Farlost: Arrival Page 7

  “I’m not worried about signing up.”

  “Alright, good. Can I watch this game then?”

  “I’m not worried,” he said over his brother, “‘cause I did my time already, and you're retired. I work security in space for Haskam." He waved around. "All this was years ago.”

  Ron stared at him thoughtfully. “Yeah, you catch on quick, don’t you. You’ll be okay, mini. People gonna tell you you’re crazy. Don’t you let ‘em.”

  Taggart stood up and backed away from the couch. “The fuck are you? ‘Cause you’re not my brother.”

  ‘Ronald’, laughed, and began to shine. “Your instincts serve you well. I can work with that. Give you something to help you. Your perception is going to evolve. You’ll know things. Things people tell you there’s no way to know. Don’t be afraid. Just remember you’re. Not. Crazy.”

  The light around the man who wasn’t his brother was painfully bright now. “What are you!” Taggart screamed.

  “A friend, maybe. In time. If you live long enough.”

  The light winked out, and Taggart was alone.

  His entire body was frozen and vibrating at the same time. He heard a rumble outside, and his eyes darted from window to the the scuffed brown leather couch, still dented by the body that wasn’t his brother’s, and wasn’t there anymore—was just gone.

  It was dark outside. The rumble grew louder. He walked sideways, looking all around the room, and reaching out to pull the curtains open.

  Something massive took up the whole window. Something covered in spikes, impossibly large, like the moon come down out of the sky.

  “You tell ’em, mini,” Ronald’s voice echoed. “You tell ‘em, don’t let the lights go out!”

  Taggart’s head started to ache. He let the curtain fall, and backed against the wall. He screamed again, putting his hands to his head. His vision wavered. His heart beat like it was going to melt in his chest.

  Trembling, he sunk to his knees, fell to his side and curled into a ball.

  The pain in his head flared as it someone sliced through brain with a knife.

  “The lights,” he gasped, before the pain stopped, and the world faded to black.

  “No!” Stuart Beacham shouted, poking his fingers into the projected letters on the wall-to-screen monitor at the front of the lecture hall. “You’re wrong! You’re wrong, and you’re an idiot!”

  Professor Elliot leaned against his desk and removed his wire glasses with a heavy sigh. “Remind me why I am arguing with a first year about quantum entanglement resonance?” The professor pinched the bridge of his nose. “You know I wrote the book on it, don’t you? Literally, I wrote the textbook I just assigned you homework from.”

  Stuart laughed. “I don’t know, maybe deep down you know you’re an idiot?” He turned and waved his hand across the display. Half the equation blurred and faded under his palm. “Forget all that shit about observation changing the outcome.” He squiggled his fingers through the now-empty space, and font printed itself as he corrected the equation. “See?”

  “It’s interesting I appear to you as a teacher. Why not as your father?”

  Beacham’s finger jerked to a stop. He turned and stared. “Professor Elliot, can you pay attention? I’m trying to help you! My father’s fine at selling used cars to Indians, but can we stay on point? Here’s where you fucked up.”

  Elliot laughed. “Your mind is fascinating, Mr. Beacham. How a simple physiology like yours created it is beyond me.”

  Beacham turned. “Listen, if you’re embarrassed about being corrected by a lowly first year student, tough shit! The University President promised me you’d make yourself available, so how about you focus, so we can get to work here?”

  Professor Elliot laughed again, and bright light poured out of him.

  “Fine. Don’t turn off your lights, Beacham. It’d be a shame for that brilliant mind of yours to be extinguished.”

  Stuart turned and stared. He finally took note of the halo of light around his faculty advisor.

  “Wait, this isn’t how the conversation went.” He slapped himself in the forehead. “Yes! We had this conversation before, didn’t we?”

  The professor put his hands on his knees. “So brilliant and so stupid,” he said.

  Beacham shushed him, looking back at the board. The equations had changed into lines of inquiry he hadn’t even dreamt of yet. Or hadn't back then, at school, when he'd had this conversation the first time.

  He stared at the numbers. Numbers that told him how coherent light and bent gravity could form an impenetrable field.

  “What. The. Fuck.”

  “Don’t turn off your lights, you moron!”

  Stuart turned. “You think I”m the moron?” but the professor was gone. What had he been saying? Something about...lights? Fuck it, the school had a janitorial staff to work the light switches.

  He looked back at the numbers dancing on the board, entranced.

  Lou held a towel full of ice cubes to her swollen lip. She mumbled a sullen "thanks" to the waitress who handed it to her.

  “Thanks Darlene,” Ed said, smiling at the woman, who returned his smile and left.

  Lou stared past Ed, out the window of the diner.

  She’d finally done it. Finally got herself drummed out of the service. Then started a bar fight, because that's what broken people do. Then, and this is the part that burn ed to remember, she called Ed, fighting back tears.

  She had nowhere to go and nowhere else to call.

  Rain pelted the window behind Ed. “Should I feel honoured I was your one call, after the MP’s picked you up?”

  “No-one else to call,” she said out loud this time, and barked a short, bitter laugh. “And I’m a little old to go back to the orphanage.”

  Dwyer sipped coffee from his mug. “There is a place for you. If you can just get your shit together, there’s a place for you and something important for you to do.”

  Lou didn’t want to meet Ed’s eyes, but she owed him that. “Where?” she asked, as close to despair as she had ever let herself get. “Sign on with a military contractor? Be a bullet magnet for senators on photo-ops in war zones? Or clear villages for an oil company, maybe? No, thanks!”

  Dwyer smiled, and his whole face lit up. “You’ll come into space with me on a Haskam boat. You’ll survive a million to one fluke accident, and you’ll take care of the others who make it through with you.”

  The whistles of the short order cook and the music from the jukebox disappeared. The sound of the rain still hammering against the window vanished, as if someone had hit a mute button.

  She looked up, stared past him out the window. The towel full of ice fell with a crack to the table. Outside the window was the dark of space, and something huge floated in it. Something grey, too big to all fit in even the wall-sized pane of glass.

  It was the size of a planet, but with mountainous spikes stabbing impossibly high. It felt so wrong. Her stomach rebelled, looking at it. It was like some ugly virus under an electron microscope, pale, sickly grey and yellow.

  It seemed alive. Hungry.

  As she watched, the spikes shifted, the orbit of the massive sickly thing altering as if by will, toward her.

  “Yes, its an ugly thing,” Ed said, unusual anger bubbling under his words. She looked at him. Brightness haloed him, obscuring his features. “Don’t let the light go out Lou, or it will have you.”

  An insistent voice in the back of her mind whispered “that’s not Ed. That’s not your friend. He died. You watched him die!”

  Ed nodded. “You’re right. Ed is gone. He left you in charge.” Not-Ed smiled. “And you have a mountain of a job ahead of you.”

  She watched as his body glowed impossibly bright. She shielded her eyes.

  “Keep the light going, Lou. Or everyone dies.”

  Then the brilliance was gone: the seat where Ed Dwyer had been, empty.

  She stared numbly out at the hungry thing beyond the window
, and then the memory she was reliving faded away, taking her consciousness with it.

  THE BETTY McKENNA

  17

  In another place, a dull red sun simmered.

  Around the sun circled millions of miles of conspicuous nothing, followed by a belt of crushed rock outgassing superheated liquid, reflecting the red light of the ball of gas at the center of the solar system.

  Three ugly, scarred planets-one of them gigantic- circled the dull sun farther out, then came another belt of dense rock. This one glowed white from water vapor -constantly freezing, gassing and freezing again- just the right distance from the red sun to eternalize the cycle.

  A few more cold, airless planetoids orbited silently past the second belt.

  Scattered between every body throughout the dim solar system were ominous, monstrous giants: planetoids covered with jagged, asymmetrical spikes, each thousands of kilometers tall and the same dull mix of sickly yellow and ash grey.

  The Thorns.

  And around every Thorn, orbiting silent and solemn, was a graveyard. The tombstones in these graveyards were ships, both tiny and gigantic.

  A tiny speck floated high above one graveyard. A tiny ship, the Betty McKenna, buzzed above the metal carrion for signs of one last meal to pick.

  "Can I get a hand, Cap?"

  Captain Sam Travis looked down through the condensation on his suit's faceplate. Doug had his space-suited digits wrapped around the bolt gun, shaking it.

  "It seized," Doug's voice continued from speakers in his helmet. "Perhaps some moisture was trapped inside before the airlock deperessurized?"

  Sam's headset squawked as another voice cut in. "Don't tell me how to keep an airlock, Douglas! I've been keeping ships in the air since you were a pup!"

  "I meant no disrespect, Mr. Gruber," Doug cut in. "You're a fine engineer, sir, however the equipment you maintain is not currently operating at peak performance."

  "Ben, Doug, would you kindly shut up?"

  Both voices subsided, after offering quiet 'Yes, Captain's. Sam made sure his feet were secured to the gantry at the base of the communications array, and wrapped his left hand around his right, twisting.

  A puff of instantly freezing air crystals escaped as he tugged the glove away from his right hand. "He's right, Ben. You can't keep airlocks and comm arrays working without the parts. Let's just focus on getting this gantry turned around so we can check in, so we can do what we came here for."

  "Sooner we get paid, the sooner we can upgrade things around here," Ben Gruber said in his typical grumpy tone.

  With the glove secured, Sam reached down with his right hand. His fingers, unencumbered by the glove, were just a touch smaller than the bolt they wrapped around.

  "Sure, Ben, we'll get you all the machine oil and paint you need to get 'Betty' looking like new." With a grunt, he twisted. He felt a crack as the seized bolt relented, then it began to turn beneath his fingers.

  "Coat of paint looks pretty," Gruber said, "but couldn't we aim a little higher? The airlock's not the only thing that's starting to go."

  Sam chuckled, his fingers now deftly twirling the bolt. It spun free and lifted off into space, but his right hand darted out and grabbed it. He took a minute to look down the long body of his ship, 'The Betty', glowing dully red from the sunlight streaming from behind him.

  And beyond the ship, filling half his faceplate already, was a splotchy grey and yellow planetoid. Even from a few million miles out, he could see the mountainous spikes reaching out all around the spheroid shape.

  The gantry began to turn, vibrating up through Sam's legs.

  "Thank you Captain," Doug called, his voice tinny and deformed through the old speakers in Sam's old spacesuit. "I can finish the job from here. You should head in before that hand cramps up. I'm not sure Engineer Gruber has any spare parts on hand for that, either."

  Sam laughed, and slapped the shoulder of his first officer's spacesuit. "Agreed. Don't spend too long getting the feed: I want to know if we have any competition before we commit."

  "We better not have any competition," Gruber muttered on the radio. "We need some fuel, some parts 'and' some fresh food in the galley PDQ, or I might lead the mutiny myself."

  Sam didn't respond as he grabbed the joystick floating by his left palm to engage the tiny thrusters on his back. It wasn't any real worry Gruber or anyone on his crew would revolt that kept him quiet, it was the truth behind his engineer's joke: this ship was flying with nothing in reserve.

  And that was down to Sam: it was his job to see the good ship 'Betty' flying, her engines stoked, and food on the table.

  Closing in on the open airlock, Sam reached out to slow his approach. With his right hand, he grabbed for one of the slots in the airlock housing, meant to accept hardware from docking ships. Too late, he remembered he'd removed the protective glove to turn a bolt.

  He came to a jarring stop and looked down. "Shit!" He muttered, staring down at the three inch slice between thumb and wrist. Some of the polymer sheathing stuck out, ripped free, and his pinky was twitching over and over.

  The lights in the airlock came on beneath him. "Captain Sam, Captain Sam!" Newark squeaked in his ear.

  "It's nothing, folks," Sam called out to anyone listening on the open channel. "Just grazed the replacement hand."

  "Keep using your right as a lug wrench," Ben called, "and I'm gonna make you wear a hook when you leave the ship!"

  Sam laughed, flipping over and easing himself feet first into the airlock. He waved at the black tentacles flicking in the inner airlock porthole, and then again to his first officer who watched from the gantry.

  The buddy system. It's what kept you alive, out in the cold. He forced a smile onto his face and gave Doug a thumbs up. Doug's spacesuited form returned the thumbs up with his right arm and all three of his right legs.

  Rotating to face the Thorn as he 'sunk' into the airlock, Sam took in the tiny flecks, reflecting the silver-white of made things, and dull red from the Sun behind them.

  "Online! Online!" Newark called from inside, and Sam heard his relief in the slap of tentacles against glass.

  Sam shared that relief. Doug had completed the repair and The Betty's comm array was receiving data. The suit's heads-up display came alive, and Sam's last commands played out on the inside glass of his helmet.

  Charts from two different spy satellites overlaid themselves, revealing only one red dot heading to the Thorn ahead: The Betty.

  "Looks like we're in the clear," Sam called out. "Let's go earn our daily bread."

  Half a dozen voices, human and alien alike, called out as one: "Aye-Aye, Captain!"

  18

  Sam slotted his helmet and closed the locker with 'Captain' stenciled on the outside.

  "Can we squawk now, Captain Sam? Can we? Can we?" Newark hung upside down in the pressure door out of the airlock antechamber. His black tentacles slapped the wall and a hologram floated over his shoulder in the hallway running down the center of 'The Betty'.

  The Thorn was big enough to warrant an outline at this distance, in the hologram. There were dozens of grit-sized blue dots floating around her, but only one red one: The Betty herself, which floated nearest to Sam and Newark. Three blinking, animated arrows hovered in front of The Betty, indicating that her engines were blasting, killing off her speed by hundreds of kilometers a second.

  Sam rubbed the scarred right side of his face, tracing the raised welt just below his eye down almost to his jaw. It still froze and burned every time he took a spacewalk. "Go for it. Ping away, Daisy."

  "Yes, Captain." The deep, disembodied voice seemed to hover all around him. "Sensors actively pinging now, Captain. Shall I encode the data to trade with both networks?"

  "Yes Daisy," he replied, ducking under Newark's bulk, shouldering the Tumbler's hexagonal exoskeletal-frame good-naturedly. "Pays to be good neighbors out in the cold, ya know."

  "Nor sure that's true about Ery-net," Ben groused, his voice also se
eming to float in the air next to Sam's head as he jogged down the corridor toward the front of the ship, and the bridge. "Martel, yeah, they haven't steered us wrong yet, but how about that time Ery traded for our pings with that outdated Winter Belt route, showing no pirates? We had to replace three tons of ablative armor and spend a week sitting still in the shade of an asteroid to get the dragon-scales to sit right again!"

  "Come now, Engineer," Douglas's voice, sounding slightly tinnier for being patched in from his space-suit, replied before Sam could. "Data is money. 'The Betty' has been moving around the system, encoding a goodly sum of realtime data for too long for Ery to have risked our business for thirty pieces of Pirate silver."

  "He's right, Gruber," Sam replied, grabbing the handles above an airlock and swinging through. "There's not too many free traders running around the system these days. You have to watch Ery doesn't trade you for old data sometimes, but our live pings are worth too much for them to outright sell us out."

  "Hah. They sound sweet, when you put it that way," Gruber replied.

  Bleed-through from another feed tickled his ears. Sam heard feet echoing on metal and knew someone on the bridge had just opened an audio circuit with him.

  "One thing Gruber's right about," came a strange, bleating voice. It let out a dolphin-like whistle then continued. "Ery's packets were awfully thin. We need to renegotiate our transaction rates, Cap! Martel, on the other hand, sent us multiple maps of solar data.... and by both counts, you were right!"

  Sam heard a few whistles and shouts. He grinned and jogged towards the bridge a little faster.

  Four minutes later, Daisy cycled the bridge airlock open as Sam approached. He stepped through both sets of doors and onto the bridge of his ship.

  "Show me," he said, unable to keep the satisfaction out of his voice.