Dropnauts Read online

  The ship-to-ship radio blared to life with a loud burst of static. “This is Dax on the Bristol. We’ve taken a hit. I repeat—” More static. “—hit. there’s a lot of space junk—”

  Hera swiveled and pulled herself out of her seat and into the pilot’s chair with the ease of long practice.

  Sam’s voice came from the Liánhuā at the rear of the convoy. “Bristol, you there?”

  Nervous silence filled the Zhenyi. No response.

  Hera glanced back at her teammates. Rai was pale, sweat beading his forehead, the chess game forgotten. “Everyone buckle in.”

  The radio buzzed again. “…lost contact. Something hit us and spun us around. We’re ok.”

  Hera breathed a sigh of relief and hit the comm button. “What kind of something? The way’s supposed to be clear all the way to the Launchpad.” She activated the scanner. Five glowing red dots floated over her deck, one for each ship.

  “Don’t know. It was too fast—” Loud static cut him off again.

  “What’s happening?” Rai sounded panicked, his voice raspy.

  “Keep it together, Rai.” She couldn’t deal with his fear and this at the same time. Hera leaned forward, staring at the dots—each of the jumpers were still there, spread out in a lazy line. She sighed with relief. “Dax, you there?”

  “Yeah. We’re losing pressure…” Dax’s usually calm, suave voice broke. “Hissing hell, it cracked the hull—”

  An apocalyptic boom, then nothing.

  All the blood drained from Hera’s face, and her stomach twisted. Please let them be okay. Hera looked at the lights hovering above the deck again. The Bristol’s dot was gone.

  Sam’s voice crackled over the comm. “What happened? Zhenyi, can you see the Bristol?”

  Hera was racing to scan the space ahead of them. “Unexpected debris. I think—she’s gone, Sir.” Concentrate. She had to figure this out fast.

  Dax, Jess, Ola, and Xiu Ying… cracking hell. She bit her lip hard, tasting blood.

  Rai sobbed quietly behind her.

  “Must have been a space-junk collision somewhere since they scanned it last, scattering more debris.” Ghost sounded calm, but that was one of his tells. He was totally freaking out inside.

  “No shit, Sherlock.” Her eyes tracked the screen, looking for danger. She had no idea who in the whole pantheon of history Sherlock was, and right now she didn’t care.

  Something flared bright blue above the deck. “Hang on!” She fired one of the aft thrusters, and a gust of steam pushed them out of the way of a piece of debris. It slipped past the window, a white-encased leg. Hera fought not to hurl.

  “Oh crap. Wasn’t that—”

  “Shut up!” The Bristol was gone. Better not to know who it had belonged to. “Sam, we have visual on Jumper One’s debris. Advise course correction. Sending revised path.” Her hands flew across the deck. Hold it together, Hera.

  “Affirmative. One moment.”

  Hera watched the sensor field nervously. “Ghost, sealant ready?”

  “Yeah. Just a sec.” He rummaged around in the webbing along the wall of the craft.

  Something struck the metal skin of the jumper. Air hissed out as the temperature and air pressure dropped precipitously. “Ghost!”

  “On it!” He leapt out of his seat to find the pinhole puncture and applied a dab of sealant. It sucked into the hole and froze, holding tight. “Got it.”

  More blips on the sensor field. “Hold on!” Hera fired the thrusters again, and the ship threw her sideways. No belt! She flew up out of the pilot’s seat, slamming hard against the metal ceiling of the Zhenyi.

  Tovey, I love you… Searing pain was followed by darkness.

  “Hera!” Ghost unbuckled his belt and leapt to grab the pilot. He pulled her down toward her chair gently.

  “Careful.” Tien floated next to him, checking Hera’s body through her white suit. “She might have broken something.” Together they maneuvered her into her seat and buckled her in. “Rai, take the controls. I’ll check her over.” Tien pulled out her medkit from her seat’s webbing.

  The ship was tumbling off-course, moving away from the others at a rapid pace.

  Rai was still buckled in. He was hyperventilating, looking back and forth from the controls to Hera. “It’s not… I’m not supposed to… I’m not ready—”

  Tien knelt in front of him, taking his face in her hands. “Rai, snap out of it, dammit! If you don’t get this jumper under control, we’re all dead!” Tien pointed at the pilot’s seat, moving out of his way.

  Rai swallowed hard and nodded. “Okay.” He unbuckled and slipped past them to settle into the pilot’s seat. He stared at the deck as if all his training had fled. “I’m just the backup—I never expected to have to actually fly this thing.”

  “Tien, take care of Hera. I’ve got this.”

  Tien met his eyes and nodded.

  “Zhenyi, everything okay over there?” Sam’s synthetic voice over the com was calm, reassuring.

  Rai’s teeth chattered. “I… I don’t know what to do.”

  Ghost squeezed past Tien and activated the comm. “Sam, this is Ghost. We’re okay. Hera sustained an injury when she rolled the ship to avoid a patch of space junk.” He let go of the comm button. “Rai, you’re going to be okay. Just take a deep breath, buddy.”

  Rai nodded. He closed his eyes, putting his hands on the cool deck. His breathing slowed.

  “Injury? How extensive is it?” Sam actually sounded concerned.

  “Unclear, sir. Tien’s checking her over now. She wasn’t buckled in.” Rai’s cheek was inches from his. Ghost took a deep breath. Keep it together, big guy.

  “Where’s Rai?”

  “He’s getting this bucket of bolts back on course.” Ghost squeezed Rai’s shoulder and thumbed off the comm. -You got this, pal.-

  -Thanks.- Rai leaned in to the jumper’s deck and went to work, monitoring the debris sensor, his hand flying through the navigational controls in the air like a master piano player.

  Being so close to Rai again set off all kinds of alarms in his head. They’d kept a certain distance between them the last two months. A healthy distance, for Rai.

  Ghost was toxic, and he knew it.

  Rai gently nudged the ship back into a straight trajectory with the attitude jets, reducing the Zhenyi’s spin and wobble. Bit by bit, he pulled her back to center, and then swung them around toward their destination.

  “You’re doing it, squirt.” Ghost winced. Tiger, buddy, pal, squirt. He was working overtime to put Rai back in the friend zone, in his head. He squeezed Rai’s shoulder and pulled away before his teammate could see how the close proximity rattled him.

  Ghost turned to find Tien crouching next to Hera, running a sensor over the pilot’s forehead. “How’s Hera?”

  “She’s okay, I think. Just a concussion.” Tien sounded calm too, a doctor’s voice, serious and reassuring. “She’ll have a nasty goose egg on her head when she wakes up.”

  Ghost laughed. “What the hell is a goose?”

  “Earth bird. Long neck, swam in ponds.”

  Rai’s voice had that know-it-all tone, and Ghost couldn’t help but mock him. “You’re such a geek. So it’s like a swan?”

  Rai didn’t seem to notice. “Kind of. They had enormous eggs. Like giant chickens.”

  Ghost shivered. The idea of eating something that came out of a bird’s ass squicked him out. Still, for all that he kidded Rai, Ghost was proud of him. “You did good. I knew you would.”

  Rai flicked the comm back on. “This is Rai on the Zhenyi. Back on track, sir.”

  There were cheers in the background. “Excellent work, Rai.” Sam sounded dejected, though, different from his usual mech self. Ghost frowned. Since when did Sam have feelings?

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Rai?”

  “It’s not your fault. The debris maps must have been wrong, or there was a collision somewhere. Or—”

  “Thanks, Rai. But everything on this mission is my responsibility. And my fault if it goes wrong.” The comm link cut out.

  Rai looked up at Ghost, his eyebrow raised.

  “I know. Weird.” He picked a floating rook out of the air and set it back down on the magnetic chessboard.

  Four of their fellow dropnauts were gone, just like that. The sense of security, the boring normalcy of the trip was shattered.

  Ghost sighed. This spin just got real.

  Sam sat back in his chair, running a diagnostic on his mental state. There was something corrosive in his programming, a sense of wrongness that gnawed at him. His diagnostic identified it as guilt.

  He shunted the feeling away again, but it was harder each time. When he got to the Launchpad, he’d have to ask Alpha for a tune-up.

  ...fileto > memcache…

  He’d never been in such sustained contact in such intimate and challenging situations with humans before. They’d finally gotten to him with their complicated emotions.

  ...access > communications module…

  He relayed the news of the Bristol’s destruction to Alpha, who would pass it on to the families of the dead.

  I should be the one to tell them.

  He retrieved the strange feeling again and spun it around, considering it as if it were a math problem, this strange new wrinkle in his programming.

  Guilt made no sense here. He had committed no wrong act. He and Alpha had worked together to chart the space junk left in Earth orbit by human activity before and during the Crash. He had acted correctly based on all the knowledge they had at hand.

  ...access > data: debris map…

  Nothing. But there was no way to track it all, not without a fleet of satellites—or to predict the changes that would occur, for instance, when a piece of the old Frontier Station collided with one of the old Cino-African Syndicate space mines.

  Too many variables.

  Besides, these young dropnauts had signed on knowing the risk.

  There was no good reason for him to feel this guilt. Then again, he was a mech. There was no good reason for him to have feelings at all.

  Sometimes he missed the simpler times before his forced uplift, when the only thing he’d felt was a satisfying jolt of recognition when he unearthed a rare type of moonstone, one that matched the specs for maximum profit. Damn you, Alpha, for making me like this.

  He still couldn’t feel in the physical sense. His fingers were touch-sensitive, to allow him to pick up objects without crushing them or knocking them aside, but his metallic “skin” had no human-like ability.

  It was these new emotional feelings that threatened to undo him. They wouldn’t stay cached, stubbornly resurfacing again and again.

  His mission felt doomed, and with it the remainder of humankind. The power core under the old Jīnsè Base was slowly eating its way into Luna’s heart, melting the wastewater that the old base had injected into the crust. The crisis growing more acute by the day. The reactor had been steadily working its way down for more than a hundred years, but now the quakes had begun. And they were getting worse.

  We waited too long.

  “You okay, sir?” Ying Yue’s voice pulled him back to the present.

  Sam opened his eyes to find all the Beijing team on the Liánhuā looking at him. “I will be. Are we past the debris field?”

  She nodded. “We have a clear path to the Launchpad.”

  ...fileto > memcache: return, the > bristol…

  He wanted to retain this moment in all its clarity. “Please send a message to the other teams. ‘We are heartbroken about the loss of Team One, but we must continue on.’ The Bristol would want that, I think.”

  “Yes, sir.” She put a hand on his metal knee. “It’s not your fault.”

  Sam wished he could feel her touch.

  Was he that transparent? His features shouldn’t have betrayed the cursed emotions he was feeling.

  The whole crew was staring at him now. They needed something from him. Inspiration. “We’re humanity’s last chance. But looking at all of you, I’m not afraid. I see hope, and Redemption.”

  Ying Yue held her fist to her heart over the Return Mission’s leaf-and-orb logo, in automatic salute. “Redemption.”

  Her teammates did, too.

  She searched his silver face a moment longer. He wondered what she was looking for. At last, she nodded and turned away.

  Humans are strange creatures. He closed his eyes, seeking comfort of his own.

  …define: redemption. > The act of redeeming something or someone. The name of the main human colony on Luna. Alternatively, the program for the return…

  Guilt surged in him again, and he squeezed the armrest so hard it cracked.

  Sam shut off his definition subroutine.

  No more distractions. No more errors.

  2

  Bridges

  The towns and cities we’ve traveled through are little more than broken ruins. Some buildings are intact, but most have collapsed—probably under the weight of the Great Winter snow.

  Many more burned to the ground after it melted. Most of the rest are solid brick, or hollow steel frames, and there are bones in many of them. Bones of people seated around a dining table, hands clasped. Bones of couples with their arms wrapped around each other on a rotted mattress.

  It makes me want to puke every time I see them. But if I don’t make a record of their passing, who will?

  They deserve better. Maybe someday, someone will come lay them to rest.

  I hope their end came quickly.

  There are just five of us now—Ally, Auggie, Aidan, Mamma and me. Dad told me once that there were seven hundred and fifty under Boundary Peak when the Collapse happened.

  What if it’s just us?

  —Aidan’s Journal: June 17th, 2282

  * * *

  Aidan gave one last nod to the two skeletons on the dusty, collapsed couch, staring at a broken tridee screen. He added a pair of hatch marks to the list at the end of his paper journal and did a quick count. Over two hundred already. He sighed and slipped the journal in his pocket.

  Above the couple, an old, faded oil painting of a yellow bridge and a pyramid-shaped building hung crookedly on the cracked wall. Aiden reached over their bodies gingerly to straighten it out.

  Then he slipped out of the decrepit brick house, shutting off his solar flashlight to stare up at the early morning sky. It was clear today and cold—though the wispy cirrus clouds streaking the pink heavens suggested a coming storm. The day before, the temperatures had topped out at 113 degrees. Now he could see his breath.

  Ally should still be sleeping, though she’d be awake in time to see the sun rise.

  For decades their family had huddled underground, waiting out the Great Winter. They hadn’t seen the heavens until he was eight, when the first of the sky tree seeds began to fall.

  His father had taken his hand, and they’d knelt and prayed together, father and son under the starry sky. This is your inheritance. We’re the lucky few who get to be fruitful and re-populate the Earth. How his family would re-populate the Earth was never explained.

  His father was long gone. Aidan closed his eyes, pain seizing his gut.

  His younger brothers Alex and Auggie—the twins—had stayed behind to watch after their sick mother Astra, under the Mountain, and he and Ally were on this hopeless quest to save her.

  Aidan scratched the pale skin of his elbow absently as he passed house after empty house, broken windows gaping at him like empty eye sockets.

  He liked to get away from Ally for a few minutes, early in the morning, before they made breakfast, broke camp, and set off again. He had needs, after all, better attended to without his sister watching.

  Aidan liked to explore, too, and this neighborhood offered lots of options.

  The city was in better shape than some they’d passed through. Many of the homes were still standing, fronted by suggestions of lawns and low walls and garden beds, though time and age were dragging everything back down to Earth.

  The sky trees were smaller here than in the mountains. Younger, probably. They were ripping apart houses and pulling up pavement with their crooked roots. A new forest was slowly spreading across the continent.

  Aidan looked up to see one of them spinning down from the sky. It was a few blocks away, an old gray football, its feathery “wings” spinning to slow its descent like a helicopter in an old tridee. It drifted past him gracefully, a hundred feet or more above.

  Aidan watched it until it disappeared behind the ruins in the distance.

  Where did you come from? He touched the scratchy red bark of one of the younger trees, just a couple feet taller than him, staring up at it in wonder.

  He’d scoured the records under the Mountain. There was nothing about giant seeds that fell from the sky.

  He squinted at the bright sky. There must be someone up there. On the moon? In orbit around the Earth? Humans? Or aliens? Aidan imagined other civilizations on the planets of the solar system or circling faraway stars. Did you get it right, where we screwed everything up?

  Was there an alien boy just like him on one of them, staring up at Earth’s sun so far away, wondering the same thing? An Aidan with three eyes, green skin, and a pair of antennas?

  He laughed, the last of his discomfort slipping away.

  Aiden knelt to wash his hands at a little stream that burbled along the old roadway, slowly wearing down the pavement, remaking the Earth a few pieces of asphalt at a time.

  His talkie buzzed. He reached up to touch the talk button behind his ear.

  “Aidan, where are you?”

  Aidan sighed. “Just stretching my legs.”

  “Get back here soon. I want to get on the road.” Ally sounded impatient.

  Aidan grinned. His sister always sounded impatient.

  A rounded brick wall still stood about thirty feet away, across what had probably once been a lawn but was now an overgrown mess of weeds. Curious, he approached it to touch the brick and mortar. Who put you here? And when?