Carrier

by Timothy Johnson

  "You saved his life," Daelen said.

  "He's probably going to wish you hadn't, though," Pierce said.

  "What do you mean?" Stellan asked, and Pierce turned away, putting his hands on his head and releasing a deep breath through puckered lips.

  "Edward suffered massive cardiovascular and tissue damage," Daelen said. "We can fix that when we get him home. Until then, he will be in terrible pain here. I can keep him sedated and comfortable, but that's about all I can do. My surgical equipment isn't adequate for repairing his injuries."

  "And not only will he have to come to terms with all that," Pierce said, "but we have no idea what kind of mental state he will be in when he wakes."

  Stellan sat up, and Daelen restrained him.

  "What were you two arguing about?" Stellan asked.

  "Gordon wants you to put Edward in confinement," Daelen said. She looked anxiously at Pierce. "Of course, if you do, I won't be able to keep him comfortable. All my equipment for that is stationary here. When he wakes, if he isn't mad, the pain likely will drive him to it."

  "If we leave him here and he wakes, he poses a risk to you, to the rest of the crew, to the entire ship," Pierce said.

  "Edward deserves treatment, Gordon!" Daelen yelled. Stellan sensed a resurgence of their conflict, and he would have to keep the peace by deciding. Should he do what was best for the individual, or assuming the worst, should he do what was best for the ship? It was true that Edward could wake and hurt someone else. It wouldn't be the first time someone suffering from the black madness had done such a thing. Still, Edward had only proved to be a threat to himself, and if Stellan locked him up, he wondered what good it would actually do. At least in the medical bay, someone could monitor his health.

  "Do what you can for him," Stellan said to Daelen.

  Pierce shook his head in disgust. He couldn't believe they were going to leave a madman where he could continue to be a threat. Pierce was finely tuned to pull back and see a situation from a distance. Stellan could not do that. He could not accept one man's fate was less important than the whole, and it was why they made a good team. Together, they saw both sides of a situation.

  "Fine," Pierce said. He pointed a determined finger at Stellan. "But if anything happens, that's on you." Pierce stormed out of the room, and it stung Stellan like a smack across his face. He buried his head in Daelen's chest, and she cradled him, brushing his hair with her fingertips.

  "Don't worry, love," she said. "Edward will be all right."

  "I know," he said. "It's Gordon. Something's wrong. I haven't seen him like this in years."

  They sat, breathing each other in for what felt like a lifetime. Neither spoke for fear words would disturb the stillness in the air, the warmth that nearly brought Daelen to tears because she was so thankful he had returned to her unharmed.

  In a nearby room, no one grieved over Edward Stone's body, which lay in a chamber that cured his decompression sickness and augmented the healing process. It wouldn't heal his mind, however.

  Seven

  Arlo was alone, flying in the black. The bridge's wall display projected the outside view of space and stars, as if he drifted in the abyss in a chair that rested on a lonely platform. Arlo sat at his station, gazing into the systems ahead as they drew nearer.

  An impossible door cut a hole in the darkness, and light poured in from the command deck. Pierce entered the bridge, carrying his choice whiskey. The glass platform around him lit to help him find his footing in the endless expanse. He passed his command platform and walked down the ramp to Evans' empty workstation, which revealed itself as he neared.

  Pierce sat with a pleased groan. His legs and back ached from a long and hard day, and it felt good to finally sit and relieve the strain from them. He offered a glass to his pilot, who silently declined with a raised hand. Pierce set the two glasses on the deck and pulled the stopper from the neck of the whiskey bottle. He kicked it back with a few swallows and set the bottle back in his lap, licking the burning from his lips and breathing the heat from his throat.

  "You want to re-engage the light drive?" Arlo asked.

  "Not just yet," Pierce said. "We have time."

  Arlo would not look at him, but he could tell his pilot had been weeping.

  "You okay?" Pierce asked.

  "Not really."

  "That's understandable," Pierce said, taking another sip. "These days, I seem to be finding more reasons to drink this stuff. As if I need one." He laughed modestly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  A delicate silence fell on the room, like the vacuum of space, while Pierce waited for Arlo to continue, to open up, something he'd waited years for Arlo to do, but Arlo had always kept his emotions hidden behind a facade of arrogance and immaturity, another persona. Pierce saw through it. Everyone else only saw the cocky pilot Arlo wanted them to see.

  "Thing is," Arlo said, "what's bothering me most isn't what he did but something he said. He said he wanted to go for a walk. When I was a kid, we'd go for walks out in the woods by our house where there was this clearing, and away from all the city lights, you could see the whole sky. The stars were so bright, and he'd point and say, 'Wonder what's beyond all those lights. The things I've seen just in my short time. I bet someday you'll know. You'll have a chance to just reach up and peel back the sky, and you'll see.' It was times like those that made me want to fly."

  "The Atlas," Pierce said

  "It's no explorer," Arlo said with a shrug, "but maybe someday."

  "That's pretty rough, kid."

  "That's not it either. I don't know," Arlo shook his head in frustration. Pierce reached out and grasped Arlo's shoulder, encouraging him to go on.

  "I wanted to be with him. No, it wasn't like I wanted to go in there and die with him, but I kept asking myself why I wasn't there for him when I knew he needed me. Mom died, and I was out here. I got him this job, fooling myself that it was helping him. Now, I keep wanting things to go back to the way they used to be when we'd take off in the middle of the night. He'd sneak me out of the house when Mom was asleep, and it was like our secret. I wonder if that was what was on his mind in the airlock. I wonder if he missed me and if that drove him there."

  "Why don't you go be with him now?"

  "No," Arlo said, shaking his head.

  "Why not?"

  "I guess I'm afraid. I'm afraid he's going to blame me."

  "No, you're blaming yourself," Pierce said sternly. "A father's job is to teach, and if something happens to his child, something he could have prevented, he blames himself. And that's justified because a child's mistake is also a father's mistake. A father's mistake is a lesson. Understand it. Learn from it. Use it."

  "What is there to learn? An old fool tried to flush himself out an airlock."

  "Sounds like you have some forgiving of your own to do," Pierce said. He settled back into Evans' chair and took another sip of his whiskey. "You know why I love this stuff?" Pierce said. "It's simple. Everything's gotten so complicated, but whiskey is and will always be simple. Pure. You taste it, and you know it's genuine. Honest. Only three ingredients go into it, and because of that, they each heavily influence the taste and experience. Something as simple as the region a whiskey is distilled in or the cask it's aged in lends to its character. Its identity. And when it comes out of the bottle, you know it's unapologetic and proud of what it is. It reminds me of simpler times, and when I drink it, I think the only thing stopping life from being as simple as what I'm holding in my hand is me."

  "What are you saying?"

  "I'm saying don't let your emotions cloud your judgment. He's still your father. He's still alive. And he's going to need you. That's all that matters," Pierce said. "I'm a father. Did I ever tell you that?"

  Arlo finally looked at Pierce with wonder through his glassy eyes.

  "Hard to imagine," Arlo laughed. With the smile, a large tear streamed down each cheek. He wiped them away.

  "It's true," Pierce said
, chuckling, but his demeanor quickly became serious. "She's about your age. To be honest, I don't even know how old she is right off." He paused to calculate. "Twenty-eight. She's twenty-eight." He turned the bottle of whiskey in his hand and watched the stars morph through the glass.

  "What happened to her?"

  "I really don't know," Pierce said, trailing off into his whiskey bottle, rubbing it gently with a square thumb.

  "What do you mean?" Arlo asked.

  Pierce turned to Arlo, smiling. "I think she learned a little too well," he said. "She became a lot like me."

  "If she's anything like you, I'd like to meet her," Arlo said with a smile worthy of his nickname. Pierce shot him a look as sharp as a razor that might have killed Arlo's alter ego.

  "I mean that in the best possible way," Arlo said. The two of them laughed.

  "I wasn't always as I am," Pierce said. "Two things are constant. The world keeps turning, and you never stop learning."

  "What are those? Song lyrics?"

  "No," Pierce chuckled.

  The laughter didn't last long. It was nice to visit that place of humor, but they both knew it wasn't a time for that. It wasn't a time to hide behind laughter. It wasn't a time to cover their faces with smiles. If being on the Atlas and running through deep space had taught them anything, it was how to measure and define their reality. It was what it was, and they accepted that this was the best it was going to get. They learned their situation was only ever as good or bad as they reasoned it to be, and sometimes, facing the hard talk, the real talk, was necessary to find out where things stood because, out there, they had nothing to distract them from the truth.

  "So what do I learn from this?" Arlo asked.

  "That it's never too late to make amends," Pierce said dreamily, still rubbing the bottle, wiping away a blemish. His rough hands, the hands of a soldier, wrapped around the bottle's neck and slowly twisted, as if to throttle the life out of it. Arlo feared that it might shatter in Pierce's grip.

  He reached out to his captain then, and Pierce put the bottle of whiskey in his pilot's hand.

  The two of them drank in silence until the whiskey was gone and the Apophis system emerged ahead, brilliant as a rising sun breaking dawn for a wayward pirate ship.

  Chapter 4: Hour Of The Wolf

  One

  In many ways, the darkness of space simply felt like perpetual night. The stars in the distance reminded the Atlas' crew of the times they'd spent gazing into the night sky with wonder and awe. Seeing them through a monitor on the Atlas wasn't so different than viewing them from the surface of New Earth. They laughed about how naive they'd been in their formative years when they just didn't understand the scale of the universe. As if they understood as adults. As if they'd ever understand.

  According to folklore, the hour of the wolf is just before dawn when wolves lurk outside bedroom windows. The stories are simple, but the danger is real. The wolves are ourselves, and as we descend further into unconsciousness, we find them, ready to pounce, beneath the surface of our minds, beneath what we knew was there. In the hour of the wolf, our demons are at their strongest, and the darkest of our dreams wait no longer. They crash through our doors and windows and find us where we feel safest. They sink their teeth into our heels and drag us to the most horrible places we can imagine because we are them, even if we can't control them.

  However, for the Atlas and its crew¸ the hour of the wolf was an instance of time no clock could measure. The space between New Earth and a mine site could be one night, and this run was the longest night of their lives. A cosmic wolf lay in wait. They all felt it.

  The Atlas itself slept, lazing in the endless expanse, the backdrop of stars impossibly far away, as if the carrier were a galaxy of its own, hopelessly isolated by distance, any semblance of hope for help should they need it far behind them in the Atlas' black wake.

  In the midst of the hour of the wolf, the time where, if the Atlas had arms, it could almost reach out and touch the borders of the Apophis system, they slept one last time. In their deepest sleep, something synced in their minds, like the teeth of a lock latching onto a key. As the key turned, they saw the deepest, darkest corners of their minds.

  During this time, the wolves stalked them, mad from the bloodlust, starving from such a long night on the prowl, and their wrath would be supreme. The wolves, now hunting in a pack, wielded sanity like wind across a swaying rope bridge, their minds hanging in the balance.

  Stellan sat on the edge of his bed, sweat beading on his brow, his heart pounding. Daelen's touch graced his shoulders, and she pulled him close.

  The cranes in the cargo bays rumbled hungrily. When they reached the Shiva, the work would last days, and it would be backbreaking, making each of them regret their choice to ferry back and forth between worlds, scavenging for resources and materials. Some would collapse from exhaustion. Equipment would break down. There would most certainly be injuries, perhaps a fight or two over who wasn't pulling their weight.

  But when the work was finished, the Atlas' appetite sated, they would rest with New Earth in their sights, most of them not all that eager to return but looking forward to the trip nevertheless.

  The Atlas' crew lived in that time between worlds. They found peace in the black, where the hull was their border and everything in between was home sweet home, the safest place in the universe. It was a pleasure to essentially not exist, for the world to just leave them alone.

  In that time between worlds, the New Earth Council could not reach them. They lived on their own and by their own rules, free to govern themselves.

  Though, they still had duties to fulfill, the work that granted them the freedom when there was nothing but open space surrounding them, most certainly not the steady and strict hands of the Council.

  So the Atlas slept. All deckhands and engineers slept. All support crew, including medical and security, slept. The department managers and other non-essential officers slept.

  The Atlas was cool, dark, and calm, and it was easy to forget that, for a time of peace and happiness, they would pay with a torrent of pain, like a cosmic balance.

  Unwittingly, they committed themselves to their fears, and none would sleep well the night before reaching the mine site. None expected the wolves, and even if they had, it would have done them no good.

  Stellan, though, was more prepared than others, having faced recurring nightmares for as long as he could remember, and he thought he was beginning to understand them. He thought about Edward Stone, perhaps the wolves' first victim of the run and who lay in a hyperbaric chamber. He would have to wait through the agony while the crew did their jobs. Stellan thought no one understood the balance of sanity better than Edward.

  Stellan lay back down next to Daelen, finding relaxation and renewal in the warmth of her skin and the sweet honeysuckle scent in her hair. He wrapped his arms around her, filling the nook behind her knees with his own, and he held her tight.

  He closed his eyes, and as the Atlas' dawn approached, they descended together into the wolf's embrace.

  Two

  Stellan didn't really return to his dreams so much as they returned to him, bringing with them that agonizing heat that threatened to char his skin and combust the air in his lungs. They brought the fear and cold sweat, the waves of adrenaline and panic, things he was never supposed to feel as a soldier but did.

  He opened his eyes, and the record began to play again. Though, this time felt different, like his mind was dipping further into something it didn't understand. Perhaps it reached for the darkness of his memories, or maybe it reached out to the black of space. Perhaps they were the same thing.

  Most of the dream was the same. The immaculate grass of St. James Park. The path through the Strand and Trafalgar Square. The thrumming of choppers and gunfire in the early morning sky. The fires, oh yes, the fires. They burned the same. Through all of it, he knew, although it looked like the same city, it wasn't.

  When they worked
their way into Piccadilly Circus and found the puncture in the side of the building, which held the machine gun nest, Stellan again retreated down the steps to the Underground station. Then, the record of the event began to blur. Something encroached upon it. Under the city, descending into the tunnels below, Stellan found perfect silence, like sound stopped entirely, as it did in the vacuum of space.

  The sobbing broke that silence.

  Stellan leaped over a turnstile and into the back hallway where he found the boy, rifle standing between his knees as he crouched on the floor, head in hands, and Stellan decided to play it a little differently.

  "It's me again," he said. "I want to help you."

  "You don't have the stomach for it," the boy said.

  "This time, I do."

  Before the boy could stand and aim his rifle, Stellan drew his sidearm and shot him in the chest. The boy's head snapped forward so hard Stellan was sure the force of the round pushing through his sternum broke his neck as well. He fell to the cold tile floor, his rifle tumbling just out of the reach of his dead fingertips.

  From the fading echo of his weapon's blast, a familiar sound rose from below, rolling in waves. It rose in intensity but never in pitch. What Stellan first thought could be the onset of an earthquake became the sound of a light drive.

  A moment later, the crash of gravity cranes joined it like a walking giant, and Stellan pushed forward to meet it.

  As he descended deeper into the subway station, the dim tunnels brightened. The billboard advertisements for films he'd never see and products he'd never use became red public and safety notices, informing him that, if he went any farther, personal protective equipment would be required. Others displayed general Council propaganda. Privacy was a small price to pay for safety and security. Cooperation is mandatory. Anyone could be an independent: Report suspicious behavior to a Unity Corps officer immediately. The Unity Day celebration was coming: Buy your Unity Bonds today!

  He was on the cargo deck of the Atlas, and it had become bitterly cold. It penetrated deep into his bones. Frost streaked like drawings of frozen tree branches on the metal deck beneath his feet. The radiant thermal units should have kept them warm, but the floor burned with cold like the icy black fingers of space had crept in and grasped the Atlas' innards.