by Nathan Dodge
We headed out. The others had been surprised to see me join, but no one had openly spoken up. I’d said it was time for action on my part, leaving it at that. The opening and closing of that gate told us the bait was taken, and our first runner, Aleksandr, was safe. If it had been Charles, the secondary connective gate would’ve flashed; if it had been Thanchanok, it would have been the viewing station. And Alek’s backup team, Midori and Mike, would now be trailing the attacker and finding where the last group of saboteurs were hiding. We just had to meet up with them.
We entered the small panel just opposite the quarters we’d taken and hurried into the passage. There was a risk, of course, that we’d run into Alek’s follower, retreating to find his team, but it was low. We were using the janitorial bypass, which was politely hidden from obvious view, the doors blending invisibly into the walls. So far as we’d been able to tell, our attackers had never identified those back corridors, which was part of how we’d kept the upper hand.
We emerged with weapons raised, tense and eyes wide. A soft, low whistle called and we lowered our weapons and Midori came in view. I breathed a sigh of relief. Aleksandr was a nurse, one I used to run with, according to my daughter. He had the speed for the assignment, but he’d been scared. Midori looked unphased, though, so he must have made it safely.
“They’re in port five. I followed them there. But there’s more than we thought. I saw at least five.”
“Port five? They must’ve just moved there. There’s no facilities there at all—no water, no wash space.”
“No, they’ve been there a while. You can tell from the smell, and a couple of them are looking pretty shaky. My guess is they haven’t eaten in a while, and there’s not much water left.”
“Children?”
“Depends on your definition. But they’re all young. And one of them … one of them’s real young,” she managed.
“Okay. Let’s set up.”
As plans go, “wait until they show up and shoot” wasn’t the best, especially when facing suicidal extremists, at least one of whom was young enough to unnerve Midori. Mareka’s belief in the failing motivation of the team was tempting, but it guaranteed nothing. So we waited, weapons ready.
And no one came.
First five minutes passed, then ten. At fifteen I pulled Midori aside again.
“You’re sure they were setting up to come get the water?”
“I’m sure.”
“What other ways would they go?”
“You know as well as I do. Main walk, crosscut, the janitor’s bypass, which they clearly didn’t take or you’d have bumped into each other—”
“The cafeteria,” someone said.
I turned to see a young man, one of our few surviving doctors. I’d almost told him to stay back, but in the end I’d let him come. Kentaro? I couldn’t remember.
“There’s no other exit in the cafeteria, is there? Just the two that go to the hall.”
“If they got Mike, it’s as good a place to go as any for a quick interrogation.”
“Mike was fine when I left, hidden around the corner,” Midori said—but she didn’t sound convinced.
“He was supposed to wait behind the gate,” I hissed. Fil swore, and we all started moving.
What started as a fast walk became a half-jog by the end. We slowed only as we were ready to round the final corner, raising our weapons to find the hall empty—and to hear sounds coming from the cafeteria. Hideous sounds.
“Flush ’em out? Call ’em out? Go in and just shoot like hell?” Fil stuttered. The team turned to me with fear and desperation in their faces, and two others half-opened their mouths to speak.
“Shut up,” I said, and thought.
The cafeteria had been emptied of food weeks ago, Mareka had told me, the storage units locked out of the attackers’ reach for the most part. It had a pleasant view, an excellent kitchen, and the strongest gravity of the ship, located as it was at the outermost edge of the ship’s spinning starboard wheel—appropriate to its healthy, younger employees, while the home center was on a secondary internal circle of gentler half-gravity that suited its elderly residents.
The strongest gravity of the ship.
“Kill the spin,” I said.
“Are you joking?” Mareka hissed. The look on her face was almost funny. If she’d been my old commander, I’d have said she was ready to throw me to the dogs.
“We’ll be expecting it. They won’t. There’s a ton of metal in there. It’ll go flying, they’ll panic, probably want to get out of there. They’re kids, they’ve never done zero-g training like we have. All our residents are in stasis, so none of them will be hurt. The saboteurs panic and come out, we stun them. Let’s do it.”
I’d expected an argument, but it took only seconds before everyone got in place. The command itself took over a minute to implement—a long, slow minute while Midori sweated profusely, eyes on the cafeteria doors.
Then we waited.
It came on so gradually at first I worried my plan was for nothing. The adjustment was easy, just barely noticeable in the first seconds. But then everything changed. As if we’d gone cliff-diving, our stomachs bottomed out, up became down, and we juddered and slid as the ship ground to a halt. Then the screams began.
The door ahead of us opened, but no one exited. We waited, the only sound a general, desperate breathing, until the first one broke. A young man not Mareka’s age half-stumbled, half-floated out, pushing himself off the doorframe to launch himself down the corridor, only to find himself facing us and unable to alter his trajectory. Weaponless, he floated almost peacefully into our arms. The doctor who’d spoken before quietly taped him up. The boy looked relieved.
The second escapee was much the same, albeit a little messier and much younger. Stunning was required, vomit arcing through the air. The team’s medical training came in handy with that, at least: no one panicked on our side, just simple sidestepping to avoid the spray. Although I couldn’t have imagined he’d heard much, the third escapee tried to make it through in the other direction, whipping around so quickly we’d have missed him if we’d glanced away even a second. But we didn’t, and he was quickly stunned. Then we caught a fourth saboteur, not fifteen years of age, with equal ease. Troublingly, with each rushed exit a few tiny droplets of blood floated idly by, peppering the air with scarlet.
Then a voice spoke from the other side of the wall.
“Aunt-ie,” she crooned.
“Acting Captain,” I corrected. “You didn’t recognize me before.”
Auntie. Auntie.
“You’re one of Kony’s grandchildren, too, aren’t you,” I said. I heard gasps behind me. I ignored them.
“Yes, Auntie,” she said. “But you’re wrong thinking I didn’t recognize you. I recognized you as one of us from the first. I’d hoped you survived. You should join us. You are one of us.”
“No,” I said. Neither of us bothered to parse the refusal. “You can still come back, though.”
“You can never go back,” she said.
Memories rushed in. The refugee camps. The hunger, the rain. Mareka, so small, her newly formed sentences lisp-ridden and only half-intelligible: Mommy, they said I will kill their children. Retraining. Threats. Departure.
“Fresh starts can happen,” I said. Fil edged up next to me, but I kept my eyes facing forward, pushed off her inquiring hand on my arm.
“You killed the girl,” she said. “It all comes back.”
“I didn’t kill,” I said. “I stopped.” My throat seized up, and my mind, and I searched desperately for something, anything to say.
“Were you a frontliner?” I asked. “Were you a shield child?”
“No,” she said.
“I used to get put out front. But not as a shield. As a scout. I could see,” I explained. “I could see in anything. Because of my eyes. Implants. They’d protect me. The other children would die all around me, but they’d protect me, no matter how much I begge
d them not to.”
“How did you get punished?” she asked. I hesitated. Some things I did not want Mareka to know.
“The usual,” I said. “Or sometimes they’d toss us under the dead. And of course, they’d make us watch the punishments. You?”
“The usual,” she said. I nodded.
“You have any friends survive?” I asked. “We didn’t kill them, you know. The children.”
“They’re none of my friends,” she said. “They have it easy. They don’t understand.”
“They shouldn’t have to understand,” I said. She was quiet for a while, and I felt the others itching to go past me. Behind me, I heard a soft click and I glanced back to find one of the admins looking into a wiring panel. I glared at her, and she snapped the closure back, shamefaced. I turned back to address the killer.
“Is there a man in there?” I asked. “One of ours?”
“Auntie,” she said, ignoring the question. “Auntie, we’re going to win.”
Frustrated, I retreated. “Do you have children, too?” I asked. She had to. We always did. Golden brown hair from Mareka’s father; I think that one was her father. Most of the others had had dark hair, like me.
“All dead. All dead,” she said, sighing.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was. My heart twisted for her. So many memories. Carrying Mareka through the night. Racing for escape, the dogs howling behind us.
“Kony tactics, revised,” she said, her voice unemotional. “I was too valuable, so they killed them instead.”
“What were their names?” I asked.
“Dead names.”
“Your name?”
“Elti. But mostly they call me Lead Striker.” Position names. I remembered that, found myself nodding, even knowing she couldn’t see.
“We escaped. Mareka and I. You could too, Elti,” I said.
“No,” she said. “No more old people. No more killing when they’re gone. No more dead babies.”
And with that, it was over. I felt it. Her next words confirmed it.
“I have your boy, and he’s bleeding,” she said. “I’m going to cut off his fingers next.”
It took a moment to decide. I breathed deep, trying to absorb each moment, each possibility. Then I spoke.
“First it was destroy the ship, now it’s cut off some fingers? Poor strategy. De-escalation is not appropriate to the situation.” I gestured at the doctor, pantomiming dropping and crawling the floor, trying to see more. I edged forward with him, but opposite, gently flipping myself, rotating toward the top of the hallway now that gravity was no longer an impediment, using the light strip’s decorative edges as shallow handholds to pull myself forward.
“It’s a tactical shift, not a de-escalation.” She sounded miffed. “It’s making it personal.”
“Hardly gets you anywhere.”
“I don’t need to get anywhere. I just need to give the small ones time. It’s easier than what you want.”
“And what do I want?”
“To keep everyone alive and safe. But all I want to do is get one person through that door to set off the second bomb.”
I lost my breath: a sudden loss, as if the air pressure had vanished, only it was my lungs that had forgotten to work. I glanced back and saw equally stunned faces. We hadn’t known.
“You’ll never get there,” I managed, sounding only slightly breathless. I heard the charge of a D3 on the other side of the wall. She had lethal force level, though it couldn’t blow through the wall.
I was pretty sure it couldn’t.
But where was the bomb? How had they not gotten to it in all this time? Unless they were closed off from it because—
—because we’d had all the gates locked down until a few minutes ago.
“Lock the gates and hit the lights!” I hissed to Fil, and then I swung around the corner and blasted.
I almost hit Mike. I wasn’t sure he was still living, clouded as he was by globules of floating blood, but my shot went wide as I corrected myself and spun out away from him. As the lights flickered out and my implant adjusted, I launched myself wildly, trying to stay in motion to avoid getting shot, trying to relocate my attacker through the field of cutlery and scattered plates. In the starlight, I spotted a lifeless body floating gently over the counter, spread-eagled—Mike’s doing?—but no Elti, and I bounced off the ceiling again to land at a table that I flipped downward in defense, throwing myself behind it. I scanned my surroundings, nearly shooting in return when Fil launched in silently in the dark and landed some seven meters away, flipping another table same as me and positioning herself behind it. She tilted the table slightly, battling its tendency to keep moving—trying to get a complimentary angle, I realized, so she could see what I couldn’t, and vice versa. She wore the only pair of night vision glasses we had. Clever, prepared Fil.
“You’re all that’s left,” I called out. “We have all your people. You’re the last. And you can’t see a damn thing, while I can.”
“How?” she asked. It was almost polite.
“I’ve got the implants still,” I said. I didn’t mention Fil.
“Government cheaps. As if a new pair of eyes was too much to ask.”
“I don’t know. They’re a nice color.”
“You missed one of us,” she said. “And I don’t care about damaging the ship.” Conversational switchback. Trying to keep me off balance. She should have known better than to try it with me.
A few shots scattered wildly over the room. Elti had to be somewhere along the back kitchen wall. Unless there really was someone else? Her voice seemed closer than it should be, echoing along the kitchen corridor. Was she still behind the mess line? I slid to the other side of the table, evaluating the hidden spaces of the room, the crevices even my enhanced sight couldn’t penetrate. My pulse was calm. War was familiar. War was every day.
“No, we didn’t miss anyone,” I called out as Fil nudged her table forward, willing the woman’s attention on myself. “And you know it. No one’s going to remember your sad little revolt. You lost. More of your people died than ours, it was so damn poorly pulled off. Give up now and you live, and if you’re very lucky, you might get to start fresh in a penal colony. Or you can watch your own piss and blood float through the air as you bleed to death.”
A laser shot through the air, neatly cutting the table and Fil’s outstretched arms in half. She never even managed a scream, just slid into unconsciousness with one brief look. I kicked my legs and launched off the wall behind me with the table and slammed through the air, shooting wildly over the edge of it as I went, stopping as I crashed into the far wall, twisting desperately around as I looked for Elti along the back wall, until I heard the groan and turned behind me.
I’d crushed the blonde’s skull with the table where she rested, pinned against the wall.
* * *
We saved Fil with surprising ease, the laser having handily cauterized the wounds and limited the bleeding. Mike’s blood loss was the real worry. Oxygen deprivation was a terrible enemy. Elti we left for dead, our altruistic tendencies unable to extend so far. She had, as it turned out, thankfully lied, and there had been no other escapees—though the bomb had been real enough. Many gods were thanked that it hadn’t gone off, and Ship Su’s mobile mechanic dismantled it with delicate expertise before shooting the parts out the airlock with something akin to disdain.
We got the spin going again and started cleanup then, and we held a memorial for the crewmembers and residents alike in the destroyed portion of the ship. We didn’t want to wake any residents until everything was secure and pleasant, or at least until we could fake it well enough. I alone set Elti to her final rest in full, albeit unaccompanied, funeral rites, unable to toss her out without ceremony. A sister deserved that much. Then we set to repairing the ship, bandaging over the less troubling aspects and rebuilding a few necessary sections from our emergency reserves. We resentfully fed and tended to the rest of our attackers before sett
ling them in one of our three remaining transit shuttles, preparing to turn back to Earth. Finally, we reached out to our main commercial hub to share our success.
And got no response.
For days.
* * *
“You’re sure?” I asked. It was the last time I would ask it.
“I’m sure,” Mareka said. She was in mild shock: the distant eyes, the paleness, the confusion. “They won.”
“The Vitalists.”
“Yes.”
“Anyone hold out?”
“China. Some islands, a lot of Southeast Asia. A few other pockets here and there they didn’t have the energy to take.”
“But for the most part.”
“For the most part.”
“Death to old folks, en masse.”
“Yes. They’re calling it the Extinction. It’s already starting.”
“They’ll rise up again,” I said. I sounded more confident than I thought. “The fringe wins sometimes, but never for very long.”
Mareka said nothing, her golden chestnut hair glittering in the ship’s light. She looked almost sweaty, and I found myself checking her, almost unconsciously, for a fever. More memories slipped back as I did so. Mareka in pigtails, playing ball. Mareka winning her first race, her dreams of becoming a veterinarian. Other dreams, too: a dog, a garden, the bright blue sky once more.
“We’re safe here,” I said unsteadily. “It’ll be okay.”
I brought Mareka back to her room. Her own real room, miraculously untouched by the attack. I fed her hot, sweet tea before brushing her teeth as if she were a baby and settling her to bed. Then I called the rest of the crew, who hadn’t been there when the news came in, to meet at our makeshift bridge. The news was delivered swiftly. Options were provided: to stay, or to go. Decisions were made in glances between partners and friends, certainty visible in seconds. I knew where most would go. I returned to my room and found Fil waiting.