Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

What would Palm Strike do? He wouldn’t be sitting here in the dirt kissing his knees. Palm Strike would find a way to save the colony and take down the pushers.

“Can you help me get some gear?” he asks Sasha. “I need a helmet, body armor, gloves. It needs to be black, or I need some dye. Do you know where I can score some?”

She stares at him, her eyes ginormous. Then, slowly, she nods.

Palm Strike never had a sidekick. For a while, he let Josiah create a fake identity as his partner No-Shadow, not to do any actual fighting but to talk to the cops once they stopped trying to kill Palm Strike. No-Shadow’s outfit was all cape and full-face mask, plus some gloves with spikes coming out of them. Ridiculous.

One night, Palm Strike got back from busting heads but No-Shadow was nowhere to be found. Turned out No-Shadow had gone on a ride-along with a pair of detectives, Lancaster and Marsh, so they could talk his ear off.

“They think you’re doing more harm than good,” Josiah explained when he got home. “You shut down the Street Commanders and took out some of the Shardlings, but in the process you’ve only strengthened Dark Shard. Both by eliminating his competition and culling his weakest people.”

“You shouldn’t judge an exterminator halfway through a job,” Luc grunted.

“But that’s the thing. It’s like, during the Great Leap Forward, Mao sent every peasant in China out to kill sparrows, on the theory that sparrows were eating seeds and reducing the harvests. But once the sparrows were all gone, turned out they had been eating locusts, which had been eating the grain. It was an ecosystem. When all the sparrows were gone, everybody starved.”

Josiah said these things while he was making a sandwich for Luc, still wearing his big black cape and unfeasibly spiky gloves as he stood at the marble kitchen counter.

“Maybe Palm Strike isn’t the best solution,” Luc said after he stopped laughing at No-Shadow. “But he’s all I’m capable of, right now.”

The next few days, Luc spends every waking hour traveling around and taking soil samples, and every night watching the rotating cast of hoodlums selling drugs in the town square. He hasn’t seen much in the way of “peacekeepers” in this town of three thousand souls, but the dealers are there from sundown to sunup. They mostly trade drugs for food, which means there’s a stockpile somewhere.

You wouldn’t want to be the only one eating when everyone else is starving to death. You’d find out the hard way that nobody is an island.

One day, when Luc’s sitting in front of the house, Clarissa comes out and sits with him. He is trying to nibble his breakfast so he can give most of it to Sasha. She’s growing, and he has his healing mojo. “Starvation isn’t as cool as when I was a teenager trying to be a ballerina back on Earth,” Clarissa says, with sympathy. “It’s more like a chronic pain, and exhaustion. I can’t think straight and I feel like I’m constantly getting sick. It just sucks.”

“Starvation was pretty widespread back on Earth, too,” Luc says. “It’s just that here, there’s no class of people who aren’t starving. It’s more egalitarian.”

“God, this colony is such a clusterfuck.” Clarissa kicks the white dirt. “We all had jobs, most of which turned out to be irrelevant. I was supposed to be the marine biologist. We’ve barely studied the ocean here. We cannibalized the diving equipment early on and we haven’t been able to catch any marine life at all. It’s a joke. So now I’m Becky Hoffman’s assistant instead.”

“I bet Hoffman’s an okay boss,” Luc says. Clarissa just snorts.

There’s a long pause, both of them watching the sky turn pale. “Be careful with Sasha,” Clarissa says out of nowhere. “That whole time she was working on your pod, she was trying to develop her mechanic skills. But I also caught her looking at your face sometimes, as if she thought you were going to replace her dad or something.”

“I’m very comfortable having people project onto me,” said Luc.

“Just don’t break her heart, okay?” she says. Luc nods, slowly.

At night, down near the dirtiest part of the river, people gather in a three-walled structure and sing, holding hands and swaying on their feet. Luc hears their muffled chanting as he stakes out the drug dealers, hiding behind the Town Hall’s partially disassembled ancillary cockpit.

Two dawns in a row, Luc tries to follow the dealers when they leave the town square with their ill-gotten food supply. But both nights, the food disappears. He can’t see where they’re stashing it. They leave their cozy perch, walk around that ugly sculpture, go through the tight space between the two municipal buildings, then out toward the polluted estuary that runs through Hopetown. By that point, they’ve ditched their crate of food and they’re swinging their unladen arms, eager to crash out. Their route takes them right near the guard watching the food dispensary, but she doesn’t worry about people carrying food around, just about them taking food from the communal store. Luc searches every spot the dealers passed on their route. No sign.

Sasha has found him a banged-up helmet, a chest-plate, and a single ancient glove. “When do we make our move?” she asks every few minutes.

Luc keeps thinking about Mao and the sparrows. The pests that turned out to be essential. And then he thinks about the terraforming process.

On the fourth morning since he woke from his long sleep, he gets up and tells Sasha he needs to do something on his own. Then he takes off walking, toward the polar geyser. He walks for hours, until his feet are throbbing and the sunburn overtaxes his healing mojo. He hasn’t taken a long walk in the wilderness since Rene was born, and he’s forgotten how giant the sky can loom, or how it feels to be miles away from other people. His mind empties as the landscape unfolds, ridge after ridge, and he’s weirdly calm. But he’s also stewing. He’s jaw-grinding mad at Sasha for waking him up in the first place, at Clarissa for telling him not to break Sasha’s heart, and at this whole colony for being so perfectly self-destructive. He keeps yelling at people in his head. As he passes the geyser, it seems totally inert, a dry depression, but it could blow without warning. He keeps walking, the sun in his eyes, until he sees the first silhouettes on the horizon. The sun is behind him by the time he gets to the trees.

Up close, the white spikes rise up so far they seem to converge in the sky. Thousands of them, singing with the wind. Zigzag spikes extend from them, and they remind him of a power-staff Palm Strike experimented with wielding for a few months. Luc hasn’t felt anything like joy since he lost Rene, but he feels an unaccustomed thrill of wonder in the middle of all this.

Then he crouches down and opens his bag of equipment. Time to get to work. He grabs a soil sample and adds nanosensors to it.

The sun’s almost gone and two moons are taunting him, and he still can’t make sense of how these things live, or what they’re doing. They have no roots, no leaves. They fix the soil and make it fertile, that much is clear from his first samples—but they’re too far from the colony’s current site to farm here without relocating everyone. Which could actually be impossible, given that the colony only has a few small ATVs, and the exertion of moving would kill most of the colonists even quicker.

But if Luc could figure out what these things are, and how they live… He takes samples of their “bark,” he digs around them, he makes scans. He has a grinding headache, but he keeps working.

It’s almost a relief when Luc hears a loud crack and feels a gouging pain in his chest, and looks down to realize he’s been shot. He keels over, painting the white dust crimson. His chest is spurting blood like that geyser. He feels everything going black for a moment.