Farlost: Arrival

by Mierau,John

  He turned up the voices whispering on his suit radio.

  The gruff one, Gruber, was talking again. Well, talking was a stretch, Arnel decided: he was spouting off numbers that Beacham would interrupt every few minutes.

  HHL-6 groaned around him. Louder than usual, although the poor structure really hadn't stopped complaining since...

  He shook his head. I can't help C&C navigate the ship. I can't help Green manage Goss through the door in person any better than through a screen.

  He hated feeling useless. Racing back to C&C at least kept him in motion. He ran through a mental checklist of disaster planning, getting lost in the minutia that he knew had earned him a reputation as a hardass and a stickler.

  "Stickler, yeah," Taggart muttered. "Don't think anybody respected you too enough to call you a hardass before this. I sure didn't."

  "Quit doing that!" Arnel shouted, grasping a surface and pushing off, turning to face Taggart as he did. "Am I talking out loud? Is the shock that bad?"

  Taggart pushed off the same surface far more elegantly, following his First Officer up to the next airlock junction with a thoughtful look on his face.

  "No sir. I guess... maybe we're bonding? You got a lot more spine that I'd have guessed."

  Arnel laughed, his emotions still zigzagging and pushing against the freezer door he'd buried them behind in his psyche. "Glad to hear I've made a friend," he said, happily embracing the sentiment over the eerie behavior he'd asked Taggart about.

  Taggart nodded a meter behind, reaching inside his spacesuit's open visor to scratch at his chin. "Yeah, you're solid. I can see what Ina saw in you."

  Arnel stared back, goggle-eyed. Was Taggart messing with his mind? Genuinely unbalanced by the terrors of the past day? Or was his sense of humor truly twisted?

  He decided he didn't care, so long as Taggart was useful. Besides...he really did like Taggart. Which was odd, after all the demerits he'd assigned the security officer before.

  Arnel was shocked to learn just how much going through fire with the crew had put all of that corporate citizenship bullshit he'd strived for over the years into perspective.

  He reached out to the closed airlock ahead. "You're messing with my head, Taggart, but I guess I've got enough spine to put up with it."

  Taggart laughed. Arnel laughed too, bracing himself at the airlock, and pushing himself to the side to make room for the younger man to land.

  After he did so, the younger man's dark face turned towards him. Upper teeth bit pink lower lip as he stared at Arnel. "Sorry, sir. About Ina." His face tightened. "How do I know that? I'm not trying to mess with you, sir. I'm not."

  Arnel sighed. "We can worry about that later. First we plug all the holes, and doublecheck all the plugs, yes? I don't want anyone else to die becuase we miss...."

  Where the back of his suit pushed against the wall, a vibration came out. Subtle. Irregular. It came again.

  He spun and looked at the equipment storage locker he'd been bent up against. He pressed his hand against it. This time he felt and heard the slam of something from the other side.

  He braced his feet below and twisted the manual release for the locker. He pushed the retractible door up--

  --and out fell a man.

  A black worksuit with command patches on the shoulders tumbled into Arnel.

  He grabbed for the man to stop his tumble. Then Taggart was there, bracing them both.

  The figure in his arms was shuddering, his face huddled down against his shoulder, hiding from them.

  Arnel recognized the short hair, the wiry frame all the same.

  "Bill," he gasped.

  First officer Bill Y u looked up when called. His eyes bugged out. His face was coated with tears. his entire body was wracked with sobs.

  "All dead, all dead, all dead," he muttered, barely audibly.

  Bill Yu's eyes didn't register them. He stared all around, his motions jerky and birdlike.

  "Bill," Arnel said again, shaking the First Officer by the shoulder softly. In response, Yu's face collapsed into a dry crying spasm.

  "Oh, man," Taggart whispered, his face drawn.

  "The lights... everybody's dead!"

  Arnel remembered his dream. He saw the same recognition of the words in Taggart's face.

  Too much was happening. Too much for anyone to hold it all together.

  Calm, beloved Bill Yu had spent the whole time alone.

  Commanding, confident Bill Yu, who could order and receive happy obedience from anyone on board HHL-6, had waited for death, been visited by the lights, been left in the screaming bones of the ship he ran for Dwyer...all alone.

  "I've got you Bill," Arnel told him, squeezing both biceps. Taggart grabbed on the back of his suit, holding him steady instinctively. "We've got you Bill, you're safe."

  First officer Y u shook his head, over and over, his shoulders moving with his head, repeating the motion over and over.

  "No, not safe, no, not safe, no..."

  Bill Yu was a cracked shell of a man.

  "We saw the lights too," Taggart said.

  Bill kept up his weird, incessant, head and shoulder shake, but his eyes met Taggart’s. They widened even more, taking in the black man hovering behind Arnel.

  "The lights," Arnel started, then took a deep breath. Bill needed to know he wasn't mad. He said the words.

  "I saw something too, Bill. Something talked to me through my wife. Told me not to let the lights die, or we would die."

  Bill laughed. "No, not that!" He tittered, high and shrill.

  Arnel nodded. "It's alright! We didn't die! It...the thing was talking about Beacham! His force field project, 'Light Show'?"

  Bill kept shaking his head in that way that felt wrong. "Not the toys in the la-ab!," Bill squealed in a sing-song voice.

  Arnel suddenly wanted to take his hands off him.

  "Nope, nope, nope! Not 'don't let the light show die'..."

  Bill's eyes focused on something far away. "Don't let 'the Lights' die!..."

  Arnel felt gooseflesh bloom on his hands where they touched Bill Yu, then spread all over his body.

  "Eugh!" Taggart barked, letting go of Yu's shoulder where he'd reached out to offer support.

  Bill Yu stopped shaking, looking right into Arnel's eyes, now. "The Lights are so scared!" He repeated again in a hiss.

  Arnel couldn't breathe. Instinctive fear rippled through him. Fear of something that he couldn't understand.

  Yu collapsed in Arnel's arms. Taggart steadied them both.

  Bill Yu's eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed into Arnel's arms. He watched the man's lips move again, emitting a paper-thin whisper: "So scared, so scared."

  32

  HHL-6 groaned around them, accelerating ahead towards the Betty McKenna. Ready klaxons sounded, then were cut off mid-screech.

  Rose Okoro looked over to Lou Montagne, floating, strapped in, at her command station. Sure enough, she was the one who'd killed the audible.

  Commander Montagne saw Rose looking her way. "Just the bad loud noises from here on, alright, Nav?" she called out calmly, with a little trill in her voice.

  Rose nodded, her hands automatically slapping through icons to silence future standard audible alerts even before she managed to tear her eyes off the acting Commander.

  She looked so alive, Rose thought. How did she stay so calm, when I'm a--

  She paused for a second and looked down. Her fingers weren't shaking: they were dancing between dozens of open windows. Her mind was clear and sharp, and even though she was terrified, she'd locked that dangerous emotion away in a tickle trunk in the back of her mind.

  A small grin crept onto her face, as she tapped an incoming signal live, and listened as Commander Villanueva reported his status into her ear.

  She was cool as a cucumber, Rose was surprised as hell to realize.

  And having a blast.

  "Holy shit, this'll work!" Rose heard on the open channel between C&C and
The Betty's Captain and Chief Engineer. Heavy breathing filled the line, and then Engineer Gruber started laughing hoarsely, overloading the speaker in his helmet. She winced until the audio system dampened his volume.

  Rose stared at the diagrams on a screen above her head; a slaved feed from Beacham's terminal, showing arrows marking trajectory as HHL-6 moved at hundreds of kilometers an hour toward the ancient human ship ahead.

  Other systems lit up on her screen: status updates from department heads, automatic reports from the flight computers as they prepared for the braking and turning maneuvers that lay ahead, as HHL-6, basically a collection of cylindrical fuel tanks, performed the aeronautical equivalent of threading a needle.

  Captain Travis came over the feed. "Confirmed, 'Six," he panted. "We've sprayed emergency sealant across the entire surface area of the cargo bays to make a hard seal in here, but Daisy confirms you can slot two midline tanks inside with less than a meter's clearance."

  "Like a virgin on prom night," Gruber roared again.

  Rose Okoro laughed aloud. She cast an apologetic look across C&C to her Commander, and the station where Doctor Beacham and his assistant Stan were working. Stan grinned back, tapping on the back of his boss's chair; Beacham didn't even notice.

  All of them were working in the zone.

  All it took was a near death experience or three, she thought, swallowing a giggle.

  "Commander," she called out. "First--uh...Officer Villanueva has gotten First Officer Yu to Doc Sanders. Med bay is up and running, and he's sedated Yu for now. He's stable."

  The Commander nodded, tapping through her own series of windows.

  "Captain Travis, when this is over, we've got a lot of blanks to fill in, remember that."

  "Yeah. A lot of history. We'll get you up to speed, Comm--"

  "Coffee!" Engineer Gruber roared over his Captain. "Lady have you got beans on board?"

  Commander Montagne burst out laughing, just as another call beeped in Rose's headset.

  "We'll brew you a bulb, Gruber," Montagne said as Rose processed the sounds in her other ear.

  In real time, she called out the report: "Pilot Nishioka's EVA has launched with his mech crew, Commander. En route to prep tanks 17 and 18 for docking."

  "We're heading back inside then, 'Six." Captain Travis panted on the open channel. "We'll be up to speed when you get here."

  "Yeah, don't wanna be casualty of our planned fender bender," Gruber wheezed. "Don't mess it up, Montagne! Once we're out of chem thrusters, we're coasting without you."

  Montagne, cool as ever, lifted her chin and reassured everyone within the sound of her voice. "You did your part, Betty, my crew will do theirs."

  "Yeah, relax, ETA's a whole twenty eight minutes out," Beacham called out, sarcasm dripping from every word.

  He swore-low and under his breath, Rose noticed. Wow, he really was trying to reign in that potty mouth. Will wonders ever cease, she thought.

  "And Captain," Beacham grated out, "ask your uh, potted computer to slow down its data transmission rates? We're getting too many errors trying to receive. We can't afford that right now. This kind of op usually gets weeks of planning and a thousand computer sims, not a one-shot deal!"

  "Beacham," Montagne called in a low, almost mocking tone.

  It was the right tack, Rose saw. The weirdo didn't explode, like Rose would have guessed. He nodded and waved his hands toward the Commander: part 'yeah, yeah, I know,' and part 'sorry about that'.

  How did she do that? Rose wondered.

  "I will speak more slowly," came that calm, inhuman voice again. Rose wondered if it was joking with them. She had no clue: she was still trying to wrap her head around the idea of a plant that thought faster than all the computer cores on 'Six.

  With that thought came the memory of the other voices, the ones tumbling away on the tram Dina was chasing in her EVA craft.

  Nope, not going there, she said, tucking the whole idea of aliens into her mental tickle trunk.

  She tapped through all her screens again, remembering the calming lessons from driver training back in her teens: check the left mirror, the dashboard, the rear-view, then the right. Keep your eyes moving, so you never miss anything.

  It helped her all her life, and it even helped her slam the trunk shut around the whole idea of aliens in the here and now!

  Internal sensors showed only a half a dozen depressurized containers and routes now. The crew released from cellar one had been busy patching things up. And motivated, she guessed: there was no support out here to save their asses except their crewmates' eyeballs.

  She exploded the view of the ship's trajectory on-screen: in twenty minutes the ship's complement would all rush back into the Cellar in case the two ships smash-up caused another leak.

  Or worse, Rose almost thought, then ran her eyes along the trail of open windows on her screen again. 'Ten and Two, Okoro," she intoned, remembering the driving tutor her father had paid to ensure his baby girl learned all the right lessons.

  And she had, she realized, as she tapped through navigation plots and comm traffic with ease, in the midst of the greatest tragedy -and adventure- of her young life.

  Father would be proud, she thought. She veered the car of her mind away from the thing in her dreams in the moments after 'Six arrived in this strange new place. The thing that had looked like her father, but warned her not to let the lights go out.

  So many wonders, father, she thought. I wish I could share them with you.

  A vibration hummed from her console. She frowned and dug up a blinking window. LIDAR overlays showed a static world full of broken, alien ships all around them.

  And motion.

  Below them lay an island of metal, still rising from being caught in HHL-6's explosive arrival. Rose stared at it again, thinking of satellite views of her father's island back home. A pretty thing of golden sand in blue-green water.

  This thing was just as beautiful, looking in places like a grown thing with curling lines and massive spans, and in other places looking engineered, like the ship that it was.

  Did it still contain the dust of the minds that had brought it here? Beacham had said none of the bones below them were less than a thousand years old.

  The screen vibrated again, and Rose drew in a breath.

  Two discrete motions on two separate axes?

  Rose felt that calm wave she was surfing begin to crumble. Idiotically, she raised her hand.

  "Uh," she stammered and fell silent.

  The overlays updated themselves again. That brain-bendingly large mass of alloy and columns and wings was not just tumbling... it was course correcting.

  It was moving with intent.

  "Commander," she said, but her throat was frozen. She grunted and shouted it out. "Commander!"

  Montagne's head swiveled, her eyes alert, sensing the change in her Nav officer. "Report!" she barked.

  Rose had to take a breath, but she got the words out.

  "Bogey inbound, Commander. It's that big one... it--" the words were thready, just more than a whisper. "It's following us."

  33

  “At least Newark stopped yappin’!”

  Dina swallowed her annoyance, listening to the Betty’s rude old engineer.

  On the other end of the line from the Betty, connected through the Toad’s comm systems, someone on the tram ‘laughed’. A deep booming sound, mixed with what sounded like the wheeze of fireplace bellows. Then the one called ‘Doug’ spoke.

  “We miss you too, Ben.” His deep voice quieted. “Don’t worry, Newark is coping. Having your voices back helped a lot. Thank you, pilot Rodriguez.”

  “Yeah,” Ben parroted back, “thank you, Rodriguez.”

  Dina felt her annoyance blow apart, hearing the gratitude and relief in the old engineer’s voice. She’d known other good men who hid their emotions behind quips and barbs, and she recognized that now.

  Don’t think about Doc Sanders, she told herself. And she didn’t
.

  “No problem, old man,” she responded in kind. “I’ll take care of your crew, you just concentrate on flying straight. Don’t put any dents on my ship when you dock, eh? I’m the one they send out to fix ‘em!”

  Ben laughed. “Yeah, I like her too,” he said, muffled, to someone in the room with him. That would be Captain Travis, she remembered.

  Dina let out her own muffled laugh, and ran her eyes across the displays in her small cockpit. A lot had happened in the last couple hours, she marvelled, but having a job to do let her push it all into short term storage.

  The Toad was rumbling comfortably around her. Dina would be running her long long and hard, but she’d done it before and she knew the craft could take it.

  She eyed the tram ahead. Less than half an hour and she’d be there.

  “More humans,” commented a nearly perfect artificial voice. Daisy and Gruber had called that one Salix. “Just what this system needs.”

  “Don’t be racist, you thorny Scarecrow,” Captain Travis teased. “A lot of us are just fine.”

  Under Travis’s voice, Dina heard Beacham shouting out numbers and question to engineer Gruber on another circuit.

  Sometimes it was hard for Dina to keep all the voices in the different places straight, but she was used to juggling reports. Only before this, the voices had all been human.

  The Toad was too far away to talk to Six directly now: all her tight beam systems were in use talking with the Betty, doing math or taking measurements.

  Dina didn’t interrupt. She kept the circuit open, both as a courtesy to the terrified crew on the tram and to hear familiar voices herself, as she called up the vid of her flyby with The Betty.

  She scrolled through the vid with her finger, focusing on the big window above the Betty’s bridge. There. She froze the image and watched as the computers cleaned it up.

  A shark floated in that window, staring out. No, not a fish, more like a whale.

  “This is gonna take getting used to,” she murmured.

  “Please repeat, Pilot Rodriguez,” called that deep voice from the Tram. Doug was the one in charge down there, keeping everyone calm.