Survival Tactics Page 5

  There was a solitary figure seated at the far end of the research table, huddled over a dim display, one finger pushing at the rows of numbers. Pella stopped at the head of the table, her expression still thoughtful, her hair still floating; Jessica moved around her to approach the researcher. Slightly built, her arms and legs thin more from lack of food than nature; skin pale, although how pale was difficult to tell in the shadows. Her hair was smoothed back into a severe knot at the nape of her neck, and Jessica didn’t have to note the color or the few escaping corkscrew tendrils to know who she was looking at.

  Adult!Jessica was frowning at the numbers before her, scrolling back and forth as if she was looking for something. Next to the display, Adult!Jessica’s left hand made quick notes now and then, but she’d written very little. Jessica drew closer, squinting at the information, but the numbers meant nothing to her. This was not a logic core or a memory shadow; this was something far more mundane. This was research, and from the expression on Adult!Jessica’s face, she wasn’t finding what she was looking for.

  “It’s late.”

  Jessica looked up, startled, and saw a figure standing next to Pella: thin, like his younger self, but more worn; gaunt and wizened, gray hair streaked with bright white. Alder James, recognizable if emaciated; they must have had some lean years for him to look so wiry and fragile.

  Perhaps it wasn’t only the years.

  “I can’t sleep,” Adult!Jessica said, her eyes never leaving the numbers.

  “You’ll make mistakes.” Alder!James made his way around the table.

  Jessica bit down on annoyance; everything he said was always so discouraging. But Adult!Jessica didn’t seem bothered. “All the worst mistakes are behind us,” she said, and Jessica heard, then, how hoarse she sounded, how strained.

  She waited for James’ annoyed sigh, his admonishment of her negativity, his direction to focus on her task. None of it came. “We couldn’t have predicted,” he said, and his voice was gentle, almost hesitant.

  “Of course we could.” Adult!Jessica’s tone was abruptly aggressive. Apparently, in her dreams at least, Jessica had figured out how to stand up to Alder James. “It’s the same every year. It’s just the severity and the timing.” She flipped through the numbers. “There are answers here. There always have been. We just need to find them.”

  James moved to stand next to Adult!Jessica; and then, to Jessica’s shock, he sat down next to her, leaning forward, hands open in appeal. “We do,” he agreed, his voice still quiet. “But we don’t have to find them tonight.”

  “Then when, James?” Adult!Jessica’s voice had grown louder, and Jessica heard in its undertones a deep well of anguish. “Everything we learn, everything we find—we can’t protect them. Year after year we can’t, and I don’t know why—“

  Adult!Jessica’s voice broke, and James put a hand over her arm, pulling her away from her data. “I’m sorry, Jessica,” he said, and Jessica had never heard him sound so helpless before.

  Adult!Jessica shook her head, silent for a moment as she swallowed tears. “It’s our duty, isn’t it?” she said. There was bitterness in her voice, bitterness Jessica knew well; but there was also weariness, resignation, defeat.

  When had she become defeated?

  “You’re not alone, you know,” James told her. “We’re with you, all of us. We all know your grief.”

  Adult!Jessica sighed, and she shuddered, head to toe, as if the emotion was draining out through her feet. “I know,” she said, and her voice was calmer. “I don’t mean to be selfish. Please don’t think—“

  He squeezed her arm. “That’s not what I meant, Jessie." How unsettling, that nickname coming from the man Jessica had only ever seen as an authority. "I meant—you don’t have to be the one to do this. We can all do it. And we can all do it tomorrow, when we’re rested, and the dead have had time to spread throughout the sea.”

  Adult!Jessica stilled. Something in Alder James’s words, something in his kindness, had hit her wrong, had brought back whatever had driven her to be alone in this space in the middle of the night. “Those dead,” she said quietly, “are mine, James. No matter how much you all loved them, they’re my cohort. And I know what you’ll say. I know I’ll find others. I always find others.” Her laugh was dry, and lost, and empty. Empty. Her life here had left her empty. “But tonight, my friend, they are gone on the currents. And I’d rather be alone here, doing something useful, than alone at home.”

  She started scrolling through the numbers again.

  Alder!James watched her for several minutes, his hand still on her arm. Adult!Jessica didn’t look at him, but surely she could see him out of the corner of her eye: rigid, helpless, wanting so much to say or do something that might help her.

  After a moment he dropped his hand.

  Jessica thought he would stand, would leave Adult!Jessica alone. Instead he turned to the table, tapped something behind his ear, and a data set appeared before his eyes. He began to scroll through the information, taking notes, and they worked together in silence in the still, warm room.

  Jessica looked away from them. Not just a bad harvest year. A bad year for everything.

  Pella had gone to a window, and she was again a silent, backlit figure.

  “I don’t know what this means,” Jessica said. Her calm had entirely left her.

  Pella didn’t move.

  “We lose people all the time,” Jessica said. “Is that the lesson? That I shouldn’t love so much?” Fuck that. “You’re telling me I’m going to lose everything, so I have to find meaning in it? That this colony is more than just me and my petty discontents?” She was shaking; she wondered if the dream would let her pick up a chair, throw it across the room. “Why did you show me this? Why this moment? Everybody loses people here all the time, Tengri isn’t just me, and I know that, but I don’t know what you want me to do about it! I don’t—“

  Pella shifted, one arm jerking, as if she were pulling against a tether. Her figure hunched, shuddered, glitched; the moonlight made her solid then transparent, black to silver to white so bright Jessica couldn’t look at her. Jessica blinked and held a hand over her eyes, shading away the worst of the tri-moon glare; Pella turned, jerky and clumsy, as if the effort were pulling her apart, and Jessica saw her face.

  Her face.

  Her skin was no longer smooth, no longer silvered; it wrinkled and tore and gaped away from her skull, the heat decay of days, a body left alone and not found in time for a proper cremation. But she wasn’t dead: her eyes, pale and wide and terrified, searched Jessica’s face, all desperation and urgency, and one arm, thin and skeletal, hand only half-covered in corrupt flesh, reached out.

  Pella mouthed the word three times before Jessica understood it: Run.

  Jessica ran.

  5.

  She startled awake to the sunrise streaming through the infirmary windows. Before her in the bed lay Pella, and her blue eyes were wide open, and they saw nothing at all.

  6.

  Nearly the entire colony attended Pella’s funeral.

  It was set at the equinox, after the summer flu season was officially over. Pella was the last casualty, as Scottie had been so long ago. The line to honor her stretched from the central government building through the habitat square down through the tall, knocking pneumo-trees and to the shore. There Alder James made a speech, and those who attended swore that his voice, always so controlled, held actual warmth and emotion. There were tears throughout, and when Pella’s ashes were scattered into the salty sea, her cohort stood in a circle and sang an old hymn that Pella had loved.

  Jessica was already off-world.

  The day Pella died she felt drained and shattered and more certain of herself than she had ever been in her life. She might have taken it as a slight when she found Alder James had already contacted the freighter Agincourt and asked them to swing by that afternoon to pick up a passenger. She might have felt shoved away, second-guessed, mistrusted. Instead sh
e’d thrown her arms around him, and the strange, taciturn man had actually managed to return the embrace, if only for a moment or two.

  “Do great things,” he said to her, and in her heart, amidst the fear and grief and loss, a spark of hope she’d thought long lost caught and flared and started to burn.

  Overlay

  written by Elizabeth Bonesteel for The Verge

  … 40%… 50%… 75%… 98%… Upload complete. Initiating connection.

  “—there, Ray? Do you read?”

  “Affirmative. I read you, Cass.”

  Ray blinked into the dim light, waiting for the schematic overlay to come into focus.

  Reception was good, even here in the fragrant, unwashed drains under the government lab, but uploads threw him every time. Vertigo. Nausea. Sometimes memory gaps. There were meds that could help him deal with it, but they all made him sleepy.

  The mission didn’t accommodate sleepy.

  The cool damp was seeping under his skin, and the odor of raw sewage wasn’t doing his stomach any good. Apparently, not even in their own buildings did the government pay for pre-treating waste. Closing his eyes to block out the mottled fiberglass walls, Ray centered the overlay on the neon blue R that traced his movements within the green lines of the sewer drains. Cass’ vivid C was on the other end of the building, moving cautiously north as she performed her own recon.

  Above them both, in the red-outlined schematic of the locked-down federal building, he saw three amorphous red-orange spots indicating heat. No way to know through the building’s leaded floor which one was Ando, but all three were motionless.

  Damn.

  “We’ve taught him to keep still since he was a baby,” Cass said in his ear. “Don’t read into it.”

  She was talking to herself as much as him, Ray knew. At 15, Ando was already a skilled operative, both level-headed and technically adept. But he’d gone off on his own for this one, and Cass was suffering from a debilitating case of delayed helicopter parenting. Ray had spent their journey here reassuring her that Ando knew how to take care of himself, never confessing the roiling terror in his own stomach. There was nothing quite like parenting to remind you how little of the universe you could control.

  “I’m not reading anything into it,” he lied. “I’m trying to figure out which one is him. This the best data you could get?”

  “Government labs don’t label their floor plans. But based on the power grid, the middle one is the computer lab. Too much drone traffic for him to hide there.” Cass took a breath in his ear. “Flip a coin, Ray. We only get one chance at this.”

  Ray focused on his own blue icon and let his peripheral vision filter out distractions. There it was: a variance, almost insignificant, probably just the overlay’s augmentors working to enhance the little they could make out through the interference. “The north spot,” he said to Cass. “Full boost.”

  Ray felt a twinge in his left eye as the overlay flickered. The orange spot in the northern corner of the building grew larger and more pixelated, turning red, then yellow, then white, filling his field of vision. Too large to be an animal, too hot to be a drone.

  Was it moving? He was sure it was moving. Ando was there. He had to be.

  The twinge flared into a stabbing pain, and the room became another place: silhouettes; unintelligible whispers; a familiar odor, metallic and musty, out of place The brightness burned through his senses until there was nothing else left. No shadows, no sound, nothing but searing white emptiness and voices—

  “—calibrate a little better. See that line there? We just—”

  Upload suspended. Buffering… resuming… Upload complete.

  “Dad?”

  “Who’s there?”

  Ray stood in the open doorway of the building’s north library. The voice had been low, worried—Ando’s, yet not. His own, perhaps? Why would he be calling for his father? His father had been dead for 12 years.

  How had he entered the building? Through the sewer?

  That wavering call again. “Dad?”

  It was Ando after all.

  The boy came out of the shadows and threw his arms around his father, fear and relief tempering his usual teenaged reticence. “I’ve got him, Cass,” Ray said, relief washing over him in a dizzying wave. For a moment, he wasn’t an operative on a rescue mission, but a father with his only child in his arms, safe and unhurt.

  Cass, never one for sentiment, handled the situation in her usual fashion. “You tell him I’m taking his fabricator and his cryptography equipment, and he can handwrite notes to his friends for the next 30 years,” she ranted. “And he can leave the anarchy to the grown-ups.”

  Ray felt Ando choke out a laugh despite the danger. The boy knew his mother.

  “Surveillance?” Ray asked.

  “One drone sweep every 21 minutes,” Ando said into his chest. “Two minutes until it’s back.”

  “Back down into the sewers,” Cass directed. “We can get out the south door.”

  Ando said, “We can’t leave.”

  Ray loosed his arms, and Ando took a step away from him, his eyes level with his father’s. Ray frowned, uneasy. When had Ando become so tall?

  The boy’s jaw was set, but there was no anger in his face; this was determination, not rebellion. “I came here to do this,” Ando said. “I can’t leave until it’s done.”

  “You can do it another day!” Cass howled.

  But Ray knew what the boy was thinking. “They’ll be ready for us another day,” he said. “He’s right, Cass. We need to finish it.”

  She swore, repeatedly, a sailor’s grand lexicon of profanity. “Fine,” she said when her vocabulary was exhausted. “But you’ve got 85 seconds to get out of the way of that drone.”

  The overlay flickered, and abruptly, Ray could see in Ando’s face the man he would one day become: a solid jaw, cheeks still cherubic when he smiled, wisdom drawing deep lines around those passionate eyes, wires of silver threaded through his jet-black hair. Ray shook himself. The boy was barely shaving, and Ray was seeing visions of him as an old man.

  He gave Ando a quick nod, and with nothing but the flash of a grin, the boy disappeared into the shadows again. Now, of course, Ray had to remember how he’d reached the library. Surely, he’d come up through a floor panel or an auxiliary stairwell, but his memory provided nothing. “Cass?” he asked. “Where is it? The sewer entrance?”

  The overlay flashed white.

  “—on, just give it a se—”

  He was in the building’s main hallway. Behind him, he heard a low hum, possibly his imagination or maybe the patrol drone making its preprogrammed way down the hall, about to turn the corner to detect him. Everything they’d done, all of Ando’s naive determination, would be for naught. He turned and ran from the sound, but there were no stairwells, no open doors, not even the room where he’d found Ando, and why was everything growing brighter? A corner up ahead. Surely, that’s where he’d come in, that’s where he’d left Ando, that’s where—

  “—interrupts expected at this stage. They’ve been working on the problem for a while. In the next—”

  Buffering… 30%… 65%… 98%… Connection resumed.

  What problem? What connection? Where am I?

  Now, he was standing in a room lit by a bank of computer monitors. Before him sat Ando, tapping at an old-style physical keyboard, entirely absorbed in his task. Cass stood next to their son, staring anxiously up at Ray. His perception of his wife was apparently time-traveling as well: she looked to him as young and elegant as she had the first time she’d shown up at one of his protest meetings.

  They’d made it to the computer room. Of course they had.

  “I’m okay,” he assured her. “Where are we?”

  “We’re overloading the main generator,” Cass told him. “The auxiliaries should go up in sequence.”

  Well, that seemed sloppy. “No redundancies?”

  “Tons of redundancies.” She grinned at him, and
there was pain in his left eye again along with a bright white flash, like an ancient camera. “Just no fail-safes.”

  just no fail-safes

  A klaxon filled Ray’s ears. The overlay flashed red all around his peripheral vision: impending disaster. He had his back braced against the computer room’s heavy hydraulic door, but he wasn’t slowing it down. His feet pushed into the doorframe, and the structure began to press him in half.

  Bad time for a memory gap. “Cass! Ando! Now!”

  “Just one sec—“ Ando said, but Cass grabbed him by the back of his shirt and hauled him out of the chair like a rag doll. The door kept moving, and something in Ray’s hip gave. He set his hands on the frame to reinforce his futile efforts. Ando leapt over Ray’s buckling legs and ran into the corridor. Cass followed, grabbing Ray’s arm as she passed, and he stumbled out of the room.

  In a single step, Ray realized his legs weren’t going to hold him up. His hip, his eye… he wasn’t sure which pain was worse now. “Run!” he shouted. “I’m right behind you!”