HUSH

by Craig Robert Saunders

  ‘Darkness will be absolute,’ said Jin, calling Anna and Cassie on. ‘Come. There is no other shelter.’

  Ulrich tried to rouse Lian as the survivors huddled against the wreck in lee of the howling, blasting wind and swirling snow and ice crystals. Darkness enveloped them all.

  Jin could simply walk into the dark and the snow and be free. He did not have to help. Or, he could just as easily choose to grant them a swift death, and take away their pain and fear. But why? There was no more reason to kill or abandon than there was to aid them, other than his will, his wont. He was bound by nothing, and even the body which kept him alive was no longer the cage. The cage had always been the purpose.

  To kill, and to not be killed.

  His will? So many variables, and Jin had no affirmative answer, but he knew his feelings. He did not wish to walk away and leave the survivors. He did not wish to serve them. He did not wish orders.

  Is this freedom? This endless succession of choices?

  Jin put his immense long-fingered hands against the jagged lip of the wrecked section of Blue Sun Dawning’s outer hull, and tilted it so the humans could enter through the torn side to shelter from worst of the wind, if not the cold.

  ‘Anna,’ he said. ‘Cassie – can you help Ulrich to move Lian under cover?’

  The bars to Jin’s cage were open, but after all his years, he found he did not wish to leave. Not because he was afraid to do so, but because there were other prisoners inside, and they needed help.

  Why help?

  He considered his question as the humans scurried beneath the makeshift shelter, and in moment, knew the answer.

  Because I can.

  The charred and shattered section of the ship was rounded, so that it sat with the ice below and the curve above their heads. Jin squeezed inside before lowering the ship. Then, heat fired from Jin’s hands, a bluish flame akin to that from a welding torch. He melted the ice until it bubbled, near boiling, and as it melted the weight of the hull sank their shelter into the melt-water. Seconds later, ice formed a near perfect seal. Now it was secure but for small apertures, Jin caused his entire body to glow with both warmth and light.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ulrich.

  Expression was denied Jin, and he felt he need no gratitude, but understood humans need to give it.

  ‘You are welcome,’ he said.

  ‘Your hands. They’re almost delicate,’ said Anna.

  Jin rarely looked at himself, but now he moved his glowing hands before him, as though he saw them for the first time. The scale of the Titan spoiled the illusion, but he understood what Anna meant. His form was belied his strength. Humanoid, but never quite mistakable as such, and yet, there was something elegant in his design.

  He reached out with one of those finely-crafted hands and gently touched Anna’s shoulder, as though he were an alien, discovering a human for the first time...perhaps closer to the truth than he might wish, but apt, nonetheless.

  ‘Thank you, Anna,’ said Jin.

  Being singular could mean a multitude of things, or anything, or nothing. Jin chose to make it mean something.

  *

  The ground beneath was still ice, but it was as effective a shelter as any could have managed in their circumstances. Not enough room for Jin to stand, but plenty for Ulrich, tallest among the party.

  ‘A few minutes and you will all be warmer.’

  Lian did not stir, and they laid her out as best they could. Cassie and Ulrich understood simple wounds – bleeds, breaks, bruises. Both also understood enough to leave internal injuries alone.

  They needed rest, sustenance, and medical attention. Some meagre things they found in closed containers and overhead lockers were useful, but not enough, and they discovered no food, no water.

  Jin vented enough heat from his body to make the interior of their junkyard hut tolerable and save power to the environmental suits for when they most needed it. His exoshell had no visible apertures, but his metallic skin functioned in a similar manner to a humans – microscopic pores allowed excess heat to escape, just as a human might sweat.

  While Anna, Cassie and Ulrich searched for anything that might aid them in the dead hulk of Blue Sun Dawning, Jin scanned their immediate surrounds and calculated the best way to maximise their chance of survival. Fifteen kilometres from their position he detected a small energy signature – most likely one of the Century Class ships to accompany their vessel. There were no comms from the ship he could pick up, which almost certainly meant the AI was either dead, or dying, or remaining silent. None of those possibilities were desirable, but Jin did not form any theories. There was insufficient evidence to do so.

  Even a timescale to reach their destination would be a guess, but the suits were capable of only 24-hours of full function and he had that as a basis for calculation. After that, heat would be a secondary function, and oxygen primary. The atmosphere was tolerable for human physiology, but low in oxygen and that would weaken and slow them, and under strain and stress? Hypoxia, and so confusion, and a lessening of efficiency.

  It was four hours since the crash, which left twenty hours of full power to their suits at most.

  Ulrich sat, tired and struggling to move his hip, but he didn’t complain.

  ‘Any idea where we go from here?’

  Ulrich kept his tone light. The others would hear, because their comms were linked, and Jin understood that the former soldier knew better than to foster panic or despair in his team.

  ‘A small energy signature fifteen kilometres in roughly the desired direction,’ said Jin. ‘Twenty-six kilometres from our current location until the anomaly.’

  ‘Any idea when we can move again?’

  Daylight in sixteen hours. Moving in the dark was not impossible, but the risk increased beyond any benefit Jin perceived. To allow a sufficient margin of error, and unknown terrain, he estimated three hours of daylight in which to move, and four hours of suit functionality, but Jin did think it wise to mention more than was essential. He didn’t want to keep anything from the humans in his care, but in this instance it was the most practical and effective solution to maximise their chance of survival. None seemed prone to panic, but to elevate any of their autonomic functions above normal would only further drain their suits’ resources.

  ‘Sixteen hours,’ the Titan told the survivors. ‘Rest if you can. Sleep would be better. We must move with daylight and daylight is short.’

  *

  31.

  E Pluribus Unum

  The metal giant sat with legs crossed on the ice, hands resting on his knees. While his charges slept, he thought. Older than Hush, even, and yet Jin never tired of thinking.

  Here, I am whatever I wish to be. There is nothing on this planet like me.

  Jin wondered at everything and closed himself to existence so that he was entirely encased and unaffected by anything but his own mind. Intellectually, he remained aware the others were with him. He was conscious of the cold and unwelcoming world upon which they were stranded, too. Mindful of the danger to his human companions, increasing with each passing moment.

  All these things flitted around the edge of Jin’s mind. Outside of him, real, but not in his centre. There, in his core being, he was meditative. Peace and calm, wary of thoughts and feeling and hopes and desires while removed from everything but himself and a perfect circle of black and white spinning endless.

  Separated from distraction, he knew his mind. What he wished was for the humans to survive.

  No. Not the humans, but us.

  Was Jin human?

  Machines were identical, unchanging unless programmed, each iteration a perfect copy. Was he a man-machine, an evolution, or an evolutionary anachronism, a dead end creation of a vast blind universe, an accident of design and time?

  He considered himself singular...but then, wasn’t that what humans were too? Wasn’t that the difference between humanity and machine?

  Jin allowed awareness back in, and found Ann
a awake and looking at him with her ever-curious gaze.

  ‘We’d be dead by now, Jin. You’re the reason we’re not.’

  Jin did not know what to say.

  Humanity was imperfection, a work of art too large to see, lines drawn by minute differences and similarities bringing them together into something more, something magnificent and wrong and amazing all at once.

  ‘It was Hush,’ he told her, while the others slept, and did not know why he spoke at all, other than because he wished to. ‘She gave me time. Peace to think. To evolve.’

  ‘You’re grateful to her?’

  Hush was the difference between seeking peace beneath the endless drips of a damp cell or beside the fresh spray of a waterfall.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and felt it sufficed. ‘But you, Anna. You remind me why we exist. Not war.’

  ‘Why?’ said Anna.

  ‘Kindness,’ he replied. True or not, it was what he felt. He wasn’t just singular, but part of a whole, a spinning circle of both black and white, and greater because of it.

  *

  PART FOUR

  The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveller than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

  -

  Marion Zimmer Bradley.

  COLD

  32.

  Dark Light

  Blue Sun Dawning Wreckage

  Ice Fields

  26 KM from anomaly

  Jin heaved aside the hulk of the Blue Sun Dawning with no sense that shifting tons of broken ship took any effort at all, though the ice cracked beneath Jin’s feet, and as the curved remains of the ship rolled from down, to up, it did not rock like a plastic bowl might but hit with a hard, dull sound. Jin had no artificial, exterior signs of strength – there were no false muscles, nor thought to form. He did not need biceps or deltoids carved into his metallic exoframe.

  Weather more inhospitable than either of the Earth’s poles blasted the survivors. Environmental suits functioned as expected so none registered the shock of the sudden frigid wind other than to steady themselves and dip their heads against a constant, unwelcome companion they couldn’t shift.

  Among their remaining supplies they had one long rifle and two short pistols. Ulrich took the rifle, Anna and Cassie Kiyobashi the pistols. Lian could barely walk straight even with fresh meds in her system,. Her eyes were unfocused with nausea and vertigo. Anti-emetics and pysbilaud could only do so much to make her a useful member of the team. She didn’t complain, but she agreed with her crew members – she was strictly under obs.

  Any other injuries the rest of them carried were either minor or tolerable with a steady drip of stims and pain meds, and even breaks – two of Ulrich’s fingers – could be managed by their suits’ systems.

  ‘We have everything useful we can carry,’ said Ulrich. ‘We ready?’

  ‘I will lead,’ said Jin. With visibility at around thirty metres, the four humans were once again dependant on Jin for their lives.

  ‘Cassie?’ asked Ulrich.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Watch our backs?’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. She kept her pistol holstered, strapped to her waist and tied to her right thigh. Ulrich’s long gun was across his back. His knife was long gone. The rifle felt lighter. He and the rifle didn’t have a history, and his missing eye was all the history he could manage right then, because he was tired and hurting...he didn’t let them know that, though.

  ‘Anna, you got Lian?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Lian?’

  ‘I’m good,’ she said. She didn’t sound it, but what could they do?

  ‘Let’s move,’ he said, and they began their long slog through the dull white landscape

  *

  Lian couldn’t be sure as to the extent of the damage she’d sustained, but she was the only doctor among them and when she informed them she could move it was true. The pain meds pushed her injuries some place distant. It wasn’t the pain, though, or nausea which proved the problem, and she hadn’t lied. She could move...could wasn’t should, though. Her head throbbed and her vision swam and neither problem was either due to the psybilaud or aided by it.

  Perhaps a lie would have increased their chances of survival, but what could she do? It wasn’t exactly ideal.

  Is that what I’m telling myself? Because I don’t want to die?

  Trudging along with either Ulrich or Anna helping her when she swayed, or strayed from their course, she wondered if she was lying to herself. Her first duty, her oath, required her to preserve life. If they stayed because of her, they all died. If she stayed and send them on, she died. But with no medic on an alien planet, all nursing injuries?

  They all deemed it unacceptable that she stay behind. They decided for her.

  But she let them, didn’t she? The choice wasn’t theirs to make.

  Is it mine?

  She didn’t know. If she wandered into the snow, would their chances be better or worse than if she stayed?

  ‘Lian?’

  Ulrich. Doing the best he could. Same as all of them.

  ‘Uh,’ she said. Her eyes were closed. Thinking, but kind of drifting along, too. Thinking wasn’t as easy as it should be.

  Should have left me, she thought, opening her eyes wide, like she’d been falling asleep. Nodding off on her feet.

  It was a hard choice, but none complained. When she staggered, which she did often, Ulrich and Anna were always there. Ahead, Jin, too, was considerate of her limitations. He stayed within sight, his sensors easily able to gauge how far the humans in his care could see, and how fast they could reasonably move.

  ‘Lian? You with us?’

  Ulrich. Still here. Still dragging me along.

  She nodded.

  Was it Ulrich with her, or Anna? His voice was distorted, even with his suit, because of the wind and his breathlessness. The air wasn’t a problem. It was just hard, injured, walking against wind, and on snow and ice.

  ‘Still ticking,’ she said. She felt a strong hand squeeze her shoulder, and the presence guiding her was half the height again of Anna.

  Ulrich.

  It was hard to tell where people were. Their comms didn’t fade, nor increase in volume dependant on distance. The storm worked against them all, too, and when she tried to see Ulrich’s face behind his faceplate she could only see some. The suits kept them warm, but couldn’t do much about the weather. The four of them were always wiping at their visors, clearing off flakes or crystals or shards where warmth and cold melted and froze again.

  ‘Keep it that way, Doctor.’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ she said. She thought maybe he laughed. Maybe he was coughing. He’d suited up before she could examine his wounds, and his face had been pale the last time she’d seen him without a mask of snow.

  ‘Anna?’ she said. ‘Anna?’

  ‘I’m here.’ Anna moved closer, and she seemed to walk much easier than the old soldier. ‘You okay?’

  ‘Missed you,’ said Lian, and laughed a little herself.

  High, she thought. Or brain damaged.

  ‘Okay,’ said Anna, but her tone was light, and that was good.

  Lian didn’t attempt to look behind for Kiyobashi. She feared she’d pass out if she moved her head. A sharp pain in her neck seemed to push up, insistent and rude, into her head, as though her neck trying to grow.

  Probably compressed vertebrae.

  She moved her head slightly to see Anna but everything swam and from her throat, right deep down in her guts that need to vomit overpowered everything except her mind. The suit would cleanse itself but the idea of her own vomiting on her own face?

  She gagged at that thought and only just managed to stop herself puking right there and then.

  ‘Lian?’ said Anna and Ulrich as one.

  ‘I’m good,’ she said, suppressing a burp that probably wasn’t just gas and managed to hold her guts together for a while longer.

 
Jin was their constant, their landmark. He said nothing. Fifteen kilometres through snow and dark skies. The gloom was unrelenting, the swirling snow reducing visibility to mere metres ahead, but Jin was solid, guiding them unerringly toward their goal. He, at least, would not tire. If they should die and be lost, frozen among the endless white landscape, he would just...carry on.

  The light barely changed. There was no dawn, no sunset, no indication of rotation of the frozen planet. Lian had seen plenty of snowstorms and remembered that grey, sickly yellow way clouds got in a hard storm. This was worse. Darker, dimmer. She felt queasy because of the psybilaud and her concussion, but because of that eerie light, too. It felt far more alien than the landscape. She could imagine vast fields of ice on Earth, but nothing so strange as the unchanging light.

  The landscape varied every moment, so sight was unreliable, and when they came upon something jutting from the snow Lian first thought it just another feature of the plains they travelled. Snow drifted high against it, and it wasn’t until Jin spoke any realised it was a fragment of the ship they sought.

  ‘Careful here,’ Jin warned. ‘Section of the Silver Dollar are scattered all around us. Watch your footing.’

  ‘Survivors, Jin?’ asked Ulrich. His voice had become hoarse. It seemed the slog and his injuries drained him more than Anna or Kiyobashi.

  ‘No life signs. Perhaps drones, and it is possible the ship survives in some capacity though I register no signals, and no distress pulsers.’

  ‘Movement?’ asked Anna. ‘Anything moving not alive?’

  It was a good question. Drones had no heart beat. Augs and living creatures weren’t the only threats, and something had taken the both Blue Sun Dawning and the Silver Dollar from the sky. It wasn’t just a pleasant walk through a winter snow. The planet was hostile. Whatever inhabited it might be, too.