“I have plans.” Gustar paused. “I want you to be one of us. I need someone who can get the engines under my control. That was the only thing I didn’t have planned when I got on board. Then I saw you, and my wishes were answered. An engine man.”
“I trained on relativistic drives, long-range hyperspace propulsion. This thing only has fusion. Short solar system jaunts, maybe near colonies.”
“In others words, a piece of cake for you.”
“If it’ll get me someplace I can breathe real air and not have to listen to the damn engines, I’m in.”
“Welcome aboard, brother,” Gustar said, getting up.
They shook hands the secret way. Dean watched Gustar walk away, back to the death row cells in the forward bays.
Twenty Years, Three Days, Six Hours Later
There was a small monitor in each cell. It provided a real-time visual of the outside space. Civil liberties activists had lobbied for the devices, arguing the screens humanized the prison transport system.
Dean watched, hearing the squeaky wheels of Galvéz’s chair approach.
“Buenos días,” the guard greeted.
“Buenos días,” Dean replied.
“Habla muy bien en español,” Galvéz complimented.
“I speak it okay,” Dean replied. “You been to Quaoar before?”
“Only to transfer prisoners. It is no tourist destination. It is a ball of ice, amigo, floating in a debris field with the rest of the crap that never made the cut to being part of a planet. It is dark all the time.”
Dean watched his video screen. A thin streak of light shot across it.
“Meteor?” he asked.
“Remains launch,” Galvéz replied.
“On its way to Valhalla,” Dean surmised. Human remains were frequently transported to Valhalla, commonly called the tenth planet. The remains were either jettisoned from ships or placed in capsules on guided rockets and fired towards the planet.
Dean remembered Allison’s internment there. She and the other Estrella victims, their lead coffins placed on the icy surface. The cemetery crew working the Valhalla shift had carefully arranged the boxes on a sculpted mound. Dean remembered the first nine measures of Beethoven’s Andante from Sonata 25 playing as the metal crypt was placed on the glair.
“My whole family is on Valhalla,” Dean commented casually. “My sister. My father—he died on a mapping mission. My mother—she died when an atmospheric conversion unit exploded. They all got a hero’s funeral. It’s an efficient ritual. A place to put bodies without polluting space with our debris. And it keeps the population back home happy not knowing exactly how many people died setting up those profitable colonies.”
The guard was silent and only the hum of the engines filled the air. The other prisoners in the bay were sleeping or didn’t care to make any noise.
“Yep, no normal people die in space,” Dean remarked coldly. “Only saints and the damned.”
Galvéz made the sign of the Cross with a shriveled hand, as best he could, over his sunken chest. “You should be careful what you say about the dead,” he warned.
“The dead never talk back,” Dean replied. “Trust me. I’ve been listening for years.”
Twenty Years, Three Days, Sixteen Hours Later
Dean sat out again during the next recreation hour. He didn’t see the point in maintaining muscle mass. He would never be the strongest; even in artificial gravity, his musculature and bone structure would eventually start to whittle down. His skeleton would warp, his limbs shorten.
Gustar, soaked in sweat from a vigorous work out, sat next to him.
“I heard you were on the Estrella,” Gustar said solemnly. “I didn’t know that.”
“My sister died. They say she didn’t suffer.”
“You don’t believe them.”
“Governments live off telling us what they want us to want to hear. How often does the truth fall into that category?” Dean fidgeted. “I saw the particle that compromised the hull. It was beautiful. It was my birthday, and the thing sparkled like a candle lit in space itself, just for me.”
He paused, swallowing and clearing his ears. “My sister had been the center of attention all morning, getting ready for her first trip off the main ship. I was pissed. It was my birthday and everyone was fussing over her. How brilliant she was, how far she was going to go in life. I made a birthday wish: I wished that she would die. Then I could have all the attention and never have to share anything with her ever again. What kind of god answers a prayer like that?”
“The kind of god a man creates to grant such prayers. We get the god we deserve, engineer. That’s why I don’t believe in one. It keeps me safe from my own wishes.”
“By the way, no one kills the guard, Galvéz,” Dean said abruptly. “That’s part of my payment in your scheme.”
“The platypus? Why protect him?”
“He’s like us. The people who matter regard his life as nothing. He has spent lifetimes at the edge of nothingness.”
“He’s your problem, then,” Gustar replied. “I’ll come back and get you when the time comes. By then, we should have control of the bridge. I’ll spring you and you run the damned engines until we get to our rendezvous point. Understood?”
Gustar left, wary of being seen talking to anyone for too long.
Dean leaned back, feeling the vibrations of the engines in the walls. He looked at the monitor. It was empty space, the mind-numbing emptiness that no one on Earth could possibly fathom.
Somewhere out there his family lay, frozen in the ice on Valhalla. He remembered his fourth grade astronomy. 2003UB313, commonly called Valhalla. The planet’s discovers had tried to name it Xena or Planet X, as in the Roman numeral for ten. But references to twentieth-century television characters faded centuries later, quickly replaced by the name the planet’s purpose suggested.
Valhalla was the last stop on the way out of the solar system and the first stop on the way in. Ships departing for deep space fire up their relativistic engines; those arriving cut back to less than relativistic speeds. It was like an old wake zone back on Earth.
Those who die in space are buried on Valhalla, hence the colloquial name. They are placed in lead-lined burial chambers and sent to the surface, where transient cemetery crews attend to placing boxes and marking graves at the edge of the solar system, among the gravitationally-collected debris of creation.
It had been so romantically taught—almost to encourage children to imagine a glorious burial there and sacrificing their lives for the exploration of space. Dean had never bought into it. Perhaps that was why he never applied himself to his studies the way Allison did.
He remembered seeing one of the inspirations for Valhalla on a field trip to Earth when he was thirteen. Traveling in an old bus on a tour of Cape Kennedy, they passed by a large mound of dirt covered with grass to make it look inconspicuous. His mother had told him what it was even when the tour guide failed to.
“That’s the remains of the Challenger craft,” she said quietly. “It exploded shortly after liftoff, late in the twentieth century. They used huge rockets to launch in those days.”
Dean had looked coldly at her. “More people died on the Estrella,” he had said. “I know. I was there.”
More people had also died at his own hands during the bank robbery. They would never be buried at Cape Kennedy or Valhalla.
He walked back to his cell early. Galvéz locked him in.
Sleep took Dean, plunging him into the old nightmares. The distant stars became Allison’s blue eyes. He missed her more than he would permit himself to acknowledge. In his dreams, she greeted him as she had in life.
Allison was always the first to say hello when he came home. She would rap her soft knuckle playfully on his forehead. Knock! Knock! Dean, are you home?
Then the knocking seemed to come from outside, from outside the cell—from outside the ship. Allison rapping on the hull, begging to be let back in. Crying to be rel
eased from the cold.
Twenty Years, Three Days, Twenty-Three Hours Later
There was a wild rapping on the walls. Men’s voices were joined in a frantic chorus.
Dean roused uneasily from his nightmares.
Galvéz was wheeling by quickly, taking up defensive positions with two other guards. Their weapons were drawn; their faces grim and gray like the metal skin of the ship—cold, colorless, and made to bear stress.
Dean pressed his face to the bars of the little window in the door of his cell. “¿Qué ha sucedido?” he asked. What has happened?
“Riot,” Galvéz reported.
“So Gustar went for it.”
“You knew?” There was a taste of betrayal in the old man’s voice.
“He talked big,” Dean replied, “but you never know with a guy like him.”
“They are being fought back,” the guard told him. “Away from the bridge. Most of your friends are dead, señor. We are over Enceladus now. Only ice volcanoes down there.”
The noises grew louder. Dean could hear the peculiar report of line-threaded shells, little charges attached to cords. The tow weapons allowed aimed shots of energy without risking compromising the internal walls of the vessel.
“Gustar will have a plan,” Dean said. “I doubt he wants to hit the Kuiper Belt without his shadow crew up and running.”
“What do you not understand?” Galvéz asked. “There is nowhere to go.”
“Amigo,” Dean replied, “Some of us were going nowhere to begin with.”
Twenty Years, Four Days, Four Hours Later
Galvéz and the two other guards huddled together like a tiny ancient phalanx set accidentally in space. The noise outside was unnerving. The ship rattled with the sound of combat. Screams and yells and pounding filtered through the barrier doors.
Dean checked his video monitor. They had passed Saturn; Neptune was barely visible as an unfaltering star in the sky, distant in its orbit.
The fight is taking too long, Dean thought. We are picking up speed. The captain is hurrying to get to Quaoar.
He closed his eyes and the stars became Allison’s eyes again. Begging him to come outside and rescue her. To save her from his wish.
“Your friends will not capture the bridge,” Galvéz said. “It is compartmentalized within the ship.”
The banging and knocking within the walls was increasing. Dean felt uneasy. It did not sound like the herald of liberation, but the staccato moaning of the besieged.
He could hear Gustar just the other side of the door, calling out a minor victory cry. The metal door began to lift, clicking into an open position.
Knock! Knock! Dean heard Allison say, buried deep inside his mind. Is Dean home?
Why did I choose that moment to wish her dead? he wondered, watching his monitor aimlessly.
Why does she choose now to haunt me?
Twenty Years, Four Days, Five Hours Later
The Resolution passed Pluto, a little bone-ivory marble in a sea of velvety blackness, three small dots just visible around it, awkwardly shepherded by what had once been catalogued as a distant planet.
Gustar, bloodied and limping, tumbled into the lifer bay. Ten other men accompanied him, most having fared worse than he had.
The other lifers clamored forward, demanding to be released.
Gustar handed a small box to a man next to him. “Figure out which button does what,” he ordered. “I want the engineer out first. We need him to slow this bitch down.”
The rioters moved forward on a signal from Gustar. Many hands to one beast.
Fresher and better armed, the guards moved quickly. Galvéz directed targeted shots from his wheelchair with a tow weapon equipped to respond to nerve impulses from within his withered arms. His shots were unexpectedly accurate. Four rioters fell dead to the floor before his lethality was recognized.
Gustar staggered towards Dean’s cell. He grabbed the box back from his appointed right-hand man. The bald man bled from multiple wounds to his arms and chest.
Trench knife wounds, Dean noted.
Bladed weapons had enjoyed a comeback as space-faring opened up. The fear of internal hull breach dissuaded most energy- or projectile-based armaments.
The rioters were tiring and becoming demoralized. Dean sensed there had been heavy casualties.
“We can’t get onto the damned bridge,” Gustar yelled out, trying to decipher the electronic box he held.
“The bridge is contained in what amounts to being a cocoon. It is nearly impervious. If we can get to the engines, maybe we’ll have some bargaining power.”
The guards pulled out their knives as the rioters moved forward. There was fierce hand-to-hand combat, but the guards had trained together and offered a coordinated defense against weakened and disorganized adversaries. Three more rioters fell, blood beginning to pool on the black metal floor.
Galvéz was left with clear shots, picking off two more.
The remaining rioter was outflanked and one guard gutted him like an unwanted fish. Moving in, the guards slit the throats of everyone on the floor.
Coup de grâce, Dean noted sourly.
Gustar frantically pushed buttons. Dean heard cell doors in the adjacent bay open, the jubilant cries of the over-eager echoing off the metal walls.
Galvéz motioned the other guards forward to assist their cohorts in quelling the insurgency in the adjacent cell bay. He shot Dean an ugly glance as he left. “You’ll get death row now,” he said as he slid between the bays. The doors came crashing down again, leaving Gustar frozen against the wall. He pushed one button on the box, calculating the schematic.
Dean’s cell door opened.
Gustar slid down, blood rupturing from wounds he did not even know he had. Red gore oozed between his fingers.
“We’re still in the game,” Gustar said.
Dean shook his head. “No. They’ll contain the next cell block soon, and we can’t access engineering from here.” He grimaced. “I’m not going to death row for your failures.”
Gustar was too wounded to reply. He gripped the tow weapon in his hands. “You have another plan?”
“There’s an escape pod in this bay for emergency evacuation. It was designed with just enough room for the guards—three people. It won’t go far, but it will get us somewhere other than here.”
“It’s too early for my rendezvous ship, and an escape pod doesn’t have the ability to stay in orbit,” Gustar objected.
“We’ll get another ride to them. Something we can launch when the time is right.”
“Where do we get that from, engineer?”
“Valhalla.”
“Nothing but dead people there.”
“Not entirely. The cemetery has a small short-range ship stationed there, used for near-space access to pick up coffins from passing ships. They call them Valkyries because someone won a ‘What-to-name-them’ contest. Real imagination at work there.” Dean smiled, trusting in his own plan. “My whole family is down there—I’m well acquainted with how Valhalla works. We can launch the ship and meet your rendezvous when it passes.”
“Better than what awaits us on Quaoar,” Gustar said weakly.
Twenty Years, Four Days, Six Hours Later
Dean dragged Gustar into the escape pod.
He had not trained on this particular model but was familiar enough with the class of craft to figure out how to disengage it and chart a course. He got them off the damned prison ship.
Gustar clutched his short-range weapon and closed his eyes as they fell away from the belly of the Resolution. Dean watched as the course he plotted appeared as a yellow line on a view screen; a white line, indicating their actual course, tracked it faithfully.
“Two hours,” he said. “Two hours and we’re on a Valkyrie. Three hours and we’re being picked up by your contact.”
Gustar was silent. His weapon slid from his hands, discharging the short-range charge. It slammed into the control panel behind him.
“Fuck!” Dean screamed, jumping up. He raced over to the panel, fire extinguisher in hand. “What the hell are you doing?”
There was no fire, and the panel appeared only cosmetically damaged.
He turned to Gustar. The bald man’s head pivoted in an unnatural way. His chest did not rise and fall with the rhythms of inhalation and exhalation.
Blood soaked his chair.
“Crap,” Dean assessed, pushing the dead man’s face away from him.
Now he had to hope he’d recognize his ride when it came by.
Twenty years, Four Days, Seven Hours Later
An hour later, Dean noted the way the white line deviated from the yellow. He activated the navigation system, attempting to correct the wayward course.
The computer examined the pod’s operations. Navigation had been damaged; the stray weapon discharge had upset the gimbals and dislodged wiring. Worse, it had vented oxygen, diminishing the available breathable air. Dean had an hour of oxygen left.
He was glad Gustar had died early and was no longer using any portion of the tiny atmosphere.
The deviation in course was critical. At the trajectory it was tracking, the pod was bound for open space. Dean sat beneath the panel, attempting to locate the damaged components. If he could correct the physical damage, there was a chance he could correct the course.
He worked frantically, realizing the pod offered little in the way of emergency repair supplies. Pods weren’t required to carry much in tools and extra parts. Undoubtedly it would take someone else’s future tragedy to correct that oversight.
The sweat poured off him as he attempted to reconnect frayed wiring without electrocuting himself. His breathing became shallow as the air diminished.
He could hear little fragments of ice knock against the outside of the ship, glancing off the reactive hull. It sounded like rain falling in space. He could see Valhalla, its icy surface a dimly lit diamond set against the blackness of space.
The knocking continued.
The ghosts want in.
“Stop it!” he yelled at himself, wrestling with the visions. He had to keep her out of his thoughts. He had to concentrate on the repairs.
He told himself that oxygen deprivation and stress were taking their toll. He looked out at the immortal expanse of space. Valhalla emitted an odd blue tinge the closer he came to it.
Pressure Suite - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3 Page 6