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

50 minutes oxygen remaining

My display is giving me regular updates now. I’m trying to stay calm, breathing as shallowly as possible, but I know I’m pushing my luck.

“How’s your O2?” I ask, not daring to take my eyes off you.

“Getting low.” Jorge’s reply is tense.

“How low?”

“25, 30 minutes.”

My stomach knots. Our air compressors would have switched off at roughly the same time. Jorge’s lower reserves must be due to his fall and the corresponding pain. He’ll have been breathing harder than me.

“Hang on, mate. Short breaths. We’ll get back.” But I don’t know if we will.

I speed up as much as I dare, watching your nimble form all the while. It’s almost as if you recognise our new urgency. Your pace picks up along with the buggy’s. You shift one way and I follow, realising moments later that we’ve bypassed a boulder hulking in the brown fog. We skirt obstacles I can’t see, time and again, and I can almost feel Jorge squeezing his eyes shut as we rumble along in the blinding haze.

20 minutes oxygen remaining

I risk a glance at Jorge. His head is nodding.

“Jorge! Don’t you pass out on me!”

“Lightheaded,” he mutters.

I’m feeling that way myself as I eke out my remaining supply. Your lithe shape seems to grow clearer even though the dust as is thick as ever. Your fur should be tinged red from the dust, but it isn’t. It’s not even shifting in the light winds. I suddenly long to feel its softness again. Your velvet ears. Your rough pads as you rest your paw on my knee.

Jorge’s head drops against his chest. The movement startles me out of my storm-lulled reverie.

“Jorge. Jorge!” He doesn’t respond.

15 minutes oxygen remaining

We’re not going to make it. A swell of panic rises in me for the first time. I’ve never doubted your ability to get us home. But you can’t help us breathe.

“Baskerville.” I whisper your name, not sure if I’m seeking reassurance or a miracle.

You stop. You look right at me, and I’m pivoting on your gaze, my dizzy head finding an anchor in your eyes. I brake before I know what I’m doing, and suddenly…Behind you. The settlement lights, finally glowing through the dust, beacons of safety in the gloom. We shouldn’t be here yet. Did you find a shortcut, my four-pawed scout?

I pull up beside the nearest airlock and press the activation control. The lock cycles and turns green, and the door slides up. Whooshes of dust precede the buggy inside, and we’re home. Back to safety and clear vision and medical aid. The air clears as the chamber is flooded with breathable atmosphere. I pull off Jorge’s helmet and am relieved to see he’s still breathing, albeit in a ragged wheeze. He gasps in air and coughs on dust, and I tear off my own helmet and do the same. My head clears and I find myself looking for you as the dust dissipates and settles to the ground.

I don’t know what I expect to see. You’re not here. Of course you aren’t. Yet the weight of loss threatens to swamp me again after following you all this way. Jorge groans in pain as he tries to move, and I’m back in the moment, glad of the distraction from my self-pity.

I manage to help him inside, where Priya, Anders, and Lucy are waiting. They welcome us with open arms and smiles of relief. They whisk Jorge off to sickbay and I head back to clean up the buggy and put it away before dust settles firmly into its mechanisms. Alone again, I lean against the bulkhead and breathe deeply, fighting waves of fresh sorrow. I miss you so god-damned much.

Standing here, under bright lights, breathing plentiful air, my face free of its visor and my vision clear right across the airlock, a twist of anxiety forms in my stomach. Was I completely mad to risk so much? Sure, I found Jorge, but I could have killed myself trying, or doomed us both on the journey back. What was I thinking?

The mind plays terrible tricks when one’s senses are impaired. I recall I’d been thinking of you, missing you anew, only moments before the storm hit. Did I really just risk my own life and that of my fellow pioneer on the basis of dust visions and wishful thinking? We’d have been dead if I hadn’t. But even that truth doesn’t ease the lingering panic at the realisation of what an utter fool I’ve been.

I shake my head of the fruitless thought and grab the vacuum brush to clean up the buggy. There’s a fresh layer of dust all over the floor, too. My bootprints mark it as I approach, and there…

I choke back a sob. It can’t be.

It is.

I kneel in the dust and cup its shape in my hands.

It’s a single pawprint, perfectly rendered, perfectly yours, imprinted like none before and none to come, in the ancient Martian dust.

Originally published by Crossed Genres

Daddy lived in the cupboard under the stairs. I hardly ever saw him. Myra saw her dad twice a week, even though he didn’t live with them. Daddy still lived with us, but his eyes were dim and his limbs were still. Sometimes I’d sneak into the cupboard when Mum wasn’t looking and dust the cobwebs from his skin. I would sit beside him and lift one of his heavy arms around me and pretend he was really hugging me even though the arm hung limply beside me if I let go of his hand. But I could still lean against his steadfast frame and breathe in his faint metallic scent, laced with stale traces of his cologne.

It was the scent of safety, and love, and protection.

I took on two paper routes when Daddy was put away. For the first week he remained lifeless on the sofa, sitting there like he’d just sat down to watch TV or help me with homework. But one day I came home to find him gone. Mum came in from work and told me, in a tight voice, that she’d put him under the stairs. ‘For now.’ Because we didn’t know what had broken, and it was too painful to have him sitting there.

People had started reading the news on paper again with the price of electricity so high. Paper needed delivering, and we needed the money. Mum already worked every available shift, so the more I could help out, the sooner we’d have Daddy home again. Properly home. Sitting at the table while we ate dinner. Waiting for me when I got home from school. Mowing the back lawn on a sunny afternoon. Not slumped in the dusty darkness with the spiders and creaking stair boards.

Months passed and our meagre savings still weren’t near enough. My birthday was coming up, and I cried at the thought of spending it without Daddy. My first ever birthday without him. My thirteenth. It was supposed to be a big day when you became a teenager. I just wanted to stay twelve until we were a family again.

Mum heard me crying and came to sit on my bed. She stroked my hair, not needing to ask what was wrong.

“What if we don’t ever save up enough, Mum?” I asked, my voice hitching on a sob.

“We will, sweetheart. As long as we keep our belts tight and put aside everything we can, eventually we’ll have enough.”

“But that could take years!”

“I know, baby. But we’ll do it. He would never give up on us, and we won’t ever give up on him.”

I knew it was true; I’d known Daddy’s story my whole life. Mum hadn’t given up on him after the accident, either. Even when the doctors told her not to cling to a pipedream. Even when the dream came true and she was offered the uncertainty of testing a prototype that had never been tried before. He was the man she loved. The father of her unborn child. She had to give him a chance, even a radical one on the fringes of science. His body was useless, but his mind was alive and trapped.

So they freed him. His first body was little more than a computer, but they built him a proper one with synthetic flesh and the likeness of his own face. And he was my daddy. The only one I’d ever known.