SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The room fell silent for a moment, and then Adrienne—Meg’s closest friend and colleague here in Interstellar Science and Exploration—sighed heavily and angled a lamp towards them both. "Well," she said, with a studied calm, "it sort of fell out of the sky."

Meg’s heart hit her ribcage. " Halley ?"

"No, for heaven’s sake. A supply pod." Adrienne snapped her fingers and the holograph appeared at Meg’s eye-level; Adrienne twisted her wrist and rotated the image, showing Meg the fluid lines of the thing, pyramid-shaped but with no sharp points. "It’s about the size of a transit van, I suppose. Something happened—we don’t know what—and instead of going up from Leith to Halley, it, er. Came back down."

Meg’s mouth was open. "On top of the train ?"

"Not on top of the train," Adrienne said patiently. "But pretty close, hard enough to jolt the track. The train derailed maybe another half-mile down the line, near Alnwick."

Meg sat down heavily on the edge of her desk. "Okay. I’m calm. Look at me, I’m exceptionally calm. What have you done about the pod?"

"A team of investigators are flying out at dawn. It was an unmanned shuttle—they’ll get the flight recorder and recover what they can of the cargo."

"Okay, good." Meg took a breath. "What do we know about”—she picked up the sheaf of notes presumably being prepared for the minister—“Campbell? The boy on board the train.”

“He’s a light-field engineer, one of the core team,” Adrienne said, shrugging. “They’re all on furlough, you know—three weeks till launch preparations begin in earnest. It was the King’s Cross to Edinburgh train, we think he was visiting his parents."

"Oh, God," Meg said, picturing them waiting for him at the station, then lifted her head. "The last Friday train, due in—midnight, I suppose?" She glanced at her watch; it was coming up on two in the morning, and Saturday, now. “Adrienne, get a team and a report together, what happens if we have to do this launch without him, what are our options, that kind of thing.”

“We can’t,” Adrienne said, “not in three weeks—the training alone would be prohibitive, and the Halley light field, it’s attuned to the minds of the particular…”

Meg waved her silent. “Just do it, Adrienne, please? Best options no matter how bad they are. In the meantime—what’s that?”

That slowly resolved itself into an image, blurred on the white projection wall. “Ms Tripathi, is that you? Good evening.”

“Good evening, Minister,” Meg said, and bit down the hysterical laugh. Apparently Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Interstellar Science and Exploration chose to sleep in natty blue-and-white striped pyjamas. As though reading her mind, he glanced down at himself on the screen, then lifted his hand. “Transparency in government is everything, Ms Tripathi.”

“Yes, Minister.” Meg allowed herself a very quick smile; it seemed like there might not be many in her immediate future.

“What can you tell me so far?”

Meg counted off on her fingers. “One. It was an unmanned shuttle accident that caused the derailment. Two. One of Halley’s launch crew was definitely on board, a Scottish light-field engineer named Leonard Ansari-Campbell, who may be injured, or"—she hesitated—"worse. Three. The train derailed near Alnwick.”

“Has anyone else been hurt?” the minister asked, and Meg took a moment to sigh for their collective human decency; perhaps she ought to have asked Adrienne that first. “We don’t know, Minister. Although I suspect our paucity of news is good news.”

“Is it possible,” the minister said, “that I’m closer to the site than you are?”

Meg shook her head. “Closer in distance but not in time.” The minister’s constituency was on the Sefton coast, not far from Camell Laird where Halley had been built. “It’s a direct route up from London. In fact”—she made the decision—“I’ll go up there myself.”

“You don’t want to attract media attention,” Adrienne was saying worriedly from beside her, and Meg nodded.

“I’ll take the first scheduled service up. I believe the line is open as far as Morpeth.”

“Good luck, Meg,” the minister said with kindness in his eyes. “Keep me informed. And let’s try and keep this from the newspapers as long as we can, please? Particularly”—his expression stilled for a moment, becoming unreadable—“the issue of the Alnwick coroner’s sinecure.”

Too late, Meg realised why he had been asking about other deaths. “Yes, Minister,” she said, and was grateful for the cup of coffee Adrienne placed straight into her hands.

The first scheduled service of the day from King’s Cross turned out to be at 5.15am. Meg called for another taxi and went home to dress more suitably for her day, discarding the pink-sequinned dress in the bathroom. “About last night,” Deepika tried, perched on the counter top, but Meg shook her off.

“Not now,” she said. “I have to go up north. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

“To Alnwick,” Deepika said, and Meg nodded, taking a minute to stand still in the quiet kitchen. Deepika had clearly been awake since Meg’s departure; it was clean and tidy in here now, with dishes gleaming in the rack, and no other sign of the party.

Meg sighed, relaxing a little. “I need to see my engineer, and perhaps”—she gestured—“keep it a little quiet, if I can. Try and avoid any inquiries into the sinecure list."

“That sounds ridiculous,” Deepika said, and Meg took a deep breath.

“If it gets out,” she said clearly, “if some journalist figures out the right sort of questions to ask, and why wouldn’t they, about Halley and Campbell and Alnwick, then there won’t be a launch whether or not we have a full complement of light-field engineers. The scandal will kill us. So don’t tell me it sounds ridiculous.”

"Oh, not at all," Deepika said, with a crackle of anger, "not at all ridiculous, nor political. Meg, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry you had to overhear those things last night. And I’m sorry if”—she was gesturing now, her palms overturned—“it turns out the mission, everything you’ve worked for…"

She trailed off, but Meg softened at her obvious sincerity. “Yeah. That’s why I’ve got to go.”

Deepika nodded, then said, fussily, “You won’t have time to get breakfast at the station. Let me make you something”—and by the time yet another taxi arrived, she’d done two rounds of ham and cheese with chutney and a little sprig of parsley, the way Meg liked it. Meg kissed her goodbye and meant it, and ate the sandwiches three hours later as the train crossed the Tyne, feeling fragile and exhausted in the dawn light.

There were train carriages strewn in the fields. From her perch on the bonnet of a jeep, Meg counted five of them, some still coupled, others strange islands in the burnt-off stalks and snow. It made Meg’s stomach turn horribly to see them like that, at perpendicular angles to how the world ought to be. "Can I help, or will I be in the way?" she asked, watching as ambulances drove down the farm tracks, wheels spinning in the mud.

"Wait till they get through the side, miss, it won’t be long," said the voice from next to her, warm and Geordie. Meg had arrived at Morpeth to find the tiny station hushed and intensely active, passengers being herded away from the misty platforms, and had not wanted to interrupt. But the first of the local constabulary she met had recognised the crystal at her throat, and not very long after that she had been brought up here along the route of the old Great North Road, the snow vivid on the trees. "It won’t be long," PC Throckley said again. "That carriage is the last one they got to. In the dark, you know."