Jay Lake: Last Plane to Heaven

When I turned, I couldn’t see the camp.

I ran until my legs gave out. I’d lost the Stinger rack somewhere, but my Smitty still banged against my thigh as I stumbled. I reeked of propellant, blood, my own sweat. The sky above me glittered like a city in the heavens, New York ascended to the country of the saints.

Oh, God, what had I done?

Then I was down in the grass, too, clawing at the loose stems growing clumped from the gravel floor of the desert. They seemed warm to my touch. The plants crinkled in my hands, bending and snapping.

Was this what Nichols had felt?

Nichols .

What the hell had happened to him? To me? To the sky?

How had I shot a man with a Stinger, I wondered. I remembered the cold knife of ice. And something was wrong with the stars.

Something was wrong, all right.

I laid the Smitty on my chest, pointing the barrel at my right foot. The weapon was cold and heavy. If I shot my toes off out here, I’d likely bleed to death before help arrived. Assuming help ever did arrive. But I couldn’t run any farther—the scarred muscles of my thighs were already knotted beyond pain.

Item: I could not find or see the camp, even though I had a straight backtrail.

Item: I didn’t believe a Stinger would kill a man at point-blank range, not that way. It was an antiaircraft missile, and the warhead hadn’t exploded.

Item: One by one, my boys were getting those headaches.

I realized that I was dreaming. That space bitch of Hannaday’s was doing this to me. My finger rested on the trigger of my pistol.

If I was dreaming, I should just be able to wake up. My mind was my own.

Item: The trigger was oily and chill as it should have been. I could even feel the familiar scarring on the curved metal. Had I ever dreamed this real?

Item: I was dead out here anyway.

But this was going to hurt like fuck, and I hated the thought of dying stupid.

I gritted my teeth and pulled the trigger.

“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.

“Huh?”

I looked around the ger I shared with Nichols. Had he been screaming?

Fuck no, I’d been screaming. I threw the blankets back, looking for my bloody, shattered foot.

Nothing but a smooth black boot.

“Where the hell is he?”

“Nichols,” said Becque. “You know already?”

I had the Smitty out then, aimed at Becque’s face. “Listen to me, ami .” Did spacegirl speak French? Did it matter, inside my dreams? “Quel est le deuxième prénom de Henri?”

Becque put his hands up, backing slowly toward the ger ’s door. “Hey, Allen. Easy.”

“Respondez-vous, Becque.”

“Allen…”

I shot him in the face.

“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.

I rolled out of my cot, snap-drawing the Smitty. He ducked out, the orange wooden door slamming hard. I was up and after him.

Outside the sky blazed like Manhattan in heaven. The camp was gone, just my ger in the middle of the Gobi. No Becque, either.

Dreamland again, then. But I had some authority in this version.

“Come out,” I said. “Get out here and talk to me.” Smitty braced, I turned a slow circle.

No one but me and the ger .

I imagined the ger gone, and on my next circuit it was. I was alone in the Gobi under a blazing sky.

The sky…

I looked up.

The stars were moving. Fucking dreamland. They swirled, coiled flaming snakes on the prowl, making spirals that would suck down my soul if I let them.

“Stop it,” I shouted, aiming the Smitty upward. “I can’t give you what you want if you don’t tell me what it is!”

The spirals flowed into a face. A shaggy face.

No, not shag. Grass.

Nichols’s eyes winked down from high above. His voice was on the wind, made of the noises of a thousand miles of desert.

“Allen.”

I aimed toward one sparkling, swirling eye. “It’s you, isn’t it? Spacegirl.”

The eye in my sights winked with a noise like a storm over water.

“What were you doing in orbit?”

“Dreaming real,” said the night-hunting birds.

Dreaming real. She was black, blacker than anyone I’d ever met. Radiation burns?

Dreaming. Abos, from Australia. “Dreamtime, not dreamland,” I said.

“Different in the sky,” the snow leopards coughed.

I didn’t believe a fucking word of it. “Wake up!” I shouted, slamming the butt of the Smitty into Hannaday’s scars on my thighs.

“Get up. Now.” It was Becque, looking scared.

I’d brought myself out of it this time, in control. I hoped. One hand on the Smitty, I said, “Quel est le deuxième prénom de Henri?”

Becque’s fear shifted to disgust. “Henri, he does not have a middle name, bibelot .”

“Fuck you, too. What’s going on?”

“Nichols, he is outside screaming about God’s iron knives.”

“Yeah. Get that girl out of wherever she is, and awake.”

The door banged shut. I grabbed my Stinger rack—still loaded, I was pleased to notice—then stopped.

What good was a weapon going to do me?

The real question was whether this girl was Hannaday’s agent, his tool, or his prize. And I didn’t believe that even Hannaday could make things happen in orbit. She had to be stolen.

The real weapon was in the head, like always. Hers was just a little more to the point than most of ours.

Outside, Beier was sitting on Nichols’s chest. They were both breathing hard, and there was some blood. Hard to tell in the starlit dark.

The sky was normal.

Thank God.

Spacegirl was in front of me, dangled between Becque and Etchy. She smiled softly. The smile of someone who expects to die.

“You’re abo,” I said.

“Anangu,” she replied, in a soft voice that reeked of Oxford and MI-5. Her first word to us.

“Anangu. With power over the Dreamtime.”

She shrugged within her captors’ grip.

“What were you doing in orbit?”

Another shrug.

“You belong to Hannaday now. You know Hannaday?” I waited, but she didn’t respond. “He owns all of us. He owns our contracts, he owns our airplane, and he owns our every waking moment. But…” I stared hard into her eyes. “He’s never going to own our fucking dreams.”

Her smile faded.

“So. Can you dream him real, the way you’ve been dreaming us? Can you put the knives in his head?”

Shrug.

“Listen to me.” I leaned in close, almost touching her face. “If you want to walk away, to live a life of your own and be free of him, you’d better find that shit inside you. Because when Hannaday comes back with the last plane, if we don’t smoke him, he’s going to smoke us.”

“Allen.” Etchy’s voice was soft. Careful.

“Yeah?” I didn’t break eye contact with spacegirl.

“You are more crazy than Nichols.”

“Shut up,” I suggested.

Spacegirl found her smile again.

We gave up all pretense of following Hannaday’s plan. Instead we sat around and worked up scenarios for taking the Antonov without killing the pilot. For responding to a Delta-force type extraction attempt on the spacegirl. For long-term escape and evasion.

Every bit of it hopeless. Every one of us knew that in our bones. They all stayed away from me except for Nichols. The rest of the boys thought I was crazy, or crazier. Nichols didn’t care.

Spacegirl just smiled, ate our chow, and slept a lot. I hoped like hell she was cooking up a Dreamtime whammy for Hannaday.