining about zer clueless parents lately.

  After a brief introduction, the screen split to include a new video feed. Two men in vacuum suits, one of which mounted the camera recording the scene. They were inside a cave of some kind, grey rocks mixed with brownish and white marbling, probably various kinds of ices. It wasn’t anything like a cave on Gaia, and their gently bouncing movements meant low gravity. So they were somewhere on Varr, which probably meant Jian’s mission. But his expedition was taking place in a crater on the moon’s dark side, not a cavern.

  Then, a building came into focus sticking out from the wall of the cave. Benexx shuddered. Its construction was angular and sloped, but didn’t look anything like buildings in either Shambhala or Atlantis. The humans in the video were clearing debris away from what appeared to be a doorway while Chao Feng and zer parents argued about the implications of the discovery with significantly more calm than Benexx felt at that moment.

  There wasn’t any audio coming from the two men on Varr, but by expanding the ID stamp down in the corner of the image, ze confirmed the camera suit’s wearer was Jian and the knot in zer stomach tightened again. Where was he, and what the hell was he doing digging around in a cave? He was a pilot, not an archeologist.

  Then, the unthinkable happened. Like, literally unthinkable. The outwardly solid-looking wall turned to goo at Jian’s touch and started sucking him towards it.

  “No!” Benexx shouted, but the image paid zer no mind. The wall crawled up Jian’s forearms, totally ignoring his struggles. Benexx felt suddenly unmoored from reality, as if ze were watching some cheesy found-footage horror movie. Which, ze was, except this one was real, and the first sacrificial victim was one of zer oldest friends.

  “No, no, no, no…” Ze pawed at the wall display as if zer hands could latch onto Jian and help pull him back out again, but to no avail. In moments, he was swallowed entirely as the wall reverted to its flat, impassive state.

  “What happened?!” Benexx grabbed the sides of zer head. Zer people didn’t cry as humans did. They displayed their grief through involuntary flashes of bioluminescence. Benexx’s skinglow was blinking like a Christmas tree. “Where did he go? Is he all right?” ze shouted at the uncaring wall. The image froze.

  “He’s fine,” came a voice behind zer. Benexx shrieked and nearly jumped clear out of zer skin. Ze spun around and came face to face with zer father, who ze slapped on the shoulder.

  “Dad! You scared the shit out of me! I didn’t even hear you come in.”

  “You were busy.” Zer father pointed at the display. “How the hell did you find that? There was no log for that call.”

  “Ze patched it together from House’s security footage,” zer mother said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Well what the fuck was I supposed to do?”

  “Language, Squish,” zer father said.

  “I came home and you were both gone. Your locators were blocked, you weren’t taking calls, and when I tried to figure out where you went there’s you two having some mystery conversation on the recording that sent you off to who-knows where.”

  “It was important to keep this secret, Benexx,” zer father said.

  “So I wasn’t supposed to tug at the thread?”

  “No.”

  “Because you wouldn’t?”

  Zer mother giggled at that. “Ze’s got you there, my dear.”

  “Ze takes after you,” zer father said.

  “How can ze take after either of us?”

  “Hey!” Benexx shouted. “Still gan standing here!”

  “Language in that language too, little one,” zer father said.

  “I. AM. NOT. A. LITTLE. ONE.”

  Zer outburst brought silence back to the house. Benexx spoke first. “What happened to Jian?” ze pleaded.

  Theresa sighed and nodded her head. Zer father turned to face zer and held out his right hand, pinky extended. “I’ll tell you, but you have to pinky swear not to tell anyone.”

  “I’m not a child anymore, dad. Pretty sure I just yelled about it, in fact.”

  “Pinky swear.”

  “Since when do you keep secrets for the crew on the Ark?”

  “You’ve seen enough to know how big a deal this is. We’re not going to keep it forever, but we do need to know more and have a plan before we go public. Otherwise, we’ll be facing riots on two continents. Pinky swear.”

  “For Xis’s sake, I don’t even have pinkies.”

  Unwavering, zer father flexed his pinky in zer face, just like he used to do when ze would act up as a child. “Ugh…” Benexx reached up and curled one of zer four identical tentacle finger-analogues around zer father’s bony little digit. “I pinky swear not to tell anyone about whatever the hell happened on Varr.”

  “How did you know it’s on Varr?” zer father asked. Benexx regarded him with a pained expression. “Right, sorry. But you can’t tell anyone until your mother or I give you the green light, OK? Not even Sakiko.”

  “Not even Sakiko,” ze agreed after an annoyed sigh. “But I want concessions.”

  “Concessions?” zer mother said. “We’re negotiating now?”

  “No, ze must mean hotdogs and soda at the next football game,” zer father said. “Right?”

  Benexx crossed zer arms. “Not exactly. I don’t want to be in the First Contact Day Parade. It’s exploitative and I’m not going to participate.”

  Zer father just laughed. “If I have to put up with passing that goddamned statue of me in Pioneers Park on the way to work every day, you can stand on a parade float for an hour.”

  “But it’s not me standing up there. It’s some stupid symbol.”

  “And?” zer father said, an edge creeping into his normally warm voice. “Do you really think that’s me standing erect in the park–”

  “Phrasing, dear,” zer mother interrupted.

  “–standing tall in the park?” he asked without missing a beat. “Or that nonsense they put on the displays in the museum? Think that’s how it really went down? No. They’re symbols. Propaganda. A bit of polite civic fluff. Something to give the rest of the city something to look up and aspire to. Not the real deal. It’s the same for you. I’m sorry, child of mine, I really am, but you’re just as much a symbol as I am. Neither of us asked for it, but it isn’t about what we want.” He swept an arm wide to encompass the entire city, maybe the entire planet. “It’s about what they need to hear. And right now, they need to hear that the first Atlantian child of Shambhala is a well-adjusted young adult who’s happy and thriving in our little experiment of a society.”

  “Even if that’s a bald-faced lie?” ze snapped.

  “Especially if it’s a bald-faced lie,” zer mother snapped back. Benexx shrunk, suddenly keenly aware of how outnumbered and overpowered ze was. Sometimes, ze’d been able to play zer parents off against one another. More often than not, that involved zer mother and zer ganging up on zer dad until he broke. But, when they presented a united front, well, forget it. They were two of the most intractable, stubborn, and unmoving people ze’d ever met. Of either species.

  “I’m sorry, Benexx,” zer father said, with the usual compassion and warmth pooling back into his voice. “I really am, but the parade appearance has to be off the table. It’s bigger than the three of us. Now, do you want to know what happened to Jian or not?”

  Ze did.

  Nine

  The rest of Jian’s mission on Varr was far more conventional, much less dangerous, and not nearly as interesting. By some minor miracle, everyone had gotten out of the cavern intact. Jian had his sample from the mystery facility, Polly, locked away in a hermetically-sealed crate tied down snu
ggly in the cargo bay. Madeja and her techs managed to winch out the stuck harvester and make the necessary repairs to send it back on its way, with a new twenty-kilometer exclusion zone around the facility of course.

  They successfully delivered the receiver array to the Early Warning telescope site on the moon’s far side and swapped out the shift of techs and construction workers that had spent the last month on site for the fresh ones that came over on the Atlantis. They would spend the next month’s rotation on the far side of Varr installing and testing the receiver array, out of sight of the Ark or Gaia, with only the constellations and each other for companionship.

  If past rotations were any predictor, they would also pass the time fermenting booze out of freeze-dried apple cobbler rations and filming amateur porn in their bunks, because there were certain things about human beings that never changed.

  A quick stop at the telescope site’s automated fuel factory topped off the shuttle’s tanks. The solar-powered rig mined water ice from the moon’s surface, melted it, then cracked it into hydrogen and O2. Just the thing to quench a thirsty rocket ship.

  “Flight Control,” Jian said into the link back to the Ark, “Atlantis. We’re beginning our final approach. Ten minutes to flip and deceleration burn.”

  “Atlantis, Flight Control. Message acknowledged. Welcome home.”

  Jian smiled. “Good to be home, Flight.”

  And it would be, Jian reflected. Instead of the thirty-two hour flight to intercept the approaching moon, the return trip from the retreating Varr had taken almost two full days. As much as he liked his crew, after sharing the tight confines for eight days, the Atlantis had begun to smell like the inside of a laundry bag full of week-old gym socks.

  “I’m really looking forward to a full gee and fresh water,” Kirkland said from the copilot’s station.

  “You know all the water on the Ark isn’t any fresher,” Jian said.

  “True, but the filtration is way better, it doesn’t taste like batteries, and I’m pretty sure that whatever I drink isn’t something I just pissed out in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “No, but somebody else probably did.”

  Kirkland shrugged. “That’s somehow easier to take when I’m not staring at them.”

  “True enough. I’m looking forward to a shower. A real hot water shower, with soap and a luffa, no more of these moist hand-towel baths.”

  “Ugh, I hate that word.”

  “What, bath?”

  “No, ‘moist.’ Ack, you made me say it! Now my mouth feels–”

  “Moist?”

  “Aaaah!” Kirkland put her hands over her ears. “Lalala.”

  “You are so weird.”

  “What? It’s not like I’m alone in hating ‘moist.’”

  “You’re the first I’ve heard.”

  “We have a support group that meets every third Tuesday.”

  “I hate moist too, commander,” Rakunas called out from his seat on the flight deck.

  “That’s enough from the peanut gallery,” Jian called back over his shoulder. “Stop sucking up to the copilot.”

  Everyone had a good chuckle right up until the fire alarm started blaring. Jian’s head snapped down to his console to pinpoint the location.

  “Shit, it’s in here,” Kirkland said, just fractionally faster out of the gate. Jian’s eyes darted frantically around the cabin, trying to pinpoint the fire from sparks, or a telltale puff of smoke. Fire inside a spaceship was every crewmember’s worst nightmare. In moments, a fire could crawl through conduits and circuitry, drawn along by a process like capillary action. Fires burned slow because their exhaust gasses didn’t rise away from them. Little spheres of flame floated freely and kept burning at oxygen levels much lower than fires in gravity. And they would spontaneously reignite even after being snuffed out.

  “I don’t see anything,” Jian said, trying to keep his voice even. “Are we sure it’s not a sensor fault?”

  “Second sensor is registering it now,” Kirkland said.

  “Shit.” Jian hit the release on his chair’s restraints. “Abandon the flight deck,” he shouted. “Everybody out!”

  “Flight Control, Atlantis,” Kirkland yelled into her headset while Jian shepherded the rest of the crew and techs out of the deck and into the cargo cabin. “Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. We are declaring an emergency. There is a fire on the flight deck. We are evacuating to let the fire suppression systems take over.”

  “Now, Kirkland!” Jian shouted to his copilot as he waited by the hatch. “We can’t wait.”

  She loosed herself from the chair and kicked off hard against the instrument panels, sending herself flying for the door like a torpedo. As she passed through the hatch, Jian hit the emergency button and yanked his arm out just in time for the hatch to snap shut.

  With the compartment sealed, it would be a simple matter to vent the atmosphere from the flight deck and kill whatever fire had taken hold. But even as Jian brought up the menus that would do exactly that, something nagged at the corner of his mind.

  “Head count,” he said. “Everybody sound off.” Everyone did so in rapid succession. Everyone, that is, except…

  “Madeja,” Kirkland said, “where’s Madeja?”

  “She’s still on the flight deck,” Jian said, looking through the portal in the door and spotting the tech’s back.

  “Well, let her out!”

  “I can’t. The emergency lockdown is in place. The hatch won’t open until the fire’s out. There’s no way to override it.”

  “Shit…”

  “Madeja.” Jian pounded on the portal, trying to get her attention. The tech turned and glanced back at the door. Jian thumbed on the intercom. “Madeja, we can’t open the door until the fire’s out. The air’s going to be purged.”

  “What’s she doing in there?” Rakunas said from behind them.

  “Good, she’s going for her helmet,” Jian said. “Once she’s sealed in, we can vent the air before the fire gets out of control.” As Jian watched, Madeja fitted her skinsuit’s helmet and connected it to her emergency air supply. The skinsuits they wore aboard ship weren’t proper spacesuits. They used tension instead of internal air pressure to keep one’s blood from boiling off, and they lacked the insulation and life support packs necessary to keep someone alive in the cold and radiation of open space for long. But aboard ship, they were more than sufficient to keep you going in a depressurized compartment for an hour and a half, if you conserved air. Which, frankly, most people were simply awful at doing when faced with a space catastrophe.

  But Madeja’s movements seemed calm and measured. Not at all like the nervous, even panicking tech Jian had been putting up with for the entire mission. Maybe she was finally growing a spine. Maybe the time spent working around the mystery installation had… Why was she sitting in Kirkland’s chair?

  “Whoa,” Kirkland said from Jian’s right. “My screen just went dead. I can’t trigger the purge.”

  “Shit.” Jian thumbed the intercom again, unsure if Madeja could hear him through her helmet. “Madeja, we’ve just lost our panels out here. The fire must have reached the electrical cables. You’ll need to purge the air in there manually to put it out.”

  At that, Madeja turned slowly about from the copilot’s seat and looked back at him with a wry, unnerving grin twisting up the left side of her face. She held up a hand. In it, she gripped a small candle lighter, a perfect little sphere of blue and white flame glowing from its tip. With a flick of her finger, the fuel to the fire was cut out. It flickered, then a moment later, its fuel expended, and it died.

  At first, Jian’s mind recoiled at the sight, but then Madeja’s wicked grin brought it snapping back into place.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “She started the fire on purpose. She’s not trapped in there. She’s trapped us out here.”

  “What?” Kirkland pushed over to look in the portal. “Holy shit! What is she doing?”

  “Did you lock down your s
tation?” Jian asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Your station, did you lock it down before we evacuated?”

  “I was a little busy at that exact moment, Jian!”

  With open access to one of the command stations, Madeja had complete control over the entire shuttle. The screen in the cargo cabin hadn’t gotten its leads burned out, she’d cut it off deliberately. They were locked out of the system.

  “What is she going to do?” Rakunas said as the other techs and crew members began to bunch around them.

  “How the hell should I know?” Jian snapped. “But whatever she’s got planned, there’s not much we can do to stop her from this side of the hatch.”

  “How much time do we have?” Kirkland asked.

  “Before we have to flip and burn? Six, seven minutes, tops.”

  Kirkland nodded and started disassembling the panel opposite the hatch, probably hoping to get to its physical mechanism.

  “Give me a hand with this, I’ll need an eight-millimeter socket.”

  “There’s one in the tool kit we brought for the receiver,” Rakunas said, and pushed off from the bulkhead, heading back deeper in the cargo bay.

  The lights overhead switched from soft white to the flashing red of the decompression alarm.

  “Whoa!” Kirkland shouted.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Madeja’s voice piped into the cargo compartment through the public-address speakers. She sounded steady, confident, and frigid as the space waiting just a few thin centimeters away on the other side of Atlantis’s hull.

  “Why not?” Jian shouted at the ceiling.

  “Because my right hand is hovering over the cargo bay door controls. And if I see any of you trying to jerry-rig the flight hatch, I’ll push that button, the doors will open, and you’ll all be sucked out into space without helmets. Which, incidentally, are all in here with me. So just sit tight, kiddies. This will all be over in a few minutes.”