Jian’s focus on her face was so absolute, that his nerves didn’t even register the pinpricks crawling up his arm into a familiar place on his shoulder. But Madeja noticed. The grinding of his air hose unscrewing stopped. Her eyes darted over and went wide with surprise and fear of her own. Jian glanced over to see Polly sitting in its usual spot, its three green eyes half-hooded as it inspected Madeja.
Then, it held its forelimbs up in the same aggressive display it’d made at Jian when he’d first encountered the little AI. Jian’s shoulders slumped at the little bug’s impotent bluster, but then Polly’s right claws twisted together into a wicked-looking spear point.
Before either Jian or Madeja could react, Polly’s forearm shot out in a flash, stretching all the way to, then through, Madeja’s face shield, pierced her left eye, then erupted out the back of her helmet.
Madeja’s body jerked once, then fell into spasms. Her hand clutching his air hose went limp. Without withdrawing his tiny spear, Polly turned its small head to face a horrified Jian. Its left eye blinked. Jian swallowed hard. Their inside joke lost some of its charm.
There wasn’t time to waste. Jian shoved the lifeless body aside, momentarily taking a startled Polly with it.
Jian’s health monitor inside his plant started flashing heartrate and stress-level warnings, but he ignored them. Slowly, ponderously, the enormous beast slowed its tumble as Jian made the complex series of short, precise inputs necessary to counter its chaotic movements.
Laboriously, he strong-armed the Atlantis back into line. Sweat beading up on his forehead, the artificial horizon finally stabilized and the shuttle was flying straight and true once more. Which was when the collision avoidance radar started screaming at him. Jian looked up from the instrumentation and nearly screamed himself. The Ark had grown from a thumbnail to encompass the shuttle’s entire windshield. They were less than forty thousand meters out, and closing at eight thousand meters per second. Four seconds to alter course by more than a kilometer. Thrusters alone weren’t going to cut it; he needed the mains.
With a flurry of icons, Jian brought up the safety overrides for the main engine shutdown sequence, then hit the button to light them. Engines One, Two, Five and Six reported hot and ready. Three had been too badly damaged by Four to restart even with the override. It would have to do.
Jian pitched the Atlantis’s nose down and away from the Ark and firewalled the throttles. The gees threw him back into his chair painfully, but his burning muscles pinned the joysticks forward to maintain the dive as the Ark expanded exponentially in the window.
Just as it looked like he might scrape by without swapping paint, a sliver of light gleamed in the space ahead. The elevator ribbon. In his panic, Jian hadn’t even notice its carbon black surface against the background of dark space beyond. With only tenths of a second remaining, he jammed the joysticks to the right in a desperate bid to avoid it, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough.
“Oh fu–”
Ten
Benson used to love being the center of attention. He wasn’t sure exactly when that had changed, but, as he waved mechanically and smiled at the First Contact Day crowds from his “Place of Honor” on this stupid float, he was pretty sure his perennial position as the ceremonial Parade Marshal had something to do with it.
They stood on a platform built on top of two linked transit pods with a colorful fabric skirt concealing them as they crawled slowly down the electrified track. Surrounding them were all manner of garish decorations made of wire frames, local flowers, and papier-mâché. Every minute or so, the fake dux’ah behind him would “breathe” on Benson’s back with a cloud of freezing dry-ice evaporate. Towering over both of them, an eight-meter tall trident loomed over the entire parade.
Benexx leaned in to whisper in zer father’s ear. “Happy now?”
“Ecstatic.”
“We could’ve both been sitting on the couch back home right now.”
“Just keep smiling and waving, Squish.”
“My arm’s tired.”
“Oh my God, shut up.”
The crowds on either side of the route were noticeably thicker than in years past. Part of this was doubtlessly due to the extra effort that had gone into planning and promoting the fifteenth anniversary celebrations. But even more of it owed simply to how much Shambhala’s population was growing year over year, both from immigration and natural growth. Shambhala was becoming a very young city. The oldest of the first wave of human natives to the planet were about to turn eighteen. Because of the freeze on new births in the last five years before the Ark’s arrival, there were no humans between eighteen and twenty-three. It made for an odd break in the society.
The oldest Atlantian children born of Shambhala were just shy of fifteen, a few months short of Benexx. Looking around at the crowds that had gathered for the parade, Benson spotted quite a few blended groups of these teenagers mingling freely between the species, and generally doing a far better job of integrating and tolerating one another than their parents were doing.
And why shouldn’t they? They had more in common with each other’s life experiences growing up in the city than their parents living either on the Ark or Atlantis. There was nothing quite like the clean slate of a child’s mind to see the ridiculousness of the older generation’s prejudices.
Benson, Kexx, Kuul, Tuko, and a few others had forged the Trident, but the children watching the parade with the sort of conspicuous indifference only teenagers could master would be the ones to sharpen and wield it.
Somehow, Benson found the thought oddly reassuring.
Ahead of their little float, Atlantian dancers performed an elaborate and traditional routine celebrating fellowship between people of different villages. It was familiar to Benson; he’d seen it at the inaugural First Contact Day in G’tel, before they called it that, and right before all the screaming, stabbing, and shooting started. Fortunately, they had gotten significantly more civilized in the years since.
In front of the dancers was a special treat for the crowds; full-sized parade balloons. Since the Helium-3 mining effort had gotten underway on Varr, boring old Helium-4 had been cropping up as a byproduct of both the refining process and of the Ark’s fusion reactors. Between the two, there was so much of the inert gas that all of its manufacturing requirements, from welding shield gas, to superconductor coolant, was met with capacity to spare.
So in the tradition of the Macy’s Day Parade in old New York, the city council had elected to have their primary school students band together to build a half dozen balloons as a class project for the year.
The results of their herculean efforts over the last few Varrs were… mixed. Benson had spent a few months back in Avalon binging on twentieth-century cartoons in his youth in between bouts of nature documentaries, but he didn’t remember Snoopy or Garfield looking quite so lumpy.
Other balloons showed more advanced craftsmanship, probably from Devorah’s crop of advanced placement art students. The galloping representation of the Mustangs’ mascot particularly warmed his heart. Benson made a plant note to give all of the kids who built it tickets to next week’s game.
Benson waved. The crowd waved back. Some lifted their drinks in salute. Some raised a glass from a lawn chair. Some threw confetti down from second and third floor balconies. At one point, he would’ve been obligated to give them a very big fine for wasting precious resources, but with the conservation codes long buried, Benson tried to ignore it and appreciate the sentiment instead.
A string of polymer beads hit him in the head. When he looked up to see who had thrown them, he was rewarded with an exceptionally firm pair of breasts supplied by a young woman p
eering over at him from a balcony.
“Hey coach! Make First Contact with these!” she shouted as she shook her shoulders. Benson instinctively put his hand over Benexx’s eyes, while just as instinctively kept his own glued to the scenery.
“Oh for shit’s sake,” Benexx cursed. “Atlantians don’t care about tits, dad, remember?”
“No, but I care about you seeing me ogling girls.”
Benexx scoffed. “Xis below, you’re so lame!”
Benson laughed just as the transit pods lurched once, then rolled to a stop.
“What the hell?” Benexx said.
Benson looked ahead in time to see one of the Atlantian dancers prance right into the back of the suddenly halted float in front of zer.
“The track must have lost power. Probably tripped a surge protector with all these pods bunched together.”
“Um, I don’t think so,” Benexx said. Benson was about to ask what ze meant, but saw zer pointing to the side. He followed zer finger and realized all the lights in the shops and apartments were out.
“The whole block lost power?”
“Looks like it,” Benexx said.
The crowds started to react to the unexplained outage, milling about and beginning to push and shove. Benson knew what a crowd that was about to turn ugly looked like and moved quickly to head it off.
“Hey! Eyes on me!” he shouted from the top of the float. Begrudgingly most people did just that. “Good. Now, it’s just a little hiccup in the power. I’m sure it’ll be fixed in a minute. Refresh your drinks.”
Apparently, this sounded like a spectacular idea to many of the assembled humans and Atlantians alike and the crowd settled back down again.
“Dad,” Benexx leaned in to whisper. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t know, Squish.” Benson glanced back at the trident. “Let’s get a better look.” Without a second thought, he started to climb the wooden shaft.
“You can’t be serious,” Benexx said. “You’re fifty years old. Come down from there.”
“Fifty-two, and you can’t make me,” he answered as he reached the crossbar.
“You’re going to fall and hurt yourself,” Benexx said, reflexively mirroring a dozen years of parental input.
“Nu-uh,” Benson’s inner five year-old responded with glee.
“Oh lord. Fine, whatever. I’m not visiting you in the hospital.”
Benson wrapped one arm around the center tine of the trident and blocked the setting sun from his eyes with the other. Through a wide gap between buildings, he could see all the way to the harbor. No lights shone in any of the windows, or any of the streetlamps for as far as he could see.
Benson tried to connect with his wife, but the request threw up an error message.
“Unavailable?” Benson muttered. That meant the signal repeaters sprinkled throughout the city were down as well, and that Theresa was outside his plant’s own limited range.
“What do you see?” Benexx asked.
“Power to the whole city is down,” Benson said, careful to keep his voice loud enough for zer to hear, but quiet enough not to agitate the crowd.
To zer credit, Benexx pitched zer voice lower to match. “What could cause that?”
“Beats me. It’s not like we’re in the middle of a hurricane. Hold on.”
Something impossible in the sky above the city pulled Benson’s gaze to it like a harpoon. The thin, arrow-straight, almost one-dimensional black line of the elevator cable… shifted. With rising horror, Benson watched as a sine wave carried down from the infinity of space like a whiplash along the entire length of the beanstalk.
With the speed of a lightning bolt, the wave collided with the anchor station floating in the harbor, rocking the half-million metric ton platform with the violence of an angry parent shaking a petulant child. Waves radiated out from the anchor station and crashed against the shoreline.
Benson’s mind recoiled at what he’d just witnessed. For the last fifteen years of his life, the delicate but impossibly strong black thread reaching from the surface up to the Ark had never wavered. It was a landmark, a monument. It didn’t just… change. Without realizing it, Benson’s face went ashen. The sudden shift did not go unnoticed by his adoptive offspring.
“Dad?” Benexx’s voice dripped with trepidation. “What’s wrong?”
Benson swallowed, hard. “Everything.”
That’s when the bomb went off.
Eleven
Jian’s body stiffened like he’d been shocked.
Sweat pooling on his skin and on the verge of hyperventilating, Jian’s eyes darted around the cockpit, trying to regain his bearings. The setting was familiar, but slightly off, starting with the fact he wasn’t sitting in his shuttle’s command chair.
Indeed, he wasn’t sitting in his shuttle at all.
“What happened?” he shouted into the cabin.
“Commander,” the shuttle’s pilot said from the command chair without looking back. “You’re awake. That’s great. We weren’t sure you’d recover before we got you back to the Ark’s sick bay.”
“WHAT. HAPPENED.”
“Well…” the pilot said hesitantly. Jian thought he recognized the voice. Albertson. She was a couple of classes ahead of him and Kirkland in flight school and had already been running her own missions for over a year. “You were involved in a collision,” Albertson said finally.
“Yeah, I know,” Jian answered. “I was there. How bad was it? I assume since they sent you out to grab us that we didn’t cut the elevator ribbon.”
“Not for lack of trying,” Albertson said. “Your shuttle’s port wingtip clipped the beanstalk and sliced through about fifteen percent of it. Another five percent frayed before the spider drones could halt the tear. Two elevator cars had to disengage and freefall back down to the surface, and power to Shambhala had to be cut until repairs are made.”
Jian looked around the cockpit for the rest of his crew, minus Madeja, obviously. The last couple of minutes before the impact were a fuzzy rush of images and emotions, but the picture of Polly drilling a hole through Madeja’s eye and out the back of her skull kind of stood out.
He searched the faces of those seated around him for Kirkland, Rakunas, anyone, but found none.
“Where’s my crew?” he asked sharply.
Albertson looked back over her shoulder. “You don’t know?”
Even in the null gee, Jian’s stomach sank.
“I’m sorry, Jian, but you were the only survivor.”
“That can’t be right.” Jian rebelled at the thought. “I closed the damned doors. They had helmets.”
“They…” Albertson cleared her throat. “When we found them, none of them had gotten their helmets and hoses secured before the impact. They passed away from asphyxiation, unfortunately. Everyone except the tech we found in the cockpit with you. Her injuries were quite a bit more… obvious.”
There was something in her tone that set off alarm bells. It was only then that Jian’s mind cleared enough to take a full account of the scene. The restraints built into a shuttle’s chairs were already restrictive, with five-point crash harnesses securing their occupants with the sort of pressure normally reserved for bondage fetishists. But those restraints didn’t extend to the ankles and wrists, both of which Jian found had been securely strapped to the chair frame with cargo tie-downs.
Reflexively, Jian’s arms jerked against the straps, twisting and straining for freedom. It was hopeless. The belts were rated for keeping multi-ton containers firmly in place under the stress of high-gee maneuvers. No combination of one hundred humans could hope to break them.
“Commander Albertson,” Jian said breathlessly. “Why are my arms and legs restrained?”
“It’s just a precaution, commander, I assure you.”
“Then cut them loose!”
“I can’t do that just now, Jian,” Albertson said delicately. “I have orders to keep you restrained until we
get back to the Ark. There are some… concerns the rest of the crew has about the incident, and they’ll feel a lot better once they have a chance to ask you about them personally.”
“What kind of fucking questions?” Jian shouted. “A lunatic took over my shuttle, killed my crew, and tried to crash us all into the Ark!”
“Yes, that much is certain. The question, I think, is which lunatic.”
“What?” Jian shouted. “You can’t believe I did it! I’m the only reason the Atlantis didn’t plow into the Ark itself at thirty thousand kph, for God’s sake.”
“What I believe isn’t important, Jian. It’s not my call to make. Now, we’re almost at turnover. I have to concentrate on flying. So I’ll have to ask you to be quiet, or one of my crew will close your visor. Are we clear?”
Jian fumed, but refused to answer, choosing instead to break eye contact and glare at the ceiling.
“All right then,” Albertson said. “Try to relax, commander. We’re almost home.”
Jian kept silent for the rest of the trip, choosing to listen instead. The rest of Albertson’s crew wasn’t particularly chatty, probably because they were using a private plant link to prevent him from eavesdropping, but occasional cross talk did occur.
What he learned did nothing to help sooth his pain. His crew were all dead, and worse, they hadn’t even managed to recover all of their bodies before they had to abandon the Atlantis. The impact with the ribbon had sheared off his shuttle’s port wing almost at the root, sending it into a hellish six gee flat spin that rendered Jian unconscious and sent the shuttle careening away from the Ark at almost thirty thousand kph. Because Jian had regained control in the last few moments before impact, Flight Control had been able to tap into the Atlantis’s flight computers and take her over remotely. But with half of the thrusters they needed to bring its chaotic spin to a heel reduced to pulverized wreckage, it hadn’t been an easy task.
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