by C. Gockel
Kenji’s eyelids ceased their fluttering, and his hazel eyes finally opened; in the bright sunlight they looked almost gold.
“No, I don’t hurt,” said Kenji, his voice and expression flat.
Noa smiled, not sure if the extra nanos had helped, but glad that he didn’t hurt. A lot of the Satos’ neighbors had disapproved of the family’s decision to add the extra nanos, and she’d been worried about it herself. Her mom said it was the “Luddeccean influence” affecting Noa’s reasoning. Her family was part of the fourth wave of settlers to Luddeccea, the “fourth families.” They weren’t part of the hard-core Luddeccean “first families” and “second families” that had migrated here to escape the coming Cyber Apocalypse and Alien Wars. It had been over four centuries since the first, primitive neural interfaces were designed and humans had begun exploring deep space. Neither of those conflicts had come to pass. Now, only the most fundamentalist Luddecceans didn’t receive the neural interface—interfaces might be forbidden by Luddeccean gospel, but then, so was birth control. Most Luddecceans practiced birth control, and neural interfaces were even more popular than that. Still, many of the Satos’ neighbors were against more drastic augmentation, like what had been done to Kenji. It would strip him of his “soul,” they argued.
Noa had worried about that, and that it might hurt. But it didn’t. Her smile broadened.
Kenji gasped. “You’re happy.”
Noa’s eyes widened. He’d read her expression! “Yes.” She hadn’t sent that feeling to him through the net—his nanos were too new, and it would be a while before he was sending and receiving feelings or data.
Kenji’s brow furrowed. “And you’re surprised … ” His eyes drifted down to her mouth. “And happy.”
“Yes!” Noa cried, squeezing his hand. “Are you?”
“Yes,” he whispered. And then he smiled. A little awkwardly, to be sure, but genuine. Kenji’s smiles were always genuine.
“I feel … ” he murmured. His hand tightened around hers. “Not alone.”
The wagon jerked to a stop, and Noa’s eyes bolted open. She heard shouts, and the roar of large engines, but not the distinctive whir of antigrav. She was at the destination; she’d fallen asleep and missed her proverbial stop.
Outside of the wagon someone shouted, “Detach that dumb lizzar and get that loaded up onto the dumper! Let’s toss those corpses and bury them so we can get inside and get warm!”
Noa’s heart stopped. So that was what they did with the dead. She heard the driver step down from the wagon, heard engines approaching, heard four loud squeals, and then the wagon was hoisted into the air. Creeping out from under her blanket to the side of the wagon, Noa peered down and gulped. She was thirty feet above a deep pit in the dark, rich earth. She lifted her gaze. Beyond the pit was a field of low hillocks covered in snow. Her heart sank as she realized the hillocks were graves. “Focus on the positive, Noa,” she reminded herself, and then realized there weren’t many positives to focus on. “You’re out of the camp … and being a first officer was boring you half to death. Stupid blue-green algae reports.”
“Did you hear that?” someone said. “I swear this place is infested with spirits.”
Her eyes went wide. Damn it, she’d spoken aloud. But then someone else said, “You’re starting to hear things. These are augments, they don’t have souls to be trapped in the afterlife. Human up!”
Noa’s fists clenched at that, but she focused on the terrain beyond the graves. Through the falling snow she made out low, forested mountains—the perfect hideout if she didn’t freeze to death.
She heard engines to her right; she looked and saw enormous bulldozers. The platform the wagon was on started to incline and the frozen bodies started to slip. Scrambling forward, Noa grabbed the front edge of the wagon. She had to stay on top of the bodies. Clinging to the cold metal, part of her brain screamed that this was it, that the dirt from the bulldozers was going to be on top of her before she made it out of the pit. “Shut up, brain,” she whispered. This time no one heard. The whirring of the engines and screeching of the dumper drowned her out. The wagon inclined more steeply and the back opened up. Her frozen companions started to slide into the open earth. Noa could hear shouts of surprise and alarm over the engine roars. Had they seen her? Tightening her grip, she waited for bullets … but none came … and the wagon stopped its incline. She looked down. The wagon was tilted at a steep angle, but there were still a few bodies at the bottom. Once she could have clung here like a xinbat for hours, but she was so weak. Her arms shook with cold and weariness. She heard more shouts, and then her fingers slipped. Noa crashed onto the bodies below her, sending a few more toppling into the pit, but didn’t topple in herself. She blinked, and found herself staring at a body of a woman whose mouth was frozen open in horror. Noa looked up fast, knowing that strange woman’s face would be embedded in her consciousness as long as she lived. Granted, her lifespan felt like it was getting shorter by the second. She heard shouting. Above her head she heard the whir of antigrav.
There were more shouts, and the sound of engines turning off. One of the graveyard workers shouted, “The alien invasion is here! Quick, to your stations.”
Noa’s brow furrowed. What the solar core? She was ranked high enough in the Galactic Fleet to be privy to the intel the public didn’t ordinarily hear: terrorist attacks that were thwarted and not thwarted, plagues that didn’t respond to standard antivirals, antibiotics, or radiation treatments; the latest in quantum drives, hidden jump stations, and all intel on extraterrestrial life. There were no aliens—well, not the kind that were sentient space-going beings or that would be anytime soon. There was plenty of blue-green algae, though. She’d had to fill out many a report on blue-green algae in her time in the fleet. The Galactic Republic was so concerned with not disrupting the “natural habitat” of any potentially sentient being that it went to great lengths to prove that even the bloody-universal-blue-green algae they found all over the galaxy didn’t represent a hive mind. In all the cases Noa had reviewed as first officer, it hadn’t. She felt the muscles in her neck tense and her skin heat in memory of the maze of bureaucracy she’d had to go through each time they came to a semi-habitable world and she, as Acting First Officer, had gotten the joy of compiling the reports from the scientists.
She took a deep breath. It didn’t matter what the crazy Luddecceans believed about aliens. She scrambled to the edge of the wagon and peered over. Not a human in sight. Hauling herself over the edge, she slid down to the dumper platform, and jumped to the ground. Overhead she heard cannon fire and more antigrav engines. Instead of an alien vessel, she saw a single civilian flight vehicle—the kind that could just get far enough out of atmosphere to traverse the globe rapidly or rendezvous with Time Gate 8. It was being rapidly pursued by one of the Luddeccean Guard’s ships.
Noa didn’t have time to wonder who it was. Ducking her head, she ran. She heard more cannon fire in the sky—so close the ground reverberated beneath her feet and her ears rang. But no one fired at her. She couldn’t have planned a more brilliant decoy strategy. Legs pumping as fast as they would go, breathing so hard it felt like her lungs were filled with shards of glass, she threaded her way between hillocks, and didn’t stop until her heart felt like it would beat out of her chest and she was well into the trees. Panting, legs shaking, she stooped and took out the bundle. She didn’t reach for food; she reached for the pliers.
Moments later, the bolt in her neural interface was discarded in the snow at her feet. With trembling fingers, she reached into the data port and found the damaged circuits. She snapped a few tiny levers back into place. And felt … nothing. She shook her head violently side to side, and her interface was reignited by the kinetic energy of the action. She felt the familiar buzz in her neurons, and she threw up her arms in joy. She had an urge to call her mother, the Fleet, anyone, but stifled it, remembering her signal might be detected. Instead, she set about searching the ethernet for proper
escape music, or maybe what she needed was a direct link to the mind of a footballer on Mars sprinting in low gravity; that would lift her heart. She settled on a channel for Mars’s premier stadium. Instead of a direct link to a footballer’s brain, she heard an announcement: “The Republic has failed to heed the Luddeccean warnings of alien invasion. We will be alone in our struggle, but as Luddecceans we will prevail!” Noa blinked. Madness, obviously. She searched for a channel on Venus she liked for its dance music and got the same announcer, this time warning, “Disconnect your neural interfaces lest they be compromised by alien influence.” Noa felt her heart tumble as she skittered through the stations. All were broadcasting the same announcer—all the off-world and planet-side channels had been compromised.
Swearing, and almost crying, she plucked the chip from the open bundle, put it into a spare slot, and tuned into the Luddeccean secure channel—as she should have done immediately, she scolded herself. She heard a different man’s voice, low and sonorous. “Team four has joined the pursuit, target will soon be down.”
Belatedly, Noa realized the chase above her head was still going on.
Another voice crackled in her brain. “Should we give up the search for the lost prisoner?”
Noa held her breath.
“Negative, do not abort the search. Commander Noa Sato is considered a high security risk and extremely dangerous.”
Noa’s hackles rose. “Curse of bloody competency,” she grumbled.
“We don’t have her individual port reading,” one of the voices said. “She must not have a locator.”
Noa did have a locator—a Fleet supplied one. If there were any Fleet close by, they would have detected her. But, of course, the Galactic Fleet had devices that scrambled signals and even location. They didn’t want shot-down personnel being trailed by terrorists. Unless they had a Fleet decoder—or until she tried to call for help—she would be as invisible as a phantom.
Another voice chimed in, “The screw jammed into her port should have a short-range locator. Try homing in on that.”
Noa’s eyes widened. She looked at the piece of polymer and metal at her feet. It was big enough to contain a locator chip. Picking it up, she hurled it through the air. And then, after stuffing some bread and snow in her mouth and letting it warm, she accessed some data her parents had made her download when she was just a girl. For an instant she worried that the ethernet bands used by her GPS would also have been hijacked—but a map seemingly etched in light appeared in the air before her—an illusion created by data as it interacted with her visual cortex. She saw her location as a single, red blinking light in a three-dimensional landscape. She concentrated—saved the data locally in case the GPS was hijacked, and then focused on finding the closest human habitation. There was a winter retreat town exactly twenty clicks away. She could make it … if she didn’t freeze to death.
Curling her hands against her stomach for warmth, she set off through the pines. Just a few minutes later, Noa heard a howl so loud, it made every hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She heard a crack, snow fell all around her, and she ducked. A branch as thick as her leg landed not six steps away. The howling continued. Noa looked up. Where she stood there was only a breeze, but beyond the shelter of the pines’ great trunks, the wind was whipping the tree tops like mad banners. She curled her hands more tightly against herself and kept going.
Over the Luddeccean channel, someone said, “Sato’s data bolt has been found. Fan out!”
Another voice cracked, “We can’t send a jump team from the cruisers. It’s too windy.”
“We’ve got men on the ground, divert them!” someone else said.
Nebulas. Scowling, Noa willed her legs to move faster—but they didn’t. She cursed under her breath. She had to have more reserves than this.
In the sky above she heard the whir of antigrav engines, the scream of cannons, and then the roar of exploding cannon fire as it collided with a ship. Noa closed her eyes and said a brief prayer for the unknown person overhead.
A Luddeccean voice rang through her mind, over the secure channel. “The Archangel is down!” Stopping in her tracks, Noa spun in the direction of the explosions, memories of her interrogation flashing back to her at the word, “Archangel.”
Someone on the channel gave coordinates for the crash site, and it seemed that every secure Luddeccean channel on the planet echoed the strange message. “I repeat: Archangel down, Archangel down!” The words exploded in her mind, and she felt a buzz in her head.
And then all voices went silent. Noa plugged the coordinates for the crash site into her neural interface’s calculator app. Could there be any survivors? Could she reach them in time? The answer blinked back at her before she could even finish the thought: it would take hours to reach the craft on foot at her pathetic excuse for a jog. She couldn’t help, or expect help, from any fallen angel.
Chapter Two
He fell.
The ground rushed toward him, he swept past the limbs of towering Ponderosa pines to the ground of dead needles and rough stone, and he didn’t feel pain. He was pain.
He opened his eyes and found himself flat on his back, bright lights burning his retinas, tubes in his mouth and nose. He heard the sound of rushing air, felt his lungs expand with a stab of agony, and then felt the air slowly seep back out. Dimly, he realized he was on a stretcher being pushed down a long, white hallway. Heat rushed down his cheeks.
“James,” a familiar voice said.
His gaze followed the sound, and he found himself staring into his father’s hazel eyes. They were red-rimmed with tears. His father never cried. “James! Stay with me,” his father said. He pulled James’s hand to his cheek. James blinked. His hand was pale next to his father’s darker Eurasian skin. His mother was dark, too. His father and mother had struggled so hard to make sure that their blonde-haired, blue-eyed child wouldn’t face any disadvantages. And he hadn’t. James had had a wonderful life. A perfect life of mental stimulation, meaningful work, good friends, and adventure. He wanted to say so, but the mask over his face prevented him from speaking.
He heard shouting, and the sound of many footsteps, rubber on linoleum, a beeping long and slow, and someone saying, “Sir, you must step away.”
“No,” his father said. “No!”
His father’s words echoed the feeling in James’s heart. He couldn’t swallow, but his body tried to. A gurgle rose up from the tubing, and the furious whir and beeping of machines became more furious still.
Blue-gloved hands wrapped around his father’s shoulders, pulling him away, and James was moving through the long white hallway alone, the shouts becoming muted. He closed his eyes. He hadn’t had a chance to say what he wanted to say—but the time capsule, his father would find it. Everything was in the time capsule … the world went dark behind his eyelids.
His eyes opened again. He was flat on his stomach instead of his back. Instead of pain he felt cold; it sizzled from his hands and the front of his legs and torso to his spine like an electric charge. He scrambled up, and for a moment he was suspended in a white blur. Trying to get his bearings, he spun in place. Was he in the hospital? But then why was it was cold? And there was no sound of beeping, footsteps, or the whine of antigrav stretchers—just a soft whisper.
His head ticked to the side, and the white blur came into focus. He found himself alone, outdoors—the ethernet strangely silent. He blinked. Beyond the snowflakes, there were trees. The whisper he heard was the sound of millions of snowflakes colliding with the pines, the ground, and his body.
Snow whispered.
He didn’t think he’d ever noticed that before.
He blinked snowflakes from his lashes. The trees were Ponderosa Pines, which meant he was on Earth near the accident he’d just been dreaming of … no, remembering. He took a deep breath, and instead of the scent of pine, a different fragrance like mint and lavender flooded his senses—Luddeccean pine. He shook his head, blinked again, and saw
that the trees he’d mistaken for Earth’s Ponderosas had needles in gradients of red and purple, and silvery-gray bark. The morphology was almost identical to Ponderosas, hence his confusion. Similar gravity and climate on Earth and this planet had produced some of the most dramatic examples of convergent evolution in the galaxy.
How had he gotten here? He brushed snow from his chest and his hand encountered a strap. His eyes slipped down to a belt slung over his shoulder to his side … a holster … for the rifle on his back. Why did he have a rifle on his back?
He looked down at the outline his body had made in the snow. He must have fallen. Again. He shuddered, feeling a crawling sensation under his skin. Over the whisper of snow came the loud whine of antigrav engines above the treetops, ten kilometers away, south by southwest, and approaching at a rate that would put them here in 3.5 minutes.
He shook his head and clutched his temples as the recent past jolted to the forefront of his consciousness. He’d come to Luddeccea from Earth to visit with his parents at their vacation cottage—just as they had done every year since he was ten years old. The rifle was for hunting, as was the camouflage he was wearing. This year he’d come early. The recently elected Luddeccean government was very conservative. He’d heard things over the ethernet that made him suspect that the planet might have become inhospitable for outsiders. He had come to Luddeccea a week before his family, just to make sure things were safe.
He winced—the expression didn’t go further than his eyes; his lips felt odd, stiff. The last thing he remembered was being in the shuttle he’d rented from the time gate … He’d had the proper authorizations; but, before he transmitted them, the Luddeccean Guard had begun firing. He blinked snow out of his eyes. His parents had said he was paranoid—things didn’t get dangerous that quickly. James was a historian; his specialty was twentieth century Earth. Cuba had become dangerous in the 1950s very quickly … and apparently Luddeccea was undergoing such a dangerous revolution just as quickly. He couldn’t remember ever being so unhappy to be right.