‘Use this to cut through the glass,’ he said. ‘Hold out your arms.’ Mason stretched his arms out in front of him and Dr Song cuffed him. He then rested the blade on top of the glass case and left.
‘Wait!’ Mason yelled with his hands raised as the door closed behind the doctor. As soon as the door closed, bulletproof glass shields descended over all the walls. The cuffs on his wrist clicked open and dropped to the floor.
Mason massaged his wrists, stepped closer to the case and knelt beside it. He cut along the corners of the glass case and the sides collapsed away from the slumber tube. He ran his fingers along the slumber tube and lifted a latch that had been expertly concealed on its side. The hard titanium casing slid off a clear plastic door. A keypad occupied the lower part of the door and Mason’s hand hesitated above it.
He didn’t want his daughter to wake up to this. He didn’t want her to see him, yet he didn’t know if he would live or die, and most of all, he didn’t want to have to see her die too.
Mason took a deep breath and punched in the pass code. A gas was released into the tube and hid Melody for a moment. With that dose of rousing gas, Melody would be awake in the next two minutes.
Once the gas was removed from the slumber tube, the door opened. Mason’s throat constricted, and his chest tightened when he saw his daughter’s face for the first time in almost six days.
Melody wriggled her nose in that way she did when she’d just woken up. Her hazel eyes were hidden behind half-opened lids. She smiled at him groggily.
‘Are we on the moon, Daddy?’ she asked. Her small, sleepy voice filled him with equal parts of joy and dread. What have I done? He lamented.
He pulled Melody into his arms and hugged her close. ‘We’re on the moon, Sweetheart.’
#
Mason watched Melody run around the playground in the children’s dormitory. It was a quaint place with moon grass, bioengineered blossoms, and an artificial rainbow reigned above it. She was playing with three other children and appeared to be having the time of her life. Her glee warmed his heart; her dream had come true, at least for the moment.
The nurse had told him she was thriving and that her asthma could be handled. She’d told him that most of the damage would have been done en route to the moon, but it had been mitigated by the tube. She’d approved of his ingenuity with a nod.
‘We don’t have much time,’ Dr Song reminded him. He had almost forgotten that the doctor was standing right next to him. He was grateful to him for letting him see his daughter before his hearing. He hadn’t expected him to say yes but it turned out the doctor wasn’t as heartless as he had imagined him to be.
Mason took a step towards his daughter, but his courage failed him. He didn’t want to say goodbye to his daughter, and he knew this could be the last time he saw her. He cowered and turned to leave but Dr Song blocked his path. He said nothing to him, but Mason got the message loud and clear: say goodbye to your daughter. Fate must have connived with Dr Song because Melody spotted Mason and shrieked with joy as she ran to him. He poised his arms to receive her and she fell into his embrace.
Holding Melody in his arms, close to his heart, made it all worth it. Seeing the glow in her hazel eyes shattered his fears and left him light and peaceful.
‘Where have you been, Daddy?’
‘I’ve been working, Princess,’ he said.
‘Has Uncle Gary been taking good care of you?’
He nudged his daughter out of the hug and grinned at her.
‘He’s come to see me every day. He draws with me,’ Melody answered. She swung her hips side to side as she twirled her left index finger in her curly hair. Mason pulled his daughter back into his arms. He wished he could thank Gary before he went in for his hearing, but he’d already asked too much of Dr Song. He consoled himself with thoughts of a reunion with Gary sometime in the future.
Dr Song cleared his throat. It was time.
‘I have to go back to work, Melody. You’ll be a good girl and listen to your Uncle Gary, won’t you?’ he said, a lump solidifying in his throat. He clenched his jaw and willed himself not to cry.
Melody nodded. ‘What happened to your eye, Daddy?’ she pointed at his eye patch.
‘My eye is tired sweetie. I have to let it rest for a bit.’
‘When are you coming back?’ Her innocent stare threatened to be his undoing.
He tilted his head at Dr Song and considered his answer for a short while. ‘I’ll be back very soon.’
He rose to his feet and nodded at Dr Song. Melody waved goodbye and ran back to play with her new friends. Mason wondered if she would have left so easily if she knew she might never see him again.
‘Do you think they’ll expel me?’ Mason asked the doctor.
‘I don’t know. There’s more to consider in your case: you’re an Avery and, I think, the little girl changes things,’ Dr Song opined. ‘Was it worth it?’
Mason assumed he was referring to his decision to bring his daughter to the Far Side. ‘I’d do it again.’ He held his arms out and the doctor cuffed him. The two men marched off to the Senate room where Mason would learn his fate.
Gabriella Muwanga has always been fascinated by science and the fantastical. She loves to transport her readers to high-tech futures where passion and intelligence place galaxies within one’s reach, and all the way to magical realms where the sunlight never dims into dark and gravity is a suggestion. She is a Ugandan-American who lives and writes in Baltimore, Maryland.
Drift-Flux
Wole Talabi
In space, no one can hear your ship explode.
But they can watch.
Orshio Akume, captain of the Igodo, sat silently in the pilot module of the control deck, watching a mining ship cleave in two. A sudden release of energy violently ate its way out of the ship. A burst of azure light popped into the space ahead of the Igodo, despite the distance. It receded, quickly shifted to aquamarine, then turquoise, and then nothing.
A bomb. It had to have been a bomb.
The furrows between Orshio’s eyes deepened as his brows drew down and his eyes narrowed, compressing the vertical tribal marking keloid that ran from his hairline to his nose.
The ship was an old one, at least ten times the size of the Igodo, with the unmistakable bright red and blue insignia of the Confederacy emblazoned across it from end to end. There were only a few giant mining ships left operating in the Belt. The last remnants of the first Martian development schemes by the Confederacy and the only ones still in service that were not built by Transhuman Federation Engineers.
The clumsy old giants needed the size primarily to store large quantities of fuel and propellant, still completely enslaved to Newton’s third law and Tsiolkovsky’s equation. Cargo was attached and hauled using spars and rigging, enwombed in lightweight programmable material mesh and insulation to protect fragile items and ward off hot backlighting from the fusion drive. Modern Transhuman Federation mining ships like the Igodo used the Adadevoh drive to couple to the zero-point and draw vacuum energy so they didn’t have any of those problems. They still hauled their cargo using rigging though. Not that the Igodo presently carried any cargo.
‘What the hell just happened out there?’
Orshio glanced back to see his engineer floating into the control deck. Lien-Ådel was a young, tall, muscled and well-proportioned woman with brown eyes and short black hair greying slightly at the crown and temples as though her front half was aging faster than her back. It was impossible to tell but beneath her solid frame, were genetically altered lungs that allowed her function on only a fraction of the oxygen required by the average unmodified human, nanoparticle gravcines in her blood to inhibit loss of consciousness, and a skeleton modified for increased bone density. Handy, for unscheduled extravehicular repairs.
She pushed against the deck wall with her right foot and threw her six-foot and four-inch tall frame into the chair beside him, swiping furiously at the space in front of her
to draw up trajectory data and estimate the likelihood of their being caught in a debris field. Orshio had already visually assessed the situation and decided they were in no reasonable danger, the explosion wasn’t nearly big enough or close enough, but Lien-Ådel was the kind of person that liked to see every single piece of data available before making her decisions. The light from the console illuminated her face, highlighting the small nose that sat symmetrically between two finely sculpted cheekbones.
‘Ship blew up.’ Orshio jutted his bearded chin at the magnified image of the slowly disintegrating ship set against the unforgiving blackness of space on the viewscreen, like some kind perverse modern art display. ‘I’ve seen accidents before. Structural failures, overheating cores, explosive decouplings, but none of them looked like that. That was a plasma bomb. Had to be. I’d bet my collection of original Majek Fashek vinyls on it.’
Lien-Ådel kept swiping as she replied, ‘Well, it doesn’t look like there is going to be much of a debris field. Must have been a targeted, controlled explosion.’
Orshio leaned back in his seat. ‘Whoever set it off must have been trying not to damage the cargo. Maybe they’re pirates...’ he scratched his chin, ‘...or something.’
‘There haven’t been pirates in the inner belt for years, Orshio. Besides, no one is swooping in to loot the cargo. I don’t like this. We should call it in to Mars Station ahead of us. Make a report.’
Orshio rolled his eyes. He didn’t dislike Lien-Ådel per se, he just found her unbearably predictable. Despite her undeniable creativity in keeping the ship’s performance optimal, she was still incredibly regimented in her thinking. For every decision presented to her, she only ever had three responses in order of preference: one, follow the rules; two, defer the decision to a higher authority; or three, have no opinion on the matter. And now, she was already advocating her second favourite response even though they still weren’t exactly sure what they were looking at.
Lien-Ådel in turn did not like Orshio’s impulsive attitude and flamboyant style but she worked well with him anyway because her life depended on his natural creativity and artificially enhanced reflexes.
He was heavily tattooed, an elaborate pattern of images, lines, and whorls, that ran all over his dark skin and told the story of his ancestors as far back as his family records detailed. The tattoos, done in late afromysterics style, covered his right arm from shoulder to finger tips. If his other arm wasn’t fully bionic and made of expensive bioplasmium, it would probably have borne the same markings. He wore his black and grey hair in short dreadlocks and tied a band of red and black cloth around his hairline, covering the tip of the vertical scar that marked him as a true-born son of the Idoma people—beneath which sat the neuralink chip that allowed him to control his bioplasmium arm and the dozen other embedded machines that augmented his body. His entire appearance was a piece of art dedicated to the spirits of his ancestors, the Alekwu.
‘I think the first thing we should do is see if there are any survivors, don’t you think?’ he asked as he sat up in his chair. ‘Besides, we’re technically closer to Ceres station.’
Lien-Ådel nodded, ignoring the sugar-coated reprimand, and swiped away the Igodo’s diagnostic projection before requesting the ship’s AI to send a direct message on the Belt’s short-range open channel and scan all other open channels for chatter regarding what happened.
Orshio reached forward and pulled up the public Transhuman Federation shipping schedules and trajectories from their database. The data indicated that the ship that was now mostly just two large pieces of wreckage ahead of them was called the Freedom Queen. A rugged hauler for fluids and fine dusts, transporting impure Helium-3 scooped from Jupiter’s atmosphere to Independence Station, the last Confederacy settlement on Mars. She was essentially a gigantic cylindrical gas tank with a nuclear energy tube running through her long axis. Well, at least she used to be.
‘Igodo has established a link with the broken ship’s AI. No signs of life. I think you’ll want to take a look at its report.’ Lien-Ådel flicked her fingers to expand a light display projection then swiped it left. It drifted through the space between them and settled in front of Orshio.
He tilted his head to the side slightly and raised an eyebrow. ‘This says all crew life signals from Freedom Queen stopped streaming over twenty minutes ago. Before the explosion.’
Lien-Ådel blinked. ‘Yes. So now I’m wondering... where could the crew have gone?’
Orshio folded his arms in front of him. That was a good question. Almost as good a question as to why anyone would choose to attack a confederate hauler in near-space range only a few minutes after the Igodo completed its publicly scheduled uncoupling from the zero-point, came out of drift-flux and switched to auxiliary for a slow, controlled nuclear burn to Mars station. Pirates would probably have had better timing.
Suddenly, the viewscreen of the Igodo lit up as a multicoloured kaleidoscope of numbers and data overlaid it. The AI informed them that they were receiving a sudden and persistent communication packet. It had the certified data signature of the Transhuman Federation and seemed to be originating from Ceres station.
Orshio said, ‘Well bad news certainly travels fast out here, doesn’t it?’
Lien-Ådel swiped in front of her to accept the transmission. The flowing rivers of colourful data across the screen coalesced into an image of a very serious man in a very serious Transhuman Federation uniform of pure black with a gold trim mandarin collar. The uniform was blacker than Orshio’s ebony skin but blended perfectly against the man’s own shiny black complexion. It took a few seconds for Orshio to realise he had a goatee. His eyes were a stark white. The officer looked like he’d materialised from the star-sprinkled abyssal darkness of unforgiving space beyond the ship and his eyes were a binary star. Across the breast of his uniform, was a lenticular pin shaped like an ancient Zulu shield, complete with two spears crossed behind it. Its smooth black and white surface displayed the yin-and-yang, stretched to accommodate the unusual shape. Orshio had never seen anyone wearing the official Federation security corps chief uniform before.
‘This is Ceres station security Chief Mwanja Mukisa calling Federation shipping vessel Igodo. We have detected a catastrophic failure of the Confederate hauler Freedom Queen a few thousand kilometres from your scheduled flight path. Change course immediately and report to Ceres station. Do not transmit any message to anyone until your report has been formally received at Ceres Station. I repeat, change course and report to Ceres station. Immediately. Do not transmit to any other party.’
The image disappeared.
‘Well, I guess you’re going to get a chance to make that report after all,’ Orshio quipped.
Lien-Ådel’s voice went low and hoarse, ‘Does that message imply what I think it does?’
Orshio nodded. Along the surface of his bioplasmium arm, beneath his shirt, faint red lines writhed as if alive, responding to tension from his increased stress levels. He flexed the arm to ease it and thought down his rising cortisol levels.
‘That was not a request, it was an order,’ Lien-Ådel’s face scrunched up as she spoke, as if she was still trying to process the sentence, hoping desperately that he would contradict the obvious.
Orshio kept inspecting the screen. ‘Yes. Definitely an order,’ he confirmed.
‘But if they don’t want us to contact anyone, not even the supply station, then that means they probably don’t think it was an accident or pirates. They probably think it was-’
‘-a terrorist attack.’ Orshio finished the sentence for her.
They turned away from the viewscreen at the same time and saw the same thing in each other’s eyes.
They had heard rumours in the outer belt, of anti-federation rebels and old confederate militias attacking Federation mining camps and ships. Nothing major, but worrying enough for them to now be concerned.
‘I don’t know anyone at Ceres station. I’m not sure I want to get involved in all
this. We could just make a run for it. Enter drift-flux again and be back to Earth in an hour or so. Sort it all out when we get there,’ Orshio said.
Lien-Ådel recoiled, then snapped back to place, leaning toward him. ‘First of all, we can’t disobey a direct order from a Federation security corps official. Second...’ She paused to exhale, ‘Drift-flux this far into the solar system? Through the Belt? We’d never make it out alive! And even if we did, we’d be making ourselves look guilty as sin in the process.’
He nodded. ‘You’re right. You’re right. Sorry. Bad idea.’
‘Quantifiably terrible.’
Lien-Ådel kept her palms flat against her thighs as Orshio carefully adjusted the nuclear reaction control system, pulling alongside the mooring cable that was reaching out to them from the largest asteroid in the inner solar system like a possessed umbilical cord. She hated docking, or any transitions. She was much happier when they were moving steadily, the cold and dark ocean of space swelling and sweeping against the hull of the Igodo. She sank further into her chair every time Orshio fired a short burst of diverted nuclear thrust, nudging the Igodo into position.
Most of Ceres station lay below the surface, except for the army of cephalopodan mooring cables that held the hundred or so ships that transited through every day. From above, the network of pipelines, cables, equipment, and rigging, that kept Ceres’s subterranean areas functioning looked like a glowing technological infection eating its way into the heart of the asteroid, their casings and surfaces lined with bright photovoltaic cells to capture the sunlight that powered their maintenance bots. Man-made parasites, burning alone in the vastness of the dark that the city beneath may thrive.
When the cable had secured the Igodo and all its interlocking sections mated to make a solid strut, Lien-Ådel and Orshio unbuckled themselves and floated leisurely to the airlock. They moved with tense slowness as they transferred to the orbital elevator.
AfroSFv3 Page 11