Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

Falling for years, drowning in slow motion, Luc sees Rene’s corpse over and over. The bullet hole in his side, the tell-tale dilated pupils, the broken capillaries in his face. Mouth frozen open in a last abortive yell. They made him identify the body.

He only met Dark Shard once—and it was as Luc, not as Palm Strike. Palm Strike didn’t even exist yet. A few nights after he buried Rene, there was a shape in his window. A shadowy form, wearing a cloak over a chestplate, with a mask that appeared to be constantly exploding outward with black crystal pieces.

Luc heard something and sat up in bed. The light wouldn’t turn on.

“I came to convey my regrets,” Dark Shard said in a voice like the grinding of broken glass. His hands were obsidian fragments, flexing. “Your son was not meant to die. It was an unfortunate mistake. The responsible individual has been disciplined.”

“What…” Luc stammered. Naked except for filthy boxer shorts. Half drunk since the funeral. He couldn’t remember, later, what he said to Dark Shard, but none of it had any dignity. He may have begged for death. He was sure he cried and tore his own sheets. He tried, over and over, to imagine that meeting if he’d been Palm Strike.

“Your son was not meant to die,” Dark Shard said again. “We do not waste lives in such a fashion. We would have taken him for ransom, held him in our Pleasuresplinter a day or two, but he would not have been molested in any way. He might have been allowed to sample our dreamflies, which are highly addictive, depending on whether we desired a single ransom payment or an ongoing relationship.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Luc still didn’t know the answer to that question, all this time later. If Dark Shard hadn’t shown up to apologize for Rene’s death, he might not have felt such intense hatred. Luc might have remained a regular broken wreck instead of spending the fortune he’d made from his land-reclamation projects becoming Palm Strike.

The way Dark Shard explained it, they had seized Rene, as a hostage, but then they’d gotten caught in a shootout with a rival group, the Street Commanders. Rene had taken a bullet to the gut, and he was bleeding out. So one of the Shardlings, a man named Jobbo, had cradled Rene in his arms and given him something for the pain.

Rene might have survived if Jobbo hadn’t given him the drugs. The dreamflies thinned his blood and prevented coagulation, so he bled out faster. Plus Rene’s final moments were spent under the effects of a dissociative drug that made him feel lost to the world and slowed everything to a hideous crawl. He died not knowing who he was, or who loved him.

Luc has imagined Rene’s death a million times since Dark Shard described it to him. But in this frozen sensory deprivation tank, he’s living it. Rene’s eyes, like empty wells—the image keeps tormenting Luc. The harder he tries to swim, the deeper he sinks.

When the frozen waves recede and light invades, Luc cries out from deep in his strangulated throat. He’s sure he can’t face reality again, after the endless nightmare. But the light is remorseless, and the cold abandons him. He can move his arms again. At last, the lid of the cryo-module opens, and he’s looking up at a young round face. A girl. Twelve or thirteen. Red hair, in braids.

“I did it,” she says. “Hot wow, I can’t believe I did it.”

“Did what?” Luc tries to sit up, but he’s still too weak. She raises a sippy-cup of something hot and bitter, and pours it down his throat.

“I finally got this thing working. It’s been my project, for years.”

“Years?” Luc blinks. Something is wrong. He can see the chamber behind the girl’s head, and it looks old, broken. The gray serrated walls are bare except for some torn fibers and rough edges, as though every last bit of technology was stripped away long ago.

“Oh, sorry. Yeah.” She leans over further, so she can make eye contact. Her eyes are hazel. “Better start at the beginning. The Endeavour landed, like twenty years ago. Your module was busted, the wake-up sequence failed. There was no way to revive you without killing you. But I’ve been tinkering, every spare moment.”

“Everybody needs a hobby,” Luc grunts.

“Take it slow, okay?” The girl puts a threadbare blanket over him. “There was a lot of stuff here, originally. Procedures and things. You were supposed to watch some video that explained that a hundred and three years have passed on Earth and everyone you knew is dead. Plus any last messages from your loved ones back home. And there was an acclimation chamber to help you adjust to the air and gravity. But that stuff is all gone. Sorry, guy.”

“What’s your name?” This time Luc does manage to sit up.

“I’m Sasha Jacobs. Anyway, you should be glad. We almost ate you. More than once. The whole colony’s starving. Nothing grows here any more—the soil just kills all our crops. You were supposed to be some kind of big-time agriculture expert, right? I figured maybe you could help.”

“Geo-engineer.” Luc shrugs. He’s naked under the blanket. He glares at Sasha until she hands him some pants. “But that was another life, a long time ago. These days, my main skill-set involves finding bad people and making them pay. Someone sabotaged my casket. And whoever it was, they’re going to learn my rule.”

He tugs the itchy red pants on under the blanket and lifts himself up out of the cryo-module, only to collapse in a heap at Sasha’s rawhide-covered feet when his legs won’t support his weight. He twitches and grips his own knees, dry-heaving.

“You might not want to rush into anything,” Sasha says.

Luc and Sasha emerge, not from a spaceship or a survival module, but from a crude hut covered with some kind of rubbery wood, attached in overlapping wedge-shaped slats. There’s no sign of any source of that wood, though—the surrounding area is barren and the ground has a crumbly furrowed consistency, like the surface of a brain made of pale clay. Luc sees no other buildings or signs of civilization, which makes him wonder if they really did hide his cryo-module to save him from being eaten, after all.

The sun is too bright and pale—reminding Luc of the time he experimented with night-vision lenses and someone shone a floodlight in his eyes. In the blanched daylight, Sasha looks a little older. She’s a rangy girl, with arms too long for her torso and a shiny blue dress that might be made out of the upholstery fabric from one of the ship’s escape pods. Her face has freckles and a thin nose that appears to twitch constantly, perhaps in amusement or maybe because he smells bad.

“The air is higher in nitrogen than you’re used to, and the gravity—”

Luc cuts her off. “I remember the briefings. Where’s the colony?”

“Down the hill, a kilometer and a half away.” Sasha gestures. “Everyone is going to want to meet you, if you’re up for it.”

“I’m up for it.” The sooner Luc meets the pool of suspects, which is everyone who was an adult when the ship left Earth, the sooner he can start narrowing it down.

Sasha leads Luc along an unsteady slope covered with loose rocks that jab at his bare feet, and he stumbles repeatedly as the gravity catches him off guard. She keeps talking about the planet, how the other six continents have temperatures too extreme for humans to survive most of the time, but contain massive jungles full of megafauna, including nine-limbed mammoths that swing through a canopy of carnivorous fronds. She wants to visit someday.

They walk maybe three quarters of a kilometer before they reach the first buildings, which are laid out in a pinwheel pattern around the center of the colony, set in a kind of valley. Most of the buildings are made of that same spongy wood, which looks like pumice, only softer. Pipes come out of the houses and disappear into the ground. Wires snake along their rooftops, connecting to junctions on poles.