Killing Gravity

by Corey J. White

  “You lecture me about my crimes, but you’re ready to kill these girls? I want you to see something, Mariam; Synthia, show her,” Briggs says.

  One of the women turns the back of her hand to face me. Xi.

  “You two are practically sisters.” Briggs smiles, properly this time, white teeth and too-red gums.

  “I had a sister,” I say. “Her name was Sera.”

  Briggs is about to respond, but I push out hard and drop to the floor as the women stumble backward. I pick myself up and Seven yowls as she jumps onto Synthia. The other three reach out to hurt me, and I can feel the adrenaline and the anger in their thoughts. Seven gets a good scratch across Synthia’s face, but then the spacewitch throws her off. Seven tries to extend her membrane to slow her flight, but Synthia lashes out with her mind and hurls Seven through the air.

  “No!” I scream. I clench my fist and Synthia’s head implodes, blasting a streak of red and pink and skull across the floor, but I’m not fast enough. Seven hits the wall with a yelp.

  I’m screaming again, and the minds of the other three women dance in the air in front of me, trying to get a hold. Briggs runs for the corridor at the far end of the hall. I ignore the women for a moment and throw out both my hands, planting a barrier with my mind. It feels as solid as Sera’s wall on Ergot, and when I lower my arms it stays in place. I feel Briggs hit the wall, like a spider feels a bug in its web.

  Behind me, the women continue the attack, their assault like a weight on my mind, like the pressure of strong gravity, like the pain in your lungs as your oxygen runs out and you’re breathing in carbon dioxide. I spin to face them, all standing together. Their attack peaks, a violent wave of psychic energy that I brush aside with one hand.

  “You are nothing!” I yell, lifting the women off the floor, but it’s not them I’m yelling at, not really. How can I yell at someone who doesn’t even register in my vision, in my thoughts? They might be orbiting around me a meter off the ground, but I don’t see their faces. I see Sera’s face. I see girls from my childhood. Maybe I knew these three, but I don’t know them now; I don’t know anyone who would follow Briggs willingly. I see the boy, shivering inside a machine of death, and I see all the ones I killed downstairs. And I see my father and that fucking smile on his face in the picture, and I try to picture my mother, but it’s just Sera again.

  My whole body throbs. Pulses of energy rush through as the power builds inside me, clear and bright. Mind open, thoughts endless. Arms out, palms up, vision shimmering as reality burns.

  The women are gone, and I’m not even sure what I did to them. The floor is covered in blood, but the floor was already covered in blood.

  I stand and walk to the corridor where Briggs is trapped, hitting my wall with one fist. He’s slowing down, like he’s already given up.

  “This is what you wanted, wasn’t it? For me to come home?” I ask.

  “You are my greatest achievement, Mariam.”

  “You say that as if I’m not about to kill you.”

  He smiles, and I can’t tell if it’s the smile of a man who still has an ace up his sleeve, or the smile of a man who lived to see his child become exactly what he always wanted.

  “It doesn’t matter what you do to me,” he says. “There are others, Mariam. The MEPHISTO command structure has inbuilt redundancies. Other men like me, with other projects. Other weapons like you. Nothing will change.”

  “I don’t care,” I say. “I’m doing this for me.”

  “Nothing will change,” he repeats.

  I flick my fingers and Briggs’s head disappears. His torso topples forward as bits of brain and skull streak down my mental wall, falling to the ground all at once when I pull the barrier down.

  I fall to my knees and struggle to catch my breath, staring at Briggs’s corpse. I don’t even react when I feel a hand on my shoulder: Squid crouching down beside me.

  My head turns away from them. It’s half because of the migraine that’s throbbing inside my skull and half from shame at what they just saw me do.

  “Let’s go,” they say, resting the gun on the floor.

  They stand and offer me a hand, and I can barely get up even with the help, but after a few seconds I’m steady on my feet.

  I walk back to the open weapons platform and pull the tubes out of the boy’s arm, nose, and mouth. I leave the wires in his head, just in case, but tear them out of the machine. Then I lift him free. He weighs practically nothing, his pale skin stretched over tiny bones like a living skeleton.

  “I’ll help,” Squid says, coming to join me.

  “No, it’s okay, I’ve got him. Grab Seven, please.”

  “She’s dead, Ma—”

  “Just grab her,” I snap.

  Squid cradling Seven, me carrying the boy, and Trix with her prosthetic arm nearly scraping the floor, the five of us must look like war refugees, blood spattered and variously broken. In a way, that’s exactly what we are. Displaced, refusing to stop because stasis is death.

  Waren pings my HUD softly and his nav line glows. I follow it home.

  * * *

  Passing back through the central concourse, I feel sick looking at all the steel balls scattered across the floor—compressed tombs for the boys I didn’t even know were inside. It feels like murder.

  We head down the next vertilator, back toward the Mouse. “Nearly there,” I say as we reach the hallway where Waren parked the ship. I’m about to step around the corner when Trix hisses at me, still sounding angry.

  “This is too easy, Mars.”

  I’m sticky with blood, Seven is dead, and Trix’s arm is melted; I’m not sure I’d call it “easy,” but I know what she means.

  I crouch behind the corner, resting the boy on my knee. I lean forward to peek, but the migraine I’d been ignoring spikes again. I exhale, force the pain down, and look. The hum of laser batteries builds, and I pull my head back just as a beam of laserfire shoots past. The corridor explodes with light and noise as all the waiting troopers open fire.

  “Fuck,” I say. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

  “Just do your thing,” Trix says, edge of irritation to her voice.

  “I’m fucking spent,” I say, a little too harshly. “I’ve caused a lot of carnage today.”

  “I shouldn’t have dropped that gun. . . .” Squid starts to say.

  “Waren, we can’t reach you.”

  “I’ve got your location. You’re near a void-proof blast door.”

  It takes a second for me to realize what it’s suggesting. “If you do that, how will we get to you?”

  “The Nova is impounded in a tertiary hangar on the underside of the Rampart.”

  The laserfire stops, and I wonder how long we’ve got before they charge from cover. “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve been doing some digging while I wait for you. I heard the ship’s AI was too busy to keep me out.”

  “All right, do it, then lead us to the Nova. We’ll meet you in the void. Waren, if we don’t make it, go and do whatever it is an untethered AI with its own ship and a galaxy to explore wants to do.”

  “I will, Mars; if this doesn’t work, it’s been a pleasure.”

  Past the soldiers, somewhere out of sight, Waren disengages from the hull. As he takes a circular piece of it with him, the corridor howls with the high-pitched whistle of escaping atmosphere. I hear the first of the soldier’s screams, then the blast door slams closed.

  “All right,” I say, pushing off the wall and heading back the way we came. “Waren’s going to get us to the Nova.”

  * * *

  We ride the vertilator down to the lowest level, listening to the creaks and shrieks of a ship struggling to stay whole. The boy in my arms starts to squirm and moan, as if he were the ship, but then he goes quiet and I have to hold his mouth up to my ear to feel his breath.

  “We’re running out of time,” Squid says. I know they’re talking about the ship, but I’m so fatigued I can’t help but take it pers
onally.

  “Sorry,” I say. “We’re nearly there.”

  People in MEPHISTO uniforms run past us in both directions, but they don’t try to stop us; they barely spare the time to glance at us as they run to their emergency stations or maybe to the lifeboats.

  The occasional system broadcasts have been replaced with a constant, deafening siren, but we don’t need to talk. I follow Waren’s directions and the others follow.

  The foot traffic dies off completely before we hit the tertiary hangar. The Nova stands against one wall, and I’ve never been so happy to see a beat-up old tug. There’s the outline of dock doors on the floor beneath it, and a crane arm to hold it in place when the doors open.

  “Einri, do you copy?” Squid says. I’m out of the circuit, so I don’t hear the AI respond. “Can you access the docking mechanism? Good. Open the door, warm up the engines, and prepare to get us all out of here.”

  I stop for a second, turn, and rest my head on Squid’s shoulder.

  “Come on,” they say quietly. “Let’s go.”

  I lift my head and see I’ve marked Squid’s shoulder with blood and sweat. Maybe a couple of tears, if I’m honest. I look at their face as green and blue chromatophores drift beneath the skin.

  “Okay.”

  We stagger in through the Nova’s opening air lock. I strap the boy into a seat in the hold. After looking down at him for a few seconds I realize Squid is standing behind me, still holding Seven in one arm.

  I move over to the far side and watch out the port as the Nova drops out into space. My stomach churns as we leave the artificial gravity of the Rampart and Einri gets the Nova’s centrifuge spinning, and I feel a slight pull as we move away at speed. Soon we’ve got a view of all the carnage: two Ellis cruisers and three frigates crippled or destroyed, dozens of lost fighters, a flagship badly battered, and countless dead. So many corpses lost among the stars, so much glittering shrapnel.

  It’s almost beautiful.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Einri takes some convincing before it lets Waren dock the Mouse in Nova’s hold, but soon enough we’re all drifting together, all except Mookie.

  I take Mookie’s kit from the medbay into the mess hall, where Squid left Seven’s body wrapped in an old piece of linen—maybe a pillowcase. Squid and Trix sit at the opposite end of the table from Seven, drinking ersatz coffee.

  “The boy is still in the autodoc,” Squid says when they see me come in. “Maybe if Mookie was here he could do more, but I think for now we need to let him rest and heal. There’s no way of knowing how he’ll react to life outside the box.”

  Trix reaches across the table and rests her natural hand on Squid’s arm. “You’ve done all you can for the boy.” Einri has already fabricated her a new prosthetic, and she keeps those new fingers wrapped around her coffee mug.

  I put Mookie’s medkit down next to the bundle of Seven and take out a scalpel. I unfold the stained white cloth, and Squid walks over, announced by quiet footfalls and the smell of coffee. “Mars, what are you doing? She’s dead.”

  “She’s not dead,” I say. I put the blade against Seven’s sternum and softly thump the end of the handle to crack the thin bone. A minute later and Seven’s shattered body sits open in front of me while Squid watches.

  “Look,” I say, and I hold up the “egg.” It’s perfectly round, with a transparent shell revealing whorls of pink within. “I told you Seven was an experiment. She carries her own clone around inside her.” Squid leans forward, and I wipe the last of the blood off the shell.

  They stare wide-eyed at the tiny pink fetus.

  “Squid, meet Eight.”

  “That’s incredible, but I’m not sure about ‘Eight.’ What about ‘Ocho’?”

  I smile. “I like that.”

  I wash my hands and then the egg and put it in the hood of my cloak, which will keep the egg warm and act like a marsupial’s pouch when she hatches.

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you on the ship,” I say. “But I can’t lose her, I just fucking can’t.” My eyes sting and I can feel tears seeping into them, but I blink the moisture away. That little terror; I love her so much, and watching her die breaks my heart no matter how many times I see it.

  “It’s okay,” Squid says, “I get it.” Then, apropos of nothing, they hug me, tightly, for as long as it takes me to relax into it and hug them back. Being held like that, for the first time in too long, the tears come for real.

  * * *

  I sleep for a whole day. When I wake the migraine is still lingering.

  I sit down at the mess-hall table, waiting for the others so we can start Squid’s “family meeting.” I get myself a coffee, activate the shard holding all the information I have on my father, and swipe to the holo-image. I can rotate it a little, see the shape of my father’s head, see a snatch of the background behind him, but that’s it. I can’t make out where he is, and I don’t know who took the picture. Part of me wants to think it was my mother. It’s the only echo of her in my life—that and the fact that I was born.

  A few minutes later Trix joins me, sitting at the far end of the table, silently glaring.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Squid says, coming through from the cockpit. They sit down and look at the shard.

  “Who is that?” Squid asks.

  “The asshole who sold me to MEPHISTO.”

  “Slaver?”

  “Father.”

  Trix laughs at that, a single throaty hah that tells me everything I need to know about her own father.

  “Where’s he now?” Squid asks.

  “I dunno,” I say. “My sister Sera found some information on him—but I haven’t looked yet. Maybe he’s dead.”

  Trix taps her foot a few times, then looks up toward the ceiling when she says, “What’s our first move?”

  “We’ve been heading away from the debris field—”

  “The Mars Xi Debris Field,” Squid says. “It’ll be marked on every navmap one day.”

  Einri doesn’t skip a beat: “And we should leave this system as soon as possible. The area is about to be filled with imperial junkers and MEPHISTO reinforcements.”

  “I’ve got my stackhead contact searching for known military prisons, so once I’ve got a list, I’m going to go find Mookie. He wouldn’t be in this shit without me, and I’m not going to let them kill him.”

  “You’re not doing it without me,” Trix says.

  “You still want to be near me after seeing all that?” I say, and I hang my head and close my eyes. Behind my lids all I can see are boys: boys stuffed into electric coffins, boys crushed, boys killed. My vision is washed with red, blood-tinted.

  After a moment I look up and Trix shrugs. “This isn’t about you.”

  “You didn’t do anything MEPHISTO didn’t deserve,” Squid says. “And it’s Mookie; he’s family.”

  “I can’t ask you to do this with me. It’s probably fucking suicide.”

  “You didn’t ask,” Squid says, and then they smile a pure, reckless smile.

  “All right, then. We’re really gonna do this,” I say. “Waren, we don’t have a location yet, but I’ll trust you and Einri to take us someplace safe in the interim.”

  “Thank you, Mars,” Waren says. “There are a few areas of the galaxy I’ve always wanted to visit.”

  “Let’s get out of this system.”

  Squid heads to the cockpit while Trix goes toward the rear of the ship. I head back to my quarters and stand in front of the viewscreen. The gas giant and its two moons are far off in the distance now, tiny splashes of color against the black void. There’s so much death behind us, drifting in space. In front of us? Who knows.

  I take Ocho’s egg from my hood and hold it close to my lips. “I miss you already, jerkface.”

  Einri takes us into worm-space, and I watch as the whole universe folds down into nothingness.

  We move on. We disappear.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Bryo
ny Milner for her invaluable feedback, her friendship, and the Scotch. Thanks also to Austin Armatys for his feedback and enthusiasm, and Marlee Jane Ward for all her support. Thank you to Carl Engle-Laird for his detailed and thoughtful editorial feedback and for taking a chance on Killing Gravity in the first place.

  Finally, thanks to These Arms Are Snakes and Genghis Tron, whose music informed aspects of this story.

  About the Author

  Photograph by Marlee Jane Ward

  Corey J. White is a writer of science fiction, horror, magical realism, and other, harder to define stories. He studied writing at Griffith University, and is now based in Melbourne. Killing Gravity is his first book.

  Find him at coreyjwhite.com and on twitter at @cjwhite.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN