Hugh Howey - Half Way Home

“I think it might have something to do with the conversation I had with Colony this morning.”

Kelvin frowned. “I thought you said that went well.”

“Yeah,” Tarsi said. “According to Oliver it was a ‘miracle.’”

I frowned at her. “Colony said it was going to change some things. I thought it meant we would get back to planning for the future and chill out on the rocket schedule, maybe give morale a boost.”

“How does making guns help that?” Tarsi asked.

“It doesn’t,” I said. I glanced back and forth between them. “Unless you decide you don’t give a fuck about morale.”

We stared at each other in silence, unbroken until the whistle of a bombfruit descended from the canopy, causing us to tense up, fearful of the impact. It had become our normal reaction to the sound ever since the tremors. A sign, perhaps, of our growing learned sense of helplessness.

I had more nightmares that night—the worst ones yet. In one, it wasn’t bombfruit falling from the trees, but the heads of the four-hundred-plus colonists who hadn’t made it out of the vat module. They rained down on us, streaming fire, and landed charred and black but still screaming. We gathered them up from the ground and ate them raw, lapping at the stuff spilling from the cracked skulls, caring more about our survival than the foul taste. And in the dream, I knew it wouldn’t be long before we ran out of heads and those of us left alive would turn on each other.

A few days later, shadows of these dreams leaked out into the real world as a new group formed. The first person I saw with a gun on his side wasn’t Hickson, as I expected it to be—it was Oliver. Not that he got his weapon first, I just wasn’t actively avoiding him the way I was Hickson and some others.

I passed him on my way to the power module, where I was helping build the mission package. The bright golden object gleamed from his hip and captured my attention. He greeted me, but I couldn’t hear what he said, so distracted was I by the sight of him carrying something I knew, even if only from training modules, to be very dangerous.

“I said good afternoon,” Oliver repeated.

I nodded, looked up, and tried my best to return his smile. “Missed you at lunch,” I said. “And the floor of the tractor gets pretty cold without you there.”

Oliver frowned. “Yeah, weird how I miss sleeping like that. But I’ve moved into the command module full-time. Hickson made me an enforcer. No more bombfruit duty for me, scraping up all that green mess.”

“An enforcer?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“We’ve been falling more and more off schedule. The enforcers make sure we get back on.” He raised a finger and twirled it in a large circle above his head. “We’ve got flood lights going up today so we can work later into the evening. And with the gift we received the other day, nobody should go hungry as we wrap this project up.”

“Wrap it up?” I asked. “Don’t we need to be thinking about the long haul? Where’s the power for these floodlights gonna come from? We’re rationing energy here in the very module that’s suppose to make it.”

“We’re cutting juice back from the security perimeter. There hasn’t been any sign of predators—” Oliver stopped and looked me up and down. “Jeez, Porter, you sound pretty tense. Is everything alright? Do you need some spiritual guidance to get you through these dark times?”

I laughed, then felt bad for doing so as I saw a spasm of pain in Oliver’s cheeks. “No,” I said. “I’m fine. I just—I guess some of us are finding it hard to sacrifice so much for a project we aren’t really being told anything about.”

Oliver nodded. “I understand,” he said. “You scientists are always the first to become doubters.”

“It isn’t that, it’s just—”

Oliver raised his hand. “I’m here to talk, to help you, but not to listen. I don’t want you filling my head with any… whatever —” He turned to go.

“Oliver, wait. I didn’t mean to—”

He turned, his face twisted up in an expression of pure rage that brought me to a halt. “Colony gave you life ,” he spat. “Don’t you understand that? It taught you everything you know. None of us would even be here without it. If everything had gone perfect, if there were a half thousand of us clearing these lands and breeding like animals, would you question your existence then? Would you curse the person who made you and taught you how to live your life? Or would you carry on building yourself a better world in the service of Colony and country?”

“I don’t see—”

“I know you don’t, Porter. You don’t see what’s going on. No matter what happens here, some of us have it in our hearts to obey and some have the compulsion to rebel. I bet if I were telling you to farm these lands, you would be out building yourself a rocket. We should probably be using some of that—oh, what do you call it?”

“Reverse psychology?” I asked.

“Yeah, some of that.” Oliver jabbed his finger at me. “You know, you’ve been miserable since the day we were born, and that’s probably your lot in life, but not me. I know the glory of the gods, and I will work in their service. I’ve been an enforcer of that since day one, with or without this,” he said, slapping at the gun on his waist.

“You need to search your heart,” Oliver told me. “Figure out what you’re working toward. Get right with the gods.”

He turned and stormed off.

I just watched him go, feeling sorry for him. Then damning him for assaulting me the way he had. For planting a seed of doubt—

That night provided the first glimpse of our new life, in all the harshness of ten-thousand watt bulbs. After dinner, we were ordered back to our stations to work until we met the day’s quota. For our group, that meant finishing the three firing rocket phases attached to the end of the payload body. In order to get the package wherever it was going, three separate canisters full of two-part propellant would need to fire before dropping away. Those of us not really qualified to consider ourselves “scientists” worked on that, while another group soldered together the circuits that made up the navigation array.

While we worked, one of the guys that used to be with construction—a big lad I’d seen Kelvin speak to during meals—stood by the door, one hand resting on his gun. It was strange how readily we just went along with his presence, most of us publicly accepting the new rules with a shrug, only to bitch and moan once nobody could hear. Muriel, the girl helping me plumb the mixing valves for each of the three tanks, slept in the same module as the guy enforcing us. Several times, she tried to strike up a conversation, asking him how he was enjoying his new job, but he never replied. What little joy there was in our payload group—the jokes and gossip that gave us a tune to work by—had been sucked right out of the power module. Sapped like the energy being diverted from the defense grid to feed the demanding lights.

So we worked in a silence punctuated by the occasional grunt of frustration from someone in our group. Every now and then, a bombfruit whistled outside and all of us cringed in fear. Even though there was a roof overhead to protect us.

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to things. My head was full of an education on how to help brains on the verge of breaking, but all I’d seen around me was them bending more and more under a growing strain and somehow remaining whole. For all the studying I’d done on the fragility of a thing, here I was a witness and example of its incredible perseverance.