He put his hand on his father's chamber, bending to look through the observation window with both unease and excitement. When they took Edward away from the cargo bay on the maglev gurney, Arlo had seen his father, but he was encapsulated by the quickness with which they moved. Because of how fast they worked, he knew his father was still alive, and that had been enough. He'd caught a glimpse of his father's swollen blue skin, but only a glimpse. That glimpse planted a seed in his mind, and his imagination had filled out a picture of what his father had become. Although he tried not to form expectations, he couldn't help it, and he knew it would only lead to disappointment.
When he found the nerve to look through the window at his father's face, he found himself relieved that it wasn't as bad as he'd thought. He saw the evidence of the decompression, the swelling of the tissue. He saw the lines of the ruptured veins, but he otherwise looked clean. With the swelling already reducing and the color returning to normal, Edward actually looked okay. Though it was clear that he probably would have some scars, Arlo didn't think his dad looked like a disfigured monster as he had feared.
It would be like it never happened. Oddly, Arlo didn't like the idea that his father's mistakes could be erased. He didn't want them to move on like nothing had happened. Maybe Arlo was giving meaning to a meaningless accident, but he felt like he'd learned something. Pierce had told Arlo to learn from his father's mistakes. Well, Arlo wanted his dad to learn from them, too.
"Are you happy?" Arlo said. "I suppose not, since we stopped you. When you come out of this, are you going to understand that you're not alone, that people are here for you and will listen, that it's okay to open up to us? No, I suppose not."
He stood silent for a few moments, listening to the machinery work, the sounds of restoration and healing. Everything was about trying to make things like they were before.
"You hurt me, Dad. When you hurt yourself, you hurt me. The Captain says I should forgive you for that. Thing is, I don't know that I can. But I'm going to try. It's not my fault that you did what you did. I feel responsible anyway. I hope you don't blame me. I hope you don't blame anyone but yourself when you wake up. For your own sake. It's never too late to make amends, and I think, the longer you wait, the harder it becomes. If it becomes too hard, maybe that's what drives people to bitterness. Don't let that happen, Dad. Just be thankful. Just be thankful Stellan saved you."
When Arlo fell into silence, the tears finally came. Speaking to his father provided the catharsis to ascend from the shock, and he found the depths of his pain. All at once, he began to understand his own emotional trauma and wondered how many others had known it better than he. He wondered who could see it on his face.
A hand pressed his shoulder. He turned and found Pierce's stern face, which was hard to decipher.
"How long have you been there?" Arlo asked.
"Not long," Pierce said. He moved beside Arlo and gazed into the chamber. They stood side by side for a moment, listening to the sounds of Edward's heartbeat in high-pitched, digital tones.
"There's one thing, still, you should probably understand," Pierce said. "Stellan did what he did because he couldn't have done nothing."
"What do you mean?"
"The man grieves for himself. For years, he's been trying to make up for something there's no making up for. He dug a hole in himself, and now, every good thing he does is a rung on the ladder out of that hole. He didn't save your dad for him or you. He did it for himself. So you may feel like you owe him something, but you don't."
Arlo considered whether the reason Stellan had saved his father changed the selflessness with which he did it. He thought about his own reasons for being by his father's side. Edward would probably never know his son was there, yet he came anyway.
"He saved my dad," Arlo said. "He did the right thing. It doesn't matter why he did it."
Arlo turned back to face his father's chamber.
"Aren't you supposed to be off cycle?" he asked.
"I don't think anyone's sleeping tonight," Pierce said. They stood in respectful silence together for another moment.
"Come on," Pierce said, turning. "We'll be in Apophis soon, and there's a lot of work to do. If we're not going to sleep, we might as well do something useful."
Arlo lingered a moment longer and then followed his Captain away from his father's unconscious body, returning to the duty that beckoned, a descent onto the back of a world ender.
Chapter 5: The Destroyer Of Worlds
One
The Atlas drifted on a backdrop of swirling stars, obscuring whole galaxies with its hulking hull. Its heart, the light drive, had fallen silent, but its thrusters still burned a brilliant blue. Lazing in the endless expanse, the gravity cranes booming deep in its belly, demanding to be fed, the sleeping giant was patient.
But for all its immensity, the carrier approached a far greater entity.
The excavator Shiva of the Trinity ensnared Apophis 259 with all the grace of a predatory spider. Its long limbs stretched wide, tiptoeing above the surface of the planet, drilling and pulling earth up the tethers into the Shiva's waiting arms.
Pools of red marred Apophis 259's otherwise brown surface, as if blood spilled when the Shiva cracked its crust. The planet spun on its axis languidly as if fatigued from the Shiva's vampire embrace, slowly dying as it was torn apart mountain by boulder by rock.
A debris field from the excavation obscured the Atlas' view, but between the chunks of earth turned asteroids and beyond the planet, Apophis, the dying red giant itself, gazed like a galactic eye.
"God, that thing's close," Navigator Evans said. "The Atlas is rated for this level of solar radiation, right, Captain?"
"EM field's holding so far," Arlo said. "We're pushing it, though."
Pierce didn't answer and simply stared straight ahead, focusing on the task at hand. Their EM field would hold. It had to.
"Probe is coming back with telemetric data on the planet's composition," Evans said. His eyes traced down the list of elements on the report. Then he stopped. "Captain, there's water on two five nine."
Pierce grimaced. "If there was any life there, it's gone now."
Arlo, now manually piloting the Atlas with precision hand controls on the armrests of his chair, navigated through the chunks of charred earth that had blown out of the planet's gravitational pull when the Shiva sank its long fangs into the celestial body's veins.
"Nice and easy, Arlo," Pierce said. "The Atlas has thick skin, but some of these pieces look unusually large."
The display on the wall of the bridge served as a front-facing window. An automated proximity detection system drew thin yellow lines to the pieces of earth that posed danger. Arlo's tongue absently brushed his mustache.
"Two five nine must have a brittle crust," Evans said. "Telemetry shows a high concentration of granite."
Or the Shiva blasted straight into the layer of unidentified material, Pierce thought.
"I appreciate the concern, fellas," Arlo said. "But this is what I do, and the doing is good."
On screen, one of the yellow lines pointing to a particularly large chunk of earth flashed red, and a high-pitched beeping accompanied the visual warning. Arlo pulled both controls hard right, and the Atlas banked so sharply the artificial gravity system had trouble keeping up. Pierce grabbed the rail in front of his platform to steady his balance. The ship rolled as if crashing against a cosmic wave.
The proximity warning turned back to a yellow caution line, and Arlo leveled out the carrier, easing it by the debris while the crew watched with bated breath.
"I think the universe just slapped your ego," Evans said. Arlo acknowledged him by releasing a deep, nervous breath through puckered lips.
A comm channel window expanded from Arlo's terminal, displaying the sound waves of an incoming voice transmission along with a picture of the woman to which the voice belonged. She looked strong and distinguished. Deep wrinkles cut around her pale eyes and mouth, and her silv
er hair was pulled back into a tight, braided ponytail, striking down like an icicle from the base of her skull.
"Carrier Atlas, this is the NESMA excavator Shiva of the Trinity," Commander Emra Ashland said over the comm, the voice transmission wave recognition software shaking into form with her thick and hard southern twang. "We have you on scope, and you're clear to dock. Hope you're hungry because there's plenty to go around."
"Roger that, Shiva," Arlo responded. "We're already getting an appetizer up here."
"Copy, Atlas. The planet's crust was unexpectedly brittle. Apologies," Ashland said. "Bring it in nice and steady. See you soon." Her voice sounded warm and welcoming, like she was glad to see them. Only Pierce thought that was odd. "Shiva out," Ashland said. The voice transmission wave flattened, and the comm window shrank back into Arlo's workstation, closing the channel.
"Called it," Evans said.
"They could've sent a sweeper out to pick all this crap up," Arlo said. "You know, tidy up the place since they were expecting company."
"We're early," Pierce said.
"Right," Arlo said. "So it's my fault."
"No, you're right," Pierce said. "I'll bring it up with the commander. Maybe we could cut them some slack though, since from the looks of things, they've been busy."
The Atlas ducked under a large asteroid, giving them the first unobstructed view of the Apophis planet. Captain Pierce leaned forward against the rail on his command platform. The surface of the planet bled. Huge craters from the Shiva's gouging had scarred Apophis 259's face, and the dust and debris over the horizon loomed like a storm. The entire planet was encased in a halo of pieces that used to belong to it. Pierce felt like he could fall through the screen into those gaping holes right down into the planet's core. He'd seen the Shiva on many excavations. He'd seen it practically devour planets whole. This time felt different. The craters were alluring, almost hypnotizing. They drew him in, and if he hadn't forgotten to breathe, he might have fallen into them entirely, as if his mind were at the edge of a cliff.
"Take us in," Pierce said, and a small pang of fear pinched his gut. It was irrational, but wasn't all fear irrational? Rationality was how the mind defeated fear, but to Pierce, that planet seemed alive. From it, he feared, the Shiva of the Trinity pulled its malice along with its life force.
Two
The Atlas' belly hovered delicately over the docking platform. Unsecured anchors reached out from the Shiva like seaweed at the bottom of a shallow, waving frangibly.
"Every time like the first time," Arlo whispered to himself. "Every time like the first time." Evans looked at him with a furrowed brow, confused. At the back of the bridge, the door opened, and Stellan entered quietly. He let not even the soles of his boots interrupt Arlo's concentration.
On Arlo's workstation, a simple graphic of two circles showed him the alignment of the two ships. A large, unmoving blue circle overlaid a smaller yellow circle, which bounced around inside the larger circle as Arlo moved his controls finely. The small circle grew as the Atlas neared, and when its color and size matched, they would have a lock.
Now, Arlo thought about nothing but landing his ship. Later, as he did every time, he would reflect upon how steady his muscles had been. As if they'd been a system of mechanical pulleys and levers, he commanded the slightest movement, precise like a machine.
"Just breathe," Pierce said.
A silence crept over the command deck, though no tension or anxiety accompanied it. They watched in anticipation of a successful lock, as Arlo had achieved many times before without fault. They trusted him. If they didn't, he wouldn't have been their pilot.
The silence was for respect. It took Arlo a few runs to convince himself that he wasn't performing when he docked the ship. He was just doing his part, and by being silent, everyone else was doing theirs. Thinking of it as a team effort in those terms helped with the apprehension.
"Mind your pitch," Pierce said.
"I've got it," Arlo said. Another high-frequency warning shrieked from Arlo's terminal, and the Atlas trembled. Stellan took hold of the railings on either side of him and waited for a voice to announce an impact, but that call never came.
"I've got it," Evans said. He pulled a window from the side of his terminal to the center and expanded it with his hands.
"The planet's gravitational pull is stronger here than we anticipated," Evans said. "As a result, our calculations were wrong."
"Our calculations?" Arlo questioned.
"My calculations," Evans confessed.
The warning ceased, and the two circles on Arlo's terminal almost blended. The Atlas wobbled as Arlo found the threshold of the Shiva's magnetic anchors' pull. Quickly compensating, he eased the ship toward the cradle.
In a moment of anticipation, they held their breath. The quiet was so deathly not even the Atlas' holographic user interface system dared chirp. And then it came, a thunderous applause that shook the ship as if a giant rapped upon its hull.
A moment of uncertainty passed. No one moved. No one breathed.
"We're down," Arlo declared, folding his hands. "Thrusters cooling. Seals engaged. No variations detected. Ninety-nine percent alignment. Hard lock achieved, Captain."
Cheers and clapping erupted in the bridge and on the command corridor.
"Good," Pierce said. "Arlo, you have the conn. Stellan, you're with me."
"Why do you do that?" Evans asked Arlo.
"Do what?"
"That thing you repeat every time we dock."
"I've got a five percent cushion on the seal. If I miss the lock by six percent, it could mean both ships and thousands of lives, ours included, turned inside out by the vacuum of space, so I think it's prudent that I remind myself to never get complacent, don't you?"
Evans froze and gaped as his Captain left the bridge, his gaze almost asking for help. Pierce and Stellan walked past the smiling department heads who were flushed with joy.
It never got old. The sensation just before a dock, that moment of reflection where faith waned. It was like they doubted a thing like gravity, something so constant that they could drop a ball one thousand times and expect it to fall one thousand times. But in that moment before they let go, they weren't sure. Every time was like the first time in that, the moments after achieving a hard lock, they would all become giddy and embarrassed at how silly they'd been to doubt.
Pierce and Stellan didn't speak. They understood the words they had to say were not for others' ears. They walked comfortably and confidently, side-by-side, their footfalls in unison without even realizing it. To the department heads outside the bridge, they sounded like soldiers. Those parts of them had not changed, for better or worse.
The lift entrance at the rear of the command deck opened wide, like a mouth, and swallowed them whole, dragging them down into the belly of the Atlas.
Three
There was something about the way Stellan could almost feel Pierce's presence. He knew the man so well that he could gauge Pierce's attitude, and he could sometimes read Pierce's mind. It wasn't something time and familiarity had instilled in him. They'd both gotten so close to death that something had rubbed onto them. They'd sipped from the thin ether between this world and the next, and it had changed them.
It had seemed to Stellan at times like a hive mind. A decade ago, when the bullets flew, other men might have seen chaos. But Stellan saw what Pierce saw, and Pierce saw what Stellan saw. Pierce would see a flash out of the corner of his eye, and Stellan would return fire. An enemy would sneak up behind Stellan with his knife drawn, and before Pierce could utter a sound, Stellan would spin with his own blade in hand, as if using Pierce's sight, slashing their enemy's throat.
They never spoke of it, but it was there once. Stellan wondered if it remained, and he felt, even then, almost a decade after London burned, traces of their connection lingered.
"Arlo have trouble navigating the debris field?" Stellan asked. Between floors in the lift, light entered through a
screen panel in the wall and splashed across their faces, passing in a constant rhythm reminiscent of the sleeping light drive.
"The Shiva was a little overzealous," Pierce said. "It blew half the planet into orbit."
"Brittle crust?"
"That's what it looked like," Pierce said with a deadpan glare.
"Appearances count for something, I guess."
"Just enough to tell what something isn't."
"What's wrong?"
"I don't know," Pierce said. "This place. There's something about it. Part of me wants to kick us back the way we came."
"The other part?"
"It just keeps moving."
The splashes of light between floors slowed, and the lift settled. The doors parted with a mechanical whir upon a circular room lined with ENV suits like guardian statues. In the center of the room, a small crew stood around a ring that looked like a large well. Rick Fairchild had pulled both legs into his ENV suit, but the torso hung down at his waist like a flap of gray, dead skin.
"Someone give me a hand," he said, a cigarette bouncing on his lip. Wendy, fully dressed in her ENV suit, ran toward Rick. Her headpiece bobbed and flapped. Her legs and arms rubbed her oversized suit like sloshing through a pool of water.
"I got ya, boss!" she called.
She pulled up on Rick's suit, stretching it over his midsection and shoulders. She circled behind him and tugged on his collar, locating the seam up the back where it sealed.
"I never get used to how quick it gets hot in these dang things," Rick said. "Hurry up and get my helmet on so I can get the temperature regulator going."
"You could stand to sweat a bit, old man," Wendy said.
"You wouldn't want me to keel over, would ya?"
Wendy laughed, feigning doubt.
"Anyway, why is it you're always the first one suited up?"
"Because," she grunted and tugged, "it's a bit easier for me to fit." She pulled the suit in place and patted Rick's stomach.
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