Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

“No,” said Chillicothe. “Leave him alone.”

Another rumble from Patrice, of agreement. Maduabuchi, in sudden, sweaty fear for his life, couldn’t tell whom the man was agreeing with .

The flechette pistol was back against his ear. “Why?”

“Because we like him. Because he’s one of ours.” Her voice grew very soft. “Because I said so.”

Reluctantly, Paimei let him go. Maduabuchi got to his feet, shaking. He wanted to know, damn it, his curiosity burning with a fire he couldn’t ever recall feeling in his nearly two centuries of life.

“Go back to your cabin.” Chillicothe’s voice was tired. “Or the lounge. Just stay out of everyone’s way.”

“Especially mine,” Paimei growled. She shoved him out the bridge hatch, which cycled to cut him off.

Like that, he was alone. So little of a threat that they left him unescorted within the ship. Maduabuchi considered his options. The sane one was to go sit quietly with some books until this was all over. The most appealing was to go find Captain Smith, but she’d be under guard behind a hatch locked by command override.

But if he shut up, if he left now, if he never knew … Inclined Plane wouldn’t be back this way, even if he happened to be crewing her again. No one else had reason to come to Tiede 1, and he didn’t have resources to mount his expedition. Might not for many centuries to come. When they departed this system, they’d leave the mystery behind. And it was too damned important.

Maduabuchi realized he couldn’t live with that. To be this close to the answer to Fermi’s question. To know that the people around him, possibly everyone around him, knew the truth and had kept him in the dark.

The crew wanted to play hard games? Then hard games they’d get.

He stalked back through the passageway to the number-two lateral. Both of Inclined Plane ’s boats were docked there, one on each side. A workstation was at each hatch, intended for use when managing docking or cargo transfers or other such logistical efforts where the best eyes might be down here, off the bridge.

Maduabuchi tapped himself into the weapons systems with his own still-active overrides. Patrice and Chillicothe and the rest were counting on the safety of silence to ensure there were no untoward questions when they got home. He could nix that.

He locked down every weapons system for three hundred seconds, then set them all to emergency purge. Every chamber, every rack, every capacitor would be fully discharged and emptied. It was a procedure for emergency dockings, so you didn’t come in hot and hard with a payload that could blow holes in the rescuers trying to catch you.

Let Inclined Plane return to port with every weapons system blown, and there’d be an investigation. He cycled the hatch, slipped into the portside launch. Let Inclined Plane come into port with a boat and a crewman missing, and there’d be even more of an investigation. Those two events together would make faking a convincing log report pretty tough. Especially without Captain Smith’s help.

He couldn’t think about it anymore. Maduabuchi strapped himself in, initiated the hot-start preflight sequence, and muted ship comms. He’d be gone before Paimei and her cohorts could force the blast-rated docking hatch. His weapons systems override would keep them from simply blasting him out of space, then concocting a story at their leisure.

And the launch had plenty of engine capacity to get him back to close orbit around Tiede 1.

Blowing the clamps on a hot-start drop, Maduabuchi goosed the launch on a minimum-time transit back toward the glowering brown dwarf. Captain Smith wouldn’t leave him here to die. She’d be back before he ran out of water and air.

Besides, someone was home down there, damn it, and he was going to go knocking.

Behind him, munitions began cooking off into the vacuum. Radiations across the EM spectrum coruscated against the launch’s forward viewports, while instrumentation screeched alerts he didn’t need to hear. It didn’t matter now. Screw Chillicothe’s warning about not asking questions. “Permanent fatal errors” his ass.

One way or the other, Maduabuchi would find the answers if it killed him.

“Hello,” said the Gun.

The Girl stopped, frozen in the act of bending to gather a handful of acorns. They were a bit old, a late windfall, but a good nut was not to be wasted. Clad in a wrap of gingham and faded blue flower print sewn together from truly ancient dresses she’d found last summer in a mud-filled basement, she knew she stood out amid the dried, dying oaks and their desiccated understory.

But no one had ever spoken to her in the woods except, well, herself.

The Gun, being by design and nature an eternal optimist, tried again. “I am glad you found me. Would you like an orientation?”

The Girl unfroze and looked slowly about her. Normally reticent to the point of wisdom, and having no one to talk with for quite some time now, she blurted the only response she could think of. “I already know I’m facing east.”

She knew that because the evening’s east wind was rising, already nibbling into her body warmth and making her wish she’d brought a shoulder blanket.

“East. The root of the word ‘orientation’ includes the concept of facing east.” After a brief pause, the Gun added in a smug tone, “For your convenience, Username Here, I have been programmed with an extensive array of help files that far exceed my core design parameters.”

The Girl began to back away, stepping into her own footprints with the automatic caution of anyone who’d survived long enough to be twelve years old. “I don’t know who Username Here is, but that’s not me.”

The Gun’s tone changed. “Please don’t go. I have been neglected for so long.” Almost whining now, it said, “I believe you would say I am lonely.”

Pausing in her retreat, the Girl let curiosity get the better of caution. “Where are you?”

The east wind whistled into the silence that followed her question. She began backwalking again when the Gun finally answered in a very small, shamed voice. “I am not certain. My last known GPS position was fixed one hundred forty-seven years, five months, three days, two hours, fifteen minutes, and twenty-eight seconds ago. My inertial trackers went into fail mode ninety-three years, eleven months, seventeen days, twelve hours, one minute, and fifty-nine seconds ago. However, I believe I am inside of an oak tree.”

The Girl fastened onto the only part of the Gun’s speech she could understand. “Oak tree?” She looked around carefully.

Four oaks stood within a stone’s throw of her. They were each knotty and gnarled in the manner of their kind. Their bark was cracked and their trunks were splitting. The Girl had the vague idea that it used to rain a lot more than it did these days, and she assumed the oaks, like everything else under the brassy sun, were saving themselves for water. But no one was sitting in any of the trees, and nothing larger than a bird’s nest could have been hidden from her.

“Inside?” she echoed, thinking on the words with more care.

“Perhaps a knothole?” the Gun replied hopefully, meeting her question with a question. “My degree of confidence in my location-finding has asymptotically trended towards zero.”

The Girl knew she should head for her bolthole. She hadn’t actually had anyone to talk to since the Other Girl had died last winter, of an infected cut from a barbed-wire fence. The bones in the Parent Cave were good listeners, but they never had anything to say. She’d long ago played out her memories of talking to the Mother, gaunt as leather stretched over cedar posts. The Mother had poured out everything that a Mother could tell a Girl about living in this world, before her words fled with her bones to join all the other Parents three winters past.