The massive, rolling door into the factory was closed but not locked. He pulled it aside and made his way down the stairs to the darkness, staggered to the doorway where the brightness of David’s lab was revealed.
David was sitting where Sean had sat less than a day before, and Vidnas was putting the last of the armatures into place around his head.
“Stop!” Sean called.
“Sean?” David said, his head moving back and forth to get a clear view of him.
“You can’t do this, Vidnas.”
Vidnas stared between David within the sphere of chromatic lenses and Sean, clearly startled, but more than this, with a glimmer of embarrassment.
“You can’t let him go,” Sean went on. “You need him. The world needs him.”
“Sean, stop it,” David said. “This needs to be done.”
“And I’m the one to do it.” Sean kept his focus squarely on Vidnas. He spread his arms wide and strode forward. “I’m ruined, Vidnas. I am ruined, and David is whole, in mind as well as in body. Can you even conceive of what the world might lose today were he suddenly gone from it?”
Vidnas stared deeply into Sean’s eyes, but before he could say anything, David began pushing apart the stands that held the lenses, at least enough that he could extricate himself from them. “Get him out, Vidnas! We have to get him out!”
“Don’t listen to him,” Sean said, wincing as he took a step forward, his arms still outstretched. “You cannot.”
It was clear from the expression on Vidnas’s face that he was considering Sean’s words, but he stepped back when David strode to a nearby workbench and picked up a syringe. He filled it with a clear liquid and then began walking toward Sean.
“Don’t do this, David. Let me go. Please. You owe me this much.”
David’s face was red, and the expression was more intense than Sean had ever seen. “I was the one that brought them here, Sean. Not you.”
“I’m as much to blame.”
“You aren’t!” David’s face was red. Blue veins pulsed on his forehead and along his neck. “I practically forced you into that chair. I ran that experiment and then watched you suffer and tried to pretend it was all your idea! The Jovians are here because of my actions, and I cannot, I will not, allow you to take my place. They’re my responsibility.”
“Responsible or not, I’m not going to let you do it.”
“That, my dear friend, is no longer up to you.” He strode forward, holding the syringe high, out of Sean’s grasp, while using his other hand to grab the ligature rods connected along Sean’s collar bones. “I’m deeply sorry for everything that’s happened to you. I was a fool, then—young and worried for my career. I should never have betrayed you.”
He tried wrestling Sean to the ground, but Sean was not powerless. It caused pain, but his ligature was a beautifully designed machine. He grabbed David’s shirt with one hand, grabbed the arm holding the syringe with the other. He squeezed David’s arm until he cried out from the pain and dropped the syringe.
David, knowing the tide was turning, grabbed him about the waist and pushed him, knocking him off balance and sending him crashing to the ground. But this was ineffectual, too. It was only a matter of time before Sean got the upper hand. He wrestled David down to the cold floor, began crawling on top of him, all while David scrabbled uselessly at Sean’s back.
Then, suddenly, he was no longer able to hold David down.
Sean’s mind raced. He didn’t understand until his time in the hospital came rushing back to him. How could he have been so foolish? David had reached the cluster of controls—the mind of the ligature, in essence—at the center of Sean’s back. The hospital would have removed the panel that normally protected it. He hadn’t thought to have Therese put it back on before leaving.
The ligature was losing strength quickly, forcing his own muscles to do more of the work, which was causing more and more pain.
David tried to rise. Sean grabbed his shirt, trying to hold him in place, but it was a simple matter for David to wrest his shirt free of Sean’s weakened grip. He stared down at Sean with sympathetic eyes, eyes full of regret. “I’m truly sorry, Sean.”
But before he could do anything else, his eyes went wide.
Then they went cloudy, and his body fell limp.
Into the waiting arms of Vidnas.
Sean could only stare as Vidnas laid David gently down and moved to Sean’s side. He rolled Sean over and did something at the open panel, and the strength to Sean’s ligature suddenly returned.
“Thank you,” Sean said as Vidnas helped him to his feet.
Vidnas said nothing as he helped Sean hobble his way toward the padded seat David had so recently occupied.
* * *
Sean stared up at the lenses, watched the amber liquid flow through the tubes and bifurcate over and over again until all the lenses around him were aglow.
As before, his mind began to expand, slowly at first, but then in wider and grander increments until it felt as though he’d swallowed the cosmos.
He’d come to understand quinta essentia in a way he’d never expected. It shouldn’t be so surprising; he was a part of it, after all. All life was, from microbial life all the way up to advanced life forms—mammals, humans, the Jovians—and it made him wonder whether quinta essentia itself weren’t some form of life. A grand, enigmatic system not understandable by him—not yet, at least—but perhaps by the Jovians. He hoped he might one day share in such knowledge. Perhaps add to it.
For that was why the pods had come. They had come to find the beings that had reached out to them. They had come to fold those into their greater consciousness. And when that was done, they would move on. There were other worlds, other forms of life they hoped to commune with, which meant they would eventually uproot; they would travel to another world, and find more. And more after that. He could feel them already, places where haulms had been seeded in other worlds, which were now waiting to be visited.
Like all life, the pods were evolving, slowly accreting knowledge and wonder and experience to…to do who knew what? Sean certainly had no idea, but he hoped one day he might.
With care, he drew his attention inward, back toward Earth. The collective minds of the pods became more and more clear. In fact, so did all life on Earth. It felt like a thing he’d always been in touch with at some level, but now, as if a light had been shone on it at last, he could sense it separate from himself.
He recognized he was merely delaying now. The pods were calling to him. And for his part—though he was not without regrets—he knew he was ready.
And so, after one last longing glance at the world around him, he reached out.
And allowed them to lift him up.
In the Stars I’ll Find You
The Aeneid’s four entry shuttles had all been designed to withstand much more than the two-hundred-year journey to Menelaus, but Erin felt as if she were flying some recommissioned aircraft with compromised silica tiles. She was certain the hot atmospheric gases would penetrate the silica tiles any moment and burn up the ship. She tongued the controls to open up her comm to Ashley, her co-pilot to Erin’s right. “Hey Ash, you remember the Columbia?”
Ashley’s head swiveled her way, a look of disgust on her face. “What the fuck, Erin?”
“Hey, you talk about it, it doesn’t happen, right?”
“If you say so, Cap.”
A minute later, the shuttle’s wings caught the denser air, and they began to ease into their flight pattern toward the alkali flat some forty klicks ahead. The landing strip blinked from the lights that had been installed by the paving drones they’d dropped two days ago, but it was also highlighted by her HUD in bright neon green. Erin punched Ash on the arm, ready to gloat, when a twinkling field of light burst into the sky twenty klicks ahead, directly between them and the landing strip. A proximity alarm blared above her. She reached up and acknowledged it, staring in wonder as a dozen more flares bloomed around the
first. The proximity alarm blared again, and Erin defeated it, her heart pounding in her ears as an expanding field of soundless pyrotechnics and chaff effectively cordoned them off from the landing strip.
“What the fuck are those things?” Ash asked.
“No clue,” Erin said as she sat up and switched the controls to manual. She pulled hard to the left, willing the shuttle’s bulk to turn. “Shit.”
The horizon tilted as the shuttle grudgingly complied. Flares of searing white whipped past the windshield as they entered one of the shrapnel clouds. A horrendous, metallic clang resounded through the flight deck, then another. Erin could feel the reverberations through her console and seat.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
The readouts burst into a play of lights Erin hadn’t seen since crash training in basic. The sounds of more alarms filled the cockpit. Juan Gutierrez, sitting directly behind Erin, began acknowledging them immediately.
Ash reached her gunmetal-blue arm overhead, cycling the right elevon control system. “She’s listing, Erin.”
“Already on it,” Erin replied as the altimeter slipped below six thousand meters.
The entire shuttle rang as another series of foreign bodies struck it.
“Fire in the right wing,” Juan said. “Five thousand meters!”
She glanced at Ash. Despite the emotional damping drugs she, along with the rest of the human crew, had taken before entry, her eyes were maniacally wide, her jaw tight.
Erin tongued Ash’s comm channel and said, with all the self-control she could muster, “Calm down, Ash. We’re all going to be fine, but only if we calm down.”
She tried to correct the roll now that the sky ahead was clear, but the shuttle continued to drift left.
A voice came over their external comm frequency. “Shuttle Team, what’s going on down there?” Their fifteen teammates still on the Aeneid were being fed all the same data they were, including the video feeds from the nose camera and others around the ship.
“Talk to them, Goot,” Erin said.
“Our wing’s been struck. Internal fire reported…” Juan went on, relaying information to the Aeneid, but his voice faded into the roaring background.
“Four thousand meters,” Ash shouted. She punched several blue buttons in rapid sequence.
Erin tried engaging the speed brake to slow their descent, but the tail must have really taken a beating. More alarms flared to life above her. Something had breached the hull. “Shit.”
“Three thousand,” Ash said. “Speed’s too high, Erin!”
“Shit, shit, shit!” Erin tongued the control that would open up communications to the rear compartment. “Brace,” she said. “Deploying chutes in three, two, one…”
She punched the button that would deploy the three drogue parachutes from the rear of the shuttle. They were designed to slow horizontal speed, but they had to slow the craft down somehow.
The decel hit like a hammer blow. Erin’s body was thrown forward. Breath evacuated her lungs as the impact pressed her against her seat’s five-point restraints. The view through the flight deck windows morphed from bright blue to vivid green and yellow.
Ash coughed wetly.
“One thousand,” Juan reported. “Five hundred. One hun—”
His final words were cut short by an almighty eruption of glass and metal.
* * *
Erin sat at a table in the rooftop patio of a trendy café, anonymous and alone among the chatty lunchtime crowd. She tapped her pen absently on her geomorphology notes while staring blankly at the busy Macapá skyline. In the distance, a black payload car lifted from the tether station and began climbing the impossibly thin cable toward the Coatl Space Station some 40,000 klicks above. Her xocolatl latte had long since gone cold.
It was Tuesday, and this was a place they always met to study or escape from the hustle and bustle of mission training, but her twin sister, Tara, was late. And Tara was never late. Probably something to do with Garrett. Why? Because that always seemed to be Tara’s excuse lately. Erin was just about to call her when Tara stepped through the entry doors and looked over the crowd. A backpack was slung over one shoulder. She wore tan linen shorts and a white tee. She saw Erin and smiled stiffly, then tucked her backpack in and waded through the sea of tables and chairs. When she sat down, her lightly freckled cheeks were rosy.
“Been running?” Erin asked.
“What?” Tara glanced into her lap, confused, and then met Erin’s gaze. “Oh. No. Sorry I’m late.”
Erin leaned back. Even though she hated cold coffee, she sipped from her cup. As always when it came to Erin, Tara’s nerves were contagious. Tara set her backpack on the slate floor, then caught their server’s eye. He nodded, raising a finger to indicate he’d be right there. As he ran inside, Tara looked over the crowd, to the skyline, to the black line of the space elevator. “At least it’s a nice for once.” She smiled her quirky smile while running her fingers along her pony tail. “I swear, if we had one more day of 98 percent humidity, I was going to chop it all off.”
“You hear the news?” Erin asked.
Tara shook her head in a stiff little gesture. Erin could tell there was something wrong.
“They picked Helen,” Erin said.
Tara’s head jerked back. “They did?” she asked, without even a hint of a smile. “When?”
“Just this morning.”
Helen was a Jovian, a gas giant circling a G9 star, and it had two Earth-sized planets that shared its orbit, one sixty degrees ahead, the other sixty degrees behind. The twin planets, Menelaus and Paris, had sent a shock through the extrasolar planet community, indeed, through the entire science world. Trojan planets had been only theoretical before their discovery. What made this discovery even more amazing was the shared orbit of the Jovian and the two trojans. It sat in the center of the system’s habitable zone, the region where the star the planets orbited gave off enough heat to maintain liquid water.
Several months after their discovery, Menelaus and Paris had been confirmed as strong candidates for colonization by the spectral analysts, and it had shot them to the top of the list for the simple reason that there was a built-in fallback if the first planet was found to be unsuitable for exploration.
“That’s great,” Tara said, “but they were pretty sure already, right?”
“Yeah, but to have it confirmed… I think it’s amazing. Don’t you?”
Tara didn’t respond. She was staring out over the Macapá cityscape, her leg bouncing up and down, a thing it tended to do when Tara was both preoccupied and stressed. Erin realized her own leg was bouncing up and down, in sympathy, with her own stress. She let out a bitter laugh and gave Tara the stink eye.
“What?” Tara asked.
Erin hated secrets between the two of them, and Tara was hiding a big one. “Just spit it out, will you?”
Erin thought Tara might start another senseless argument—they’d had enough of those in just the past few weeks to last a lifetime—but instead she closed her eyes and gave the slightest shake of her head, as if apologizing for what she was about to do. “Erin, I’m dropping out.”
The clatter of cups and plates and conversation became muted. The whine of automobiles and the call of seagulls vanished. The hot Brazilian breeze, tugging the stray locks of Erin’s sloppily bound hair, suddenly became so annoying, she yanked the hair tie out and rebound it. Tara was continuing to speak, but Erin couldn’t hear it. All she could hear were the words I’m dropping out, and the conversations they’d had since they were teenagers, how they wished they could travel to another world, how jet the IASA Cub Cadet program was, what it would be like to be the first humans to set foot on the new, Earth-like planets they were discovering every month.
Tara’s words were coming out in a nonstop stream. “Tara, stop.”
Tara stopped mid-sentence. The wind blew a strand of Tara’s long auburn hair into her mouth. She pulled it out and waited, her lips tight.
“
You’re dropping out?”
Tara stared at the salt shaker, reached out and twirled it idly with her fingers. Then she nodded, as if just now coming to the final decision. “I’m so sorry, Rin. I—”
“How could you?”
“I told you.” She shrugged. “Garrett proposed. I accepted.”
“You met Garrett, what, three months ago?”
“Six.”
“And it could be over in another six. You can’t just drop out. This is what we’ve always wanted.”
“I know. I’m so sorry.”
“We’ve trained for this for ten years.” Erin felt completely powerless. “If you do this, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
“I might, but it’s okay.”
Erin knew there was more bad news on the way, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what. “Why is it going to be okay?”
“Because you won’t be alone,” Tara said.
“And just what the hell does that mean?” Erin asked, but she was already piecing it together. She leaned further back in her chair as if physically struck by the realization. “You didn’t.”
“It’s why I was late.”
“The administration agreed to it?”
The server came by, smiling, but Tara waved him away. “Under the circumstances, yeah. They were pretty good about it. It means no substitutes, no delays in the launch.” Tara sat up straighter and forced a smiled. “So you see? In a way, I’ll still be going with you.”
“An avatar?” Erin slammed her cup down into the saucer, spilling the dirty brown liquid over the table. “A fucking avatar, Tara?” A woman in a yellow sundress one table over glanced her way. Others were staring, but Erin didn’t care. “You think some machine is going to take your place?”
“It’ll know everything I know as of today.”
“I know how it works! But it’s not the same!”
“It is. It’ll be able to go where I can’t. Some part of me will experience space, just like we planned.”
“You can’t do this.”
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