by Baen Books
Patel remained on his knees, eyes on the bear. “No, Peter. Thirteen hundred miles in an open boat? Impossible in my condition. And Attu was never for me, but for you. For all of you.”
Pete’s heart swelled near bursting. “Bullshit! Crawl into this damn boat!”
Patel didn’t budge. “This is this beast’s home. You and I both know it can negotiate that four hundred foot slope in a few bounds. The toboggan ride is no way to outrun it.”
A growl rumbled in the bear’s throat, its ears flattened against its skull.
“Well, we better do something to outrun it, because smacking it with a plastic paddle won’t be worth the effort.”
Patel inched his uninjured left leg until his foot rested against the bow of the perched raft. “Peter, you don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun me.”
Patel shifted his weight, drew back his leg, and grunted through clenched teeth as he kicked the raft’s bow.
At the abrupt movement, the bear roared and charged.
“No!” Pete grabbed for Patel’s foot, and fell face first in the backsliding raft. The inflatable teetered on the precipice, then plunged down into the fog.
Tossing and prone in the raft, Pete heard a snarl, then screams. The raft struck a boulder, flew, then landed hard, and lightning flashed behind Pete’s eyes.
The raft’s floor undulated, its fabric ice cold against Pete’s cheek. He struggled to his knees, peered over the inflated gunwale and realized that the raft rocked in the slow swells eighty feet seaward of the surf line.
The bear paced back and forth on the narrow beach, eyes on Pete, snout and forepaws bloody, as it weighed the effort of swimming after more meat.
Of Patel, his blood was the only sign.
Pete knelt in the raft, the paddle across his thighs, turned his face to the low, gray clouds, and screamed. The rain poured down again and diluted his tears as they coursed down his cheeks.
After a time, the distance between the drifting raft and the shore grew until the bear lost interest.
Pete inspected his new world, an oval of rubberized canvas within which he could barely lie down. The wild ride had emptied the raft of stockpiled supplies, electronics, and equipment. Folded in his breast pocket was a sodden but serviceable paper Alaska highway map. Pockets in the raft’s main tube yielded fishing line and hooks, a knife, a sea anchor, a sail that doubled as a sunshade, an inflatable chamber in which fresh water could be distilled, a waterproof magnetic compass, and a foldable hat.
Too spent for anger, too weary for reason, too overwhelmed by the odds, he laughed. If Patel had left Pete any other legacy than fishhooks it was memories that made Pete laugh. And Attu. Patel had told Pete “Only Attu matters,” and had sacrificed more of a life and a fortune than most people ever knew to get Pete there.
Pete consulted his crappy map, tugged on the hat, and paddled west.
He couldn’t remember how many days it had been since he had caught a fish, or seen the sun. The only commodities he possessed in abundance were fresh water from condensation of the eternal fog, and loneliness.
Forced to shun even meager indications of human presence he had encountered on his journey, the last excitement he had felt had been the sight of the distant red glow of an active volcano, somewhere, he calculated from his map, around the central portion of the Eastern Aleutians. When he had paddled toward the glow, and a welcome sleep on dry land, the acrid fumes rolling down the mountain’s slopes had blistered his skin, seared his lungs, and driven him back into the cold night, coughing blood.
The Aleutians weren’t hell, but they were one flight up.
Every paddle stroke now deepened his despair. Days before, according to his tattered map, he had passed Kiska Island, and entered the final leg of his journey, two hundred miles of open water that separated Kiska from Attu. The slightest misjudgment of current, wind, or distance multiplied over two hundred miles would condemn him to miss his target in the endless fog and sail to oblivion in the vastness of the Bering Sea or the North Pacific.
By his reckoning, he should have reached Attu before now. He strained his eyes but the fog remained featureless.
Then he heard it. Not even a whisper, at first. Then unmistakable. Breaking surf.
He paddled toward the sound as muscles shrunken by malnourishment trembled, rejuvenated.
And then it was there, a great, dark bulk materializing out of the mist. He leapt ashore in the freezing shallows and hauled the raft out onto a rocky beach. The raft’s main tube tore on a rock, but what would have been a mortal wound an hour before barely slowed his step.
He danced, foot-to-foot in the sand, to the skirl of shore birds invisible in the mist, while he held the paddle above his head in both hands and pumped it up and down like a trophy. “Hooooo! Hooooo!”
He sat in the sand, caught his breath, then interred his faithful canvas companion between boulders above the high tide line. Then he set out to discover Attu’s secrets. A short climb over rock and moss gave way to a plain swept by bitter north wind. Within yards he encountered signs of human habitation.
Tilted, crumbled pavement that had been an airstrip, buildings rusted to collapse. Not a tree or a sign of animate life except the skirling birds. He crisscrossed the tiny island for hours, until Arctic twilight deepened. The roaring wind strengthened so that he had to lean into it to walk, holding the tattered foldable hat against his head, until the wind snatched that last defense against the elements from him and carried it away.
He found a sheltered angle of roofless brick walls and huddled in a stunned ball in its wind shadow.
Patel had sacrificed his life to deliver him to this ruin? It had all been some cosmic fraud?
The prospect of a thousand years imprisoned here made him weep. Finally the wind’s ceaseless howl wore him down into sleep.
“Hey, man!”
Simultaneously a light in Pete’s eyes, a hand on his shoulder, and a voice woke Pete in the windless subarctic morning twilight. He crabbed backward across jumbled bricks, felt for the paddle, crouched, and raised it like a club.
“Easy there, Robinson Crusoe!” The person behind the light lowered it and backed away, her empty palm out.
Pete blinked. “Who are you?”
The woman, lithe and small and tidy in an azure windbreaker and windproof trousers, extended her right hand. “Laura.”
Pete took her hand peering at her out of the corner of his eye. “Laura who?”
“Laura 16.”
Pete frowned. “Funny name.”
“Last names are kind of pointless here. There are only forty of us.”
Pete nodded slowly. “I’m—”
“Peter 40. We’ve been waiting for you.”
Pete stepped back, dizzy, and raised a hand to his forehead.
The woman who called herself Laura 16 stepped to him and eased him to the ground with a hand beneath his elbow.
“There are forty people here?”
“There are thirty-eight people on Attu. This is Shemya, and there are two of us on this island. Though it’s more a two and a half mile wide rock pimple than an island. The U.S. flew spy planes from Shemya during the Cold War. Most recent Alaskan maps omit it. Reminder of U.S. domination. If you’d missed Shemya, you would have run smack into Attu in another thirty miles.”
“Why are you—”
“Here? I told them all this could happen, and they said I was nuts. I’ve been cruising over from Attu to check every few days since—” her voice cracked and she swallowed, “since we heard about V.J.” She paused, stared down at the century old rubble.
Pete said, “I’m sorry.”
“We all are. I assume you know more about how it happened than what trickled out here from Kodiak. It’ll hurt, but we’ll all want to know.” The woman looked up, blinked. “For what it’s worth, I had a bet on you to show up, for a Dutch apple pie. Which you look like you could use. And a shave and a hot bath.” She helped Pete to his feet. “Come on. My
boat’s over here.”
Pete sat alongside the woman called Laura 16, sipping hot coffee that tasted like heaven from a Plasti as she piloted a covered electric launch west from Shemya Island.
She said, “I don’t suppose you solved your riddle?”
Pete shook his head. “V.J. told me nobody ever does.”
“Correct.”
Pete turned to Laura 16 and clenched his fist. “I don’t mean to be rude to someone who just turned my life right side up. But could you tell me what the hell is going on here?”
She nodded. “Transparency was never V.J.’s strength. You have a degree in aerospace engineering.”
“Both those parts I already know. Yes. Alabama Huntsville. Courtesy of the G.I. Bill.”
“Me too. Princeton. Courtesy of a spoiled child’s full freight parents. Why A.E.?”
Pete shrugged. “I always wanted to go to Mars.”
She snorted. “The worst desert in the Solar System?”
“Ever seen South Dakota?”
She smiled. “I always wanted to go farther out than Mars. A lot farther. Unfortunately, the taxpayers who funded NASA didn’t, and JPL laid me off in the late 2030s. Being too proud to move in to my full freight parents’ basement, I signed on as 16 of 40 in Patel Molecular Biology Laboratories outpatient trial number 121.”
“Shut up! I’m—”
“Nobody’s used ‘shut up’ like that in the last century, Peter. But yeah, I know. You’re 40 of 40. After The Trouble V.J. realized he had screwed over forty innocent people, by dipping them in the fountain of youth, because, as you know too well, Millennial hunters shoot first and check bank balances later. So he spent the next hundred twenty years tracking us all down and giving us a purpose.”
“Which is?”
She smiled again. “What was your riddle?”
He decided Laura 16 had an extraordinary smile for a hundred fifty year old spoiled child. “Uh. Something about the machine is strong enough but the man inside isn’t.”
She nodded. “Got it. You know the Proxima Centauri b Ranger project?”
“That was your purpose? V.J. set you up to work on the first extra-solar planet probe?”
Laura 16 shook her head. “V.J. hadn’t found me in 2092. I was cleaning pools in Pasadena with dyed hair and a fake ID. The point is Ranger has now accelerated to eight percent of the speed of light. But even so if Ranger were a manned spacecraft, by the time it decelerates and reaches Proxima Centauri b its crew would be dead. Like Einstein said, no machine, nothing, can outrun light. But to reach the stars mankind doesn’t have to outrun light. We just have to outrun death.”
In the distance, the morning wind cleared the fog. Attu Island, verdant, mountainous, and enormous compared to the forlorn rock of Shemya Island, glittered in the sun. A cluster of buildings around its harbor was dominated by a great silver needle pointed toward the sky.
Pete’s jaw hung open. “How long?”
“Since concept? Twenty-six years. Until we leave? The next launch window opens Thursday.”
“What?”
“I told you we’ve been waiting for you.”
“Why?”
“We didn’t have lots of choice. The other thirty-nine of us couldn’t put our specialties to much use without a lander pilot.”
Pete pointed a finger at his chest. “But I don’t know—”
Laura 16 waved her hand. “Travel time’s two hundred years. You’ll figure it out.”