Far from the Light of Heaven

by Tade Thompson

  “Do we have to go through this authority thing again? Because I am tired of it.”

  “Captain, the Ragtime is a crime scene. You can’t just invite anybody in before Salvo and I have cleared it. It’s contamination.” Damn it if Fin doesn’t sound reasonable this time.

  “Fin. Rasheed. No disrespect, but you’re a shitty spaceman. I need help with the ship and you and your shiny Artificial are not pulling your weight. Uncle Larry—”

  “‘Uncle Larry’?”

  “Lawrence Biz. He was my father’s friend. The point is, he’s an experienced astronaut. I need someone else who can carry water when we can’t trust the robots, and you don’t look like space is your natural habitat. I need him, all right? So we all don’t die of something routine like carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  Leaving unspoken what both of them know, the fact that an ally balances things out. Fin has Salvo; Shell now has Uncle Larry.

  “Is this your girl?” asks Larry. “Wow.”

  He is a huge, muscular man taking up space to the side of Shell’s father.

  “This is Michelle, yes,” says Haldene.

  Larry settles into a crouch, one hand on the rug. Shell still has to look up at him.

  “Hi,” he says. “I’m your uncle Larry.”

  Shell looks to Haldene, who shakes his head. “He ain’t your uncle, baby.”

  “How old are you, Michelle?”

  “Nine, but ten in the fall.”

  Larry laughs. “Ten in the fall. You know, your dad only talks about you when he’s not talking about flying?”

  “Are you an astronaut too?”

  “I am.”

  “Have you ever seen aliens?”

  “If I had, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it, darlin’.”

  “So you have.”

  Larry looks to Haldene, who just raises an eyebrow. “I told you she was smart.”

  “Yeah, but everybody says that about their kids, even the ones as dumb as a rock.”

  Shell’s belly warms whenever her father’s eye is on her.

  “Crosshairs aligned, Ragtime. Eleven metres. All thrusters inhibited.”

  “Roger that, Decisive. Target at centre,” says Shell.

  The Decisive had to descend to a phasing orbit, then perform a bielliptic transfer. It caught up to the Ragtime, taking three hours and giving Shell a headache. AI would normally do this. The transfer went well, although the Ragtime changed attitude twice. At least it didn’t speed up like when the Equivalence tried to dock the first time.

  “Contact. Capture.”

  “Confirmed.”

  The external cam shows the Decisive tacked on to the Ragtime.

  “Fin, do it,” says Shell.

  “Do what? I’m waiting at the hatch.”

  “The manual locks. We discussed this.”

  “Manual locks. Right.”

  She does a quick systems check, turns and propels herself out of the cupola. Shell heads for the fore airlock. She ignores the equipment lock and joins Fin beside the crew lock.

  Larry is older. The face is more lined, the hair has more grey and there’s some slump to the posture; more round, less muscle. That smile, though. Unmistakable. Shell pushes past Fin and hugs Larry. She feels inexplicably sad and thinks it’s because he reminds her of Haldene.

  “Hey, Shelley.”

  “Hey, Uncle Larry.”

  There’s a woman behind him. Fin seems to have frozen after the post-docking handshake. Hell is he looking at?

  “This is my daughter, Joké,” says Larry.

  Even neutralised in an EVA suit, Joké is distracting. Her eyes seem ever-so-slightly larger than usual. Dark brown skin, mouth quick to smile, taller than Shell. Joké looks at Fin briefly, then turns back to Shell without saying a word.

  “Do you want to brief us?” says Larry.

  Shell leads Larry and Joké to Node 1. Fin keeps up his weird stare, but he and Salvo move aft.

  “Keep in touch,” says Shell.

  “I need to speak with you,” says Fin. He’s looking at her in a way that mirrors her own feelings: like, Who’s this child commanding the ship, and does she know what she’s doing? Joké, behind Larry, wears an amused smile. Difficult to read, that one.

  Shell breaks off with Fin, not missing the look Larry exchanges with Joké.

  They both hold grab rails.

  “What?” asks Shell.

  “That spaceman. Spaceperson. Joké. She’s not human.”

  “So? You have an Artificial.” Shell tries to keep cool at this information. Many reasons this could be the case.

  “She’s not an Artificial – she’s an alien, a Lamber.”

  Shell glances back at the woman beside Larry. “What about him?”

  “He’s human. All the way.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “It’s my job to know, Captain. There are signs I can pick up. I’m a repatriator.”

  Low voice now. “Is she impersonating the real girl?”

  “No, Lambers wouldn’t do that. She seems to be a hybrid, which I haven’t seen before. I didn’t even know it was possible.” He seems to be in physical pain.

  “Okay, so, say she’s half-Lamber. Hell, full. What makes… is this a danger to us?”

  “‘Us’? We’re on the same side now?”

  “Fin, how is her being on board a problem?”

  “I don’t know. Lambers are—”

  The world shakes as the entire ship judders.

  Fin goes green. “What—?”

  Shell holds up her hand. “Ragtime. Diagnostics.”

  “All systems optimal, Captain.”

  “Then why—”

  Everything shudders, and the vibration increases in frequency. Alarms go off. Gravity disengages and the five of them fly around like rag dolls. The micrograv saves them from injury. Metals groan from mechanical stresses.

  “Ragtime, what the hell is going on?”

  The sense of up-down disappears. Bits and pieces not secured properly float around and a screwdriver misses Shell’s eye by inches. Alarms now insistent, loud, red alerts on the IFC.

  Shell has hold of a grab rail, as have Joké and Larry. Fin is panicked. Shell waits till he rotates then launches and clutches him from behind. “Calm down, Fin. Go limp. Like swimming. Go limp.”

  She allows the momentum to take them both to the other side and places his hand on free rails.

  Shell accesses the external cameras on her IFC. Maybe a collision of some kind? Meteoroid? But no proximity alert. The feed comes in, and she cannot believe what she sees. The stern node, Node 7, is in the process of detaching from the Ragtime. The planet Bloodroot, instead of being calm in one orientation, rotates around the camera crazily, meaning the ship is in a spin. The last restraint snaps, and the node is free. Which means—

  “Brace! Atmospheric leak in—”

  The hurricane hits, sucking at them all with gale forces.

  Shell yells above the howling depressurisation. “Ragtime, seal Node 6!”

  Node 7, along with a pair of solar arrays, tilts, smashes against the stump and spins away off the frame of the camera. No possibility of recapture. Debris, robots and air still discharge from Node 6. And liquid. Fuck.

  “Salvo, get in the Equivalence. Larry, the Decisive. I need some thrusts to stop this spin. Joké?”

  “Captain?” Calm, this one. Unpanicked.

  “Help Mr Fin into an EVA suit, please.”

  Ragtime is not answering queries, but Shell still receives telemetry on her IFC. The ship is still depressurising and power has fallen, but that’s understandable in the context of solar panel loss. Joké is now helping Shell into her own suit even though the atmosphere is still breathable. Shell wants no surprises. She and Joké move aft. They could have used the portable breathers, but if parts of the ship are going to start spontaneously snapping off, she wants to be ready.

  Pressurised suits make movement slow and cumbersome. There is no space to move side to
side, and Shell has Joké to her back – someone she does not know. Larry knows her, is her father, maybe, if she’s not an alien. She’ll be fine. Shell can hear her own breathing: raspy, loud, hint of a wheeze.

  A bar swings from the ceiling and smashes her in the centre of her visor. Not a bar. A robot arm. A second arm falls as the first rises. A third prepares to strike.

  “Arachnobots,” says Shell into the comm. “Fall back.”

  Penetrating a space suit is difficult. The suits are like armour – they are armour, but they are built for outside, not inside the ship. Shell is not in pain, but she cannot manoeuvre and can’t get to the robot, which is latched to a spot above her, swinging its arms, one of which wraps around her and begins to squeeze. Doesn’t hurt, but she feels it. How long will the suit hold? Joké tries to peel the arm off, but she makes no progress.

  “Captain,” says Fin over the comm. “Hold still.”

  Gunshot. The first arm splinters at the point of articulation with the ceiling, raining down alloy chips and hard plastic. For the other two, Shell is aware of the explosive bullets before they disintegrate. She turns like a woman made of balloons. Fin is holding a gun in one hand and his helmet in the other. He is out of the top half of the EVA suit and says something she can’t hear. She waves.

  To Joké, she says, “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Captain,” says Joké on the radio.

  “Yes.”

  “Now that we’re alone on the comm, I have a question.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What is ahead that we are, ah, going to?”

  Weird construction. Weird girl. “Aft to manually close the penultimate node and assess damage.”

  “But, um, you’re the one with Ragtime access.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “The captain can’t go. It’s too dangerous. If you die, everyone dies. Nobody else can do what you do, and though you have a really nice ass that I don’t mind staring at along this journey, you, ah, need to send someone else.”

  “I—”

  “What? You need someone five-eleven and gorgeous, you say? Okay, you twisted my arm, Captain. I’ll go.” Joké squeezes past. “Um, I’ll relay information back.”

  She moves faster than Shell is able to, so there’s that. And Joké is right.

  Shell looks at the time, takes a scheduled sip of water, then checks on the passengers. Don’t break ’em; don’t lose ’em. Stable. At her feet, maintenance bots clean up but are frustrated with the microgravity. Each fragment reminds her of the broken ship and the broken mission.

  Her comm lights up. “Ragtime, this is the Equivalence. Come in.” Salvo.

  “Ragtime, over.”

  “Equivalence ready for burn.”

  “Thank you. Wait for my mark. Decisive, come in.”

  “Decisive standing by for burn, over.”

  “All right. Let’s sort this spin out…”

  Chapter Ten

  Decisive: Lawrence

  While correcting the Ragtime’s spin, Lawrence leaves most of the precision work to the AI and lets his mind drift. Little Michelle. Look at her captaining a ship.

  Other memories come back. Lawrence alone in a ship. He looks at the screens showing the colony planet. Long time no see.

  Decades earlier, Lawrence did some work on Bloodroot as a survey pilot. He expected to map the limits of the inhabitable region of the planet. At the time he thought he wanted to join a fleet, but it was not to be; Bloodroot toned down its space programme. That didn’t mean there wasn’t work to be done planetside, however.

  “You’re going to it alone,” his CO had said.

  That was back when Bloodroot was more dependent on Lagos. Old tech propulsion, it took three hundred days to reach Bloodroot from the space station, and Lawrence took a twin-engine plane, parts printed and assembled, and flew free, beaming images and environmental information back.

  Long lonely flights. Lots of ice in the poles. Weather checks. Rations. More flights. Cold nights. Conflicts with pack canines and biting insects and dermatophytoses. Hyperkinetic creeper vines reaching for his plane along the equator. Unfamiliar indigenous species mixed with carelessly introduced terrestrial ones. Failed, abandoned outposts. An ancient meteor crater that took him four hours to fly around. Reading. Refuelling. The unending desolation of deserts and tundra alike. Waterlogged islands on which he could not land. Alone on plateau regions of mountain ranges. Scratching his name on a rockface using a diamond-tipped tool from Lagos. Because the arrival of humans interrupted local evolution in the Greater Arboreal Sea, he encountered resentful hominids who hurled shit at him. He forgave them. Losing track of time. Watching earthquakes and orogeny, landscape changing as fast as waves on the sea. He saw the bones of the first explorers and the preserved, frozen bodies of waves of rescue teams. Once his path crossed that of another surveyor and they spent a slow night together and exchanged tips, body fluids and narcochemistry.

  Bloodroot forgot him, and perhaps Lawrence forgot himself, because when he got back to civilisation looking to find a replacement component for his plane, there were no longer any survey trips being sponsored. Nobody missed him, nobody fought for his return. Hal was already dead. He had people somewhere, but he had no contact even before he went off-station. Nobody cared. Lawrence thought he was stuck on Bloodroot until the end of time. Or the end of his new mission.

  He flew some desultory missions after that, but all he really wanted to do was lie down and die. No, what he wanted was for Hal to be alive. Since that was never going to happen, he laid roots on Lagos.

  And here he was, with Hal’s daughter. Perhaps, as they say, Hal lives on in her.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ragtime: Fin

  Fin discards the helmet and pulls himself with grab rails into the cupola. The spin has stabilised along with his nausea. Salvo and Uncle Larry must have done it. He tries to find a channel to Bloodroot to give a report, but all he gets in his visual field is a “busy” bar.

  He gathers his thoughts and puts the facts together as he knows them.

  The Ragtime left Earth on schedule, stopped over at Space Station Lagos for a service, then made its way to Bloodroot’s orbit. Campion wakes up to find the AI infantilised and thirty-one passengers dead, cut up and disposed of by the ship’s bots. Someone’s artificial wolf roamed the Ragtime’s passageways, now neutralised. Fin and Salvo, counting the body parts, found two and a half humans missing. Mild friction with Campion, but Fin is used to that. Then the Decisive turns up with Uncle Larry and his Lamber daughter Joké. Then the ship kind of breaks up without warning.

  They need to work on the facts of the matter, the timeline, then, when all the known players are understood, find out motive. Fin needs to know the identities of all the victims and their positions in the passenger pods, and then dive into their IFCs.

  The break off of Node 7 is convenient for the killer. It distracts from investigation to something primal: survival. In survival mode, the human doesn’t default to detective work. Fin is afraid he’ll miss something in this tumult of survival. Plus, it’s space. The Brink. He might die for real. This kind of shit, Fin knows on an instinctive, molecular level, is coming his way like a fucking asteroid or heart attack or something. This is how he dies. In space. With strangers and robots and suffocation.

  Static and random sentences coming from the open channel. Joké mumbling to herself.

  “Nobody soothed his nightmares when he was a child.”

  Who is she talking about? Fin likes the woman, but she seems… out there. But so what? So was he, according to his colleagues on Bloodroot. They thought him some kind of wunderkind from his first cases. Which is why he fucked up the last one. Hubris.

  He reloads his gun and settles back down and waits near the crew lock. He crouches in Node 1 so that he can see as many directions as possible. Up, into the cupola, aft to the opening of Node 2, and fore into the crew area, the docking area and the airlocks.

  Esteeme
d Ones,

  I apologise. There are no words to express how sorry I am, and because of my mistake a life has been snuffed out.

  I know this letter is abrupt, but I have reason to believe my life is in danger and I do not want to die without you knowing that—

  No. It doesn’t work. It places a burden on them, a burden to listen and a burden to forgive because he might die. If they are to forgive, it must be freely. It must not be emotional blackmail, if they are vulnerable to such.

  Take stock. None of this shit means Campion is innocent, but it does seem like excessively elaborate efforts at misdirection. Fin can’t see it. Technically, though, she is still the only viable suspect.

  Careful. Don’t be spellbound by the super-competent astronaut.

  Is that it? Deep down Fin doesn’t want her to be guilty?

  Easier if she is. He and Salvo can go home, Fin back to repatriation or maybe just regular investigations. Crimes of passion, premeditated crimes, crimes of stupidity, of which there are many.

  But they have to survive first, and that prospect isn’t looking good. Fin doesn’t want this tug of war diluting priorities.

  “Equivalence, come back,” says Fin.

  “Go head, Ragtime Two,” says Salvo.

  “I’m Ragtime Two?”

  “She is the captain.”

  “Fine. Heretic. How is your mission?”

  “Almost accomplished.”

  “Will I distract you?”

  “No. I can split my attention. What do you need?”

  “As long as we’re alive, let’s remember why we are here. Anything further on the wolf?”

  “I ran a trace on the parts. Most appear to be proprietary, but those that aren’t are from MaxGalactix.”

  “Who owns MaxGalactix?”

  “Someone called Yan Maxwell—”

  “Why… where have I heard that name?” asks Fin.

  “From the list of murdered passengers. Yan Maxwell was on the passenger manifest and is one of the people we put back together.”

  Shit.

  “Did the wolf—”

  “No, Ragtime Two, the wolf did not kill Maxwell or any of the other passengers.”