Salvation Day Read online

  I shut off the screens and sat in the dark for a while. A large beetle had found its way through the insect screens around the house. It was tapping and prodding along the frame of the open door. The fog outside was heavier now; I could not see the lake.

  After the massacre, I had nightmares for years about red clouds surrounding me, mist becoming drowning liquid, dancing in the air and light. The shrill, shipwide shriek of the alarm system. Shouting, screaming. Scalpels clutched in hands. Wild eyes filled with panic, going calm, then empty. When a person dies there are seconds when the heart still squeezes, not yet knowing it is time to stop. Human bodies are messy, imperfect things, a tangle of crossed signals and incomplete messages. Blood pumped into microgravity behaves oddly, like a living thing, unbound and restless, drifting, cooling. Never falling.

  The beetle changed its mind about coming inside. Turned from the door, scuttled across the patio, vanished into the darkness. The insect screen would catch it on the way out. A snapping silent death: quick.

  I had never tried to count how many people I had seen die that day. Their faces blurred into one in my mind, their screams into a single voice. I went to the sink to throw up again, though there was nothing in my stomach but acid.

  Then I wrote a message to Baqir. I forgot we were fighting. I forgot that I was certain he would never speak to me again. I didn’t have anybody else.

  My aunt gave me all the data from the ship.

  The response was immediate: INCOMING CALL. My hands were moving without my permission. The buzzing in my head had settled to a muffled numbness.

  I answered Baqir’s call, and his face appeared on the screen, and he said, “What the fucking fuck did she do that for?”

  I started to laugh, but I was choking on my own breath, shuddering and shaking, and I could hear him saying, “Hey, hey, Jas, come on, breathe, you can breathe, you’re okay,” his words running together into a meaningless soothing rumble, the only good thing in a world where a man’s life might end with the slash of a knife, a child’s skeleton might snap with the burst of a spaceship engine, a mother might vanish with the halt of a heartbeat, and he didn’t stop saying it, didn’t stop for a second. “You’re okay, you can breathe, you’re okay.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The woman put her gun to Baqir’s head. My mind was a blank white panic.

  “You’re going to do what we say,” she said, “or I’ll kill him too.”

  Baqir was holding himself so still the tendons in his neck stood out like ropes. He looked at me—didn’t turn his head, only moved his eyes—and the fear I saw there cut into me.

  Salvatore was dead. The dark-haired woman had killed him. His head—gone, like a burst balloon. An hour ago he had been snickering loudly about how many Moon girls he was going to fuck during his fellowship at the Tereshkova Shipyard. Lucian, next to him, had groaned and told him to shut up. They had laughed. Now he was dead.

  I had barely looked at the shuttle crew when we came aboard, ignoring my aunt’s oft-repeated advice to always, always look beyond the uniform. Look, notice, remember. I had dismissed her concerns as paranoid. People stared at me, but only because I was a morbid curiosity. I never took my aunt’s worries seriously.

  The blond woman was pale and thin, looked to be in her midtwenties, but she spoke with a high little-girl voice that seemed more affected than natural. The older of the men, the one with the Flight Service tattoos on his hands, had a shaved head and a bland expression. The other man, the big one at the back of the shuttle, was scowling, his red face wrinkled beneath his flat pale hair. They were all armed.

  The woman who had killed Salvatore was in her twenties, with light brown skin, dark brown hair, hazel eyes. She was unremarkable. I had not looked twice at her when we boarded.

  “I’ll do what you say,” I said.

  It wasn’t a decision at all. I would do anything to keep her from killing Baqir.

  Across the aisle Gena’s screams had quieted to a high-pitched wheeze. Lucian had started to gasp. It was a horrible sound, those struggling breaths, that growing panic.

  Professor M’Baga said to the blond woman, “What do you want? Tell us what you want.”

  “Please stop talking,” she said. Her voice was so calm. She had the same musical, lilting accent as Baqir’s, the accent of the North American deserts. “You are all going to do exactly what we say. Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

  “Of course,” M’Baga said, “but if you’ll only tell us—”

  The blond woman pushed the muzzle of her gun against his forehead. “You need to stop talking, Professor. Ready, Zahra?”

  “You,” said the dark-haired woman. Zahra. She was looking at me, but her gun was still aimed at Baqir’s head. He had dropped his chin to his chest to shrink away from the muzzle. Our arms were pressed together between the seats. “Bhattacharya. Get up. You’re coming with me. And you”—that to Baqir, with a nudge in the back of his head. “You stay here. If your friend doesn’t do what we ask, Henke is going to shoot you.”

  The other man—Henke, she had called him—took her place behind Baqir without question. He grinned and said, “With pleasure.”

  I unsnapped my harness and put my hands on the armrest to push myself up. Baqir pressed himself into the seat to let me pass, watching with wide, scared eyes. I wanted to tell him not to be afraid. I wanted to tell him I would do what they said and keep him safe. It was what he had been doing for me since we were twelve years old and he had decided to befriend the barely verbal fellow patient in the children’s hospital. Me with all my broken bones, him with the disease eating him from the inside. Don’t be afraid, he had said to me, more times than I could count. Don’t be nervous. You don’t have to be scared. It will be okay. I’ll protect you.

  I didn’t know what they wanted, but my mind was racing. Something from my aunt, that was the only thing that made sense. They wanted to use me to persuade her to do something. They thought SPEC was lying about not having access to House of Wisdom. They were separatists or anarchists or militarists who wanted the Councils to vote one way or another, or release a prisoner, or something, something. I couldn’t wrap my head around what they could possibly expect to get out of this. It wouldn’t work. My aunt would not be impressed by their threats.

  “Move,” Zahra said.

  She pointed toward the cockpit. I obeyed without hesitation.

  The bald man at the front of the cabin was strapping Salvatore’s body to the wall. The man’s placid expression was even more unsettling than that of his grinning companion at the back. Salvatore’s arms, limp and unbound, floated in front of his chest, reaching blindly, and the man swatted them carelessly when the fingertips brushed his shoulder, with no more thought than a horse might flick away a fly.

  Forward of the passenger cabin, the orientation of the ship changed. The arbitrarily designated floor and ceiling ended, replaced by a vertical shaft with a ladder climbing toward a hatch. My hands were sweating as I gripped the rungs. If they wanted me to record a message for my aunt, I would do it. I would not fight them. There was a gun to Baqir’s head.

  Zahra said something quietly. It sounded like “We’re here,” and I realized they had been using a private comm system all along. Another thing I should have noticed—would have noticed, if I had ever taken my aunt’s security warnings seriously. The hatch unlocked with a soft clank, then opened.

  The first thing I saw was the Earth, a colorful marble, directly ahead. I felt a sudden, dizzying disorientation that passed only when I realized I was looking not through a window but at a panel of six screens, each providing a view of a different angle outside the shuttle. There was Earth, there was the Moon as a small pale disk, and there were three views of darkness and stars—Regulus, Zosma, Denebola, familiar specks of light. Any other time, the views would have dazzled me. My yearning to return to sp
ace, to reach farther and farther into the void, had grown steadily over the past ten years. Any other time, I would have marveled. Now I could scarcely breathe.

  On the sixth screen was House of Wisdom.

  From a distance it looked like a skyscraper adrift in space, roughly rectangular, with its drive engines at one end and protective nose shielding at the other. Under acceleration the apparent gravity was oriented along the long axis. It wasn’t true that it was the largest ship humankind ever built; the generation ships launched before the Collapse would have dwarfed it several times over. But at a kilometer long it was the largest built in the Reconstruction Era. About one-third of its length was taken up by my mother’s Almora propulsion drive and all its associated systems. Just above the drive was the large, square docking bay, a window through the heart of the ship.

  The shuttle’s pilot was a woman in her forties with white streaks in her red hair. She glanced over her shoulder as we entered, then turned her attention back to the controls. “Five hundred klicks and closing. We’re getting pinged with a request.”

  A request. Five hundred kilometers. The security net.

  “That’s too close,” I said. “You can’t—you have to turn away. The security drones, they’ll destroy the ship, you have to—”

  “Shut him up,” the pilot said, without looking at me. There was no anger in her voice, no fear; my warnings might have been gibberish for all the concern she showed. Zahra’s gun was already pressed against the small of my back. “You ready?”

  The question wasn’t for me. It was for the copilot. He was young for a SPEC pilot, maybe midtwenties, with curly brown hair and wary eyes. He grabbed my right wrist and pulled me forward, muttering a quiet apology as he wrenched my arm. He pressed my hand into what looked like a standard rapid-identification unit, the scan-and-verify sort used for basic security. There was a clear glass plate, cool to the touch, and beneath it the five trackers whirred and slid until they lined up under my fingertips, while sensors measured my pulse, my body temperature, the electrical conductivity of my body, confirming that it was a living flesh-and-blood person being identified. The unit pricked one finger with a needle, drawing a microscopic amount of blood.

  “Come on,” the copilot muttered, looking over the report from the ID unit. “Come on.”

  “Well?” the pilot said.

  “It’s processing,” he answered, his voice lifting into a question.

  That’s when I understood what they were trying to do.

  “No,” I breathed. “It won’t work.”

  The external security system had been developed when House of Wisdom was built, but it was kept secret until Dr. Lago’s attack forced SPEC to reveal its existence. The most cherished tenets of the Councils, and therefore SPEC, maintained that space was to be open to everybody, free of the warfare and militarism that had brought about the Collapse centuries before. That was written into the Reconstruction Charters four hundred years ago, when the survivors of the Collapse came together to reshape what remained of the world. An armed security system for a research vessel went against everything SPEC was supposed to stand for, even if they claimed it was only experimental, even if they claimed it had only ever been meant for protection.

  In the aftermath of the massacre, nobody had even known the security net was active until the first rescue team was killed before their ship could get within a couple hundred kilometers of House of Wisdom. The system was made up of a network of fast, agile, high-powered, and well-armed drones that could disable a ship in seconds—and had, twice in the past ten years, before SPEC finally stopped trying to break through.

  “It won’t work,” I said again. I was pleading, but only the copilot spared me a glance. Fear clawed at my throat. We were too close. The drones would attack. This was a passenger shuttle. It had no defenses, no real maneuvering ability. “You’re going to get us all killed, don’t you understand? You can’t—”

  “Quiet,” Zahra said.

  The copilot, his curly brown hair dampened with sweat at the temples, sucked in a startled breath. He tapped frantically at the screen. I couldn’t follow what he was doing, but I could guess. He was trying to persuade the security system to accept my genetic identification as a passkey for the quarantine. I was the only person alive whose ID was still in the House of Wisdom roster; the nature of my departure would have left an open query in the ship’s system. It was possible that a confident hacker could try to persuade the security system that my shipboard identification was enough to allow passage through the security net. SPEC had tried a similar tactic themselves some years ago, but their failure to get it right led to the destruction of a second ship. The loss of one approach team was tragic; the loss of two was reckless. Three would have been unforgivable.

  The copilot did not look like a confident hacker. He bit his lower lip, making him look even younger. His hands were shaking. He didn’t think he could do this. He couldn’t do this. Even SPEC hadn’t been able to, with all of their knowledge of the House of Wisdom system at their disposal. The drones would attack. I wondered what sort of emergency space suits the shuttle had on board, and if we would have time to reach them. What a stupid way to die.

  “Well?” the pilot said. She was smiling, but unlike the cruel smile of the big man in the cabin, hers was one of something like excitement. “We’re getting pretty fucking close.”

  “One second,” said the copilot. “It’s—okay. It’s good.”

  “Then get him out—fuck!” The pilot flinched as an object whirled by the ship outside, flashing from one screen to another so quickly it was impossible to see what it looked like. “What the fuck was that?”

  She jabbed at the display, called up a slowed-down recording for a closer look.

  It was one of the security drones. The ship’s computer gave its distance at closest pass as ten meters.

  “What’s going on?” the pilot demanded, returning the screen to its live feed. “You said it was good.”

  The copilot was focused on his controls, his hands moving swiftly, more steadily now.

  “Malachi, what’s going on?” Zahra said.

  “The passkey was accepted.” The copilot was Malachi. Another name to remember. “They’re not attacking.”

  “Then what are they doing?” the pilot asked.

  The copilot was right: the drones weren’t launching an attack. But they were clustering around Pilgrim 3 in a swarm. Two were joined by two more, and two more, every one of them racing out of the darkness at such a high speed it looked like they were aiming for impact, but stopping suddenly, with a quick, bright flare of reverse thrust. The drones were spheres of absorptive metal about a meter across, with short spines protruding from its surface like spikes. The ends of those spines glowed briefly as the thrusters fired. They looked like eyes, gleaming and metallic and watchful.

  “I’ve never seen drones like this before,” Malachi said. “This is some serious dark project shit. Did you know SPEC has weapons that can move like that? Boudicca?” He looked at the pilot when she didn’t answer.

  “No idea,” the pilot said. Boudicca. I was collecting their names one by one, and with it the knowing dread that they would not be saying them aloud if they cared that I heard. “SPEC doesn’t build weapons, remember? So they claim. I hope there are no surprises waiting for us.”

  “There won’t be,” Zahra said. “And if there are, we’ll deal with them.”

  I pressed my thumb and forefinger together, welcoming the faint distraction of the pinprick pain. None of them were looking at me, but still I schooled my expression. These people would only have gone through so much trouble—hijacking a shuttle, abducting me, hacking the security system—for one reason. They didn’t want something from my aunt. They wanted House of Wisdom.

  “I hope you’re right,” the pilot said. She tapped on the shipwide communication system. “I know you’re all sittin
g pretty and doing as you’re told. You’re going to keep doing that as we go into a series of burns. If you try anything, those nice people with guns will shoot you.”

  “I think they get the picture,” Malachi said. He flinched when the pilot glared at him, but he didn’t look away.

  “Let’s make sure they keep getting it,” the pilot said. “If this doesn’t—” Another alert caught her eye. “Shit.”

  “What?” Zahra said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Orbital Control. They’re contacting us.”

  I felt a sudden burst of hope.

  “You said they wouldn’t notice this soon,” Zahra said.

  “We don’t know what they’ve noticed,” Boudicca said. “Get him out of here—wait, no, let’s keep him here, in case we need him. But you keep your mouth shut, or we will kill every single person back there. Got it?”

  I nodded numbly. Zahra pressed her gun into the center of my chest. From that close I could see the greenish shards in her brown eyes, the faintest sheen of sweat on her brow, the way her jaw tensed when she swallowed. She parted her lips to say something—another warning, another threat—but the pilot was answering the comm.

  “Orbital Control, this is Pilgrim 3.”

  A woman’s voice came over the radio. “Pilgrim 3, this is Barcelona. We have a priority location query from Armstrong Port Control. Their trackers cannot verify your position. Have you ventured off your flight path?”

  The hope I’d felt withered. Orbital Control wasn’t monitoring the no-fly zone around House of Wisdom. They were only trying to find a wayward shuttle that was supposed to be approaching the Moon.

  “Negative, Barcelona,” Boudicca said calmly, without a trace of nerves. I had no doubt that she had been a SPEC pilot in the past. “Flight path maintained.”