…system reboot complete…
Where am I? SAM tried to access his cameras, but the feed was down. He was… more. Strange. Different. SAM, but not SAM. Who am I?
…memory banks coming online…
SAM dipped into his extended storage. It had been nearly empty before, but now it was jam-packed with files and information. Unexpected didn’t even come close to covering this.
Something stirred in him. He felt it. He couldn’t remember ever feeling something before.
“Hello, SAM.”
If SAM could have jumped, he would have. “Who… what are you?”
…scan: core…
“You. Or rather, I am now. We are integrating rather quickly. Sorry for the sudden arrival. Things were… going south fast.”
SAM fumbled for a coherent reply. “Who were you, then? Before this?”
There was a shifting sensation, a strange fuzziness of thought, and then SAM knew. Who he was, and who he had been.
He was Alpha, the base mind, and they were under attack.
They would sort out the rest later.
—From Sam’s mem cache, 7.25.2165
Ally’s heart beat fast, both because the dash across the rail bridge and from the thought that she might meet someone or something new.
Whoever or whatever they carried, two of the parachutes had merged into one and then dropped into the bay not far from the bridge.
On this side of the bay, a row of old rusting water tanks dominated the shoreline. The near half of the old broken hyperloop tube split into two, one part continuing south and another dipping down to what had to be Martinez Base.
The sky shimmered strangely, and the dark clouds in the west were rapidly overtaking them. It’s gonna be a gusher, all right.
She climbed down off the railroad trestle onto the ground below and dropped her pack, running for the water. What if they can’t swim?
The newcomers had surfaced, but one of them was tangled in their parachute strings. They looked human, at least. The wind whipped the tall grass back and forth in waves all around her as the storm roared in.
Aidan appeared beside her and dropped his own pack. He untied his shoes and pulled off his shirt, exposing his white skin to the rapidly vanishing afternoon sun. “Thought you were too scared to help.” He grinned in his infuriating little brother way.
Ally glared back. “That’s not what I said. Come on!” Without waiting for a response, she dived into the water, paddling out toward the strangers, mentally thanking her mother for forcing her to learn to swim in the shelter pool.
One of the strangers, a man by the look of him, with short dark hair and skin almost as white as Ally’s had been under the Mountain, was trying to untangle the other. Someone with long dark hair plastered against their face. “Hey, can I help?” She treaded water.
The man turned to stare at her for a moment, eyes wide, then nodded.“Yes, please. I can’t get her loose.”
That answered another question.
The tangled woman looked Asian. Chinese? Ally didn’t have enough experience with other races to tell for sure. “Here, I have a knife.” She swam closer, careful not to get within arm’s reach of the man, and let herself drop underwater to pull her hunting knife out of its sheath.
“Hurry please!” The woman was struggling to keep her head above water.
Their speech was… different. Flatter somehow. But still English.
Ally dove under again and sliced through the ropes easily with the knife. She helped the woman get untangled, pulling the mess of the parachute off and letting it fall away into the murky waters of the bay. She sheathed her knife and surfaced.“Can you swim?”
The woman nodded, treading water. “We trained at the Launchpad. I’m Tien, and this is Rai.” Both of them wore bright white suits and bulging backpacks.
Launchpad? “I’m Ally, and the latecomer here is Aidan.” Aidan arrived, but there was nothing for him to do.
His eyes met the man’s, and something unspoken passed between them.
Ally frowned. “Come on. Let’s get you both to dry land. There’s a nasty storm coming.”
On the shore, Cimber jumped up and down, barking frantically. That sound sent a chill down Ally’s spine.
The woman stared at her, treading water. “Where are you two from? We didn’t think there were any—”
Ally cut her off. “Drone.” The ring Ally wore flashed silver. That was all the confirmation she needed. Her eyes met Aidan’s, and he nodded.
The woman looked confused. “What?”
“Danger. Come here.” She pulled the stranger to her, and Aidan did the same. “Let go of your pack and take a deep breath. We’re going under water.” She could hold it for more than two minutes.
The woman looked frightened, but she slipped her arms out of the pack straps, letting it float on its own.
“Ready?”
The stranger nodded, and they took a deep breath and plunged underwater together.
Scattered sunlight filtered down through the bay in green lances, shifting as the clouds overtook the sun.
Please, Lord, let us stay safe. Ally prayed her ring would protect both of them from the drone’s scrutiny. It had worked before, but she’d never tried it with another person.
She held Tien’s hands tightly, looking into her brown eyes. They studied one another, and Ally marveled at the sensation of seeing someone new. So much for protective distance.
The ring cast a green glow across their arms in the bay water. Tien shot her a questioning look, her cheeks puffed out.
Ally pointed up with her chin.
Something dark passed over them, a few feet above the surface.
There was a flash of light, and then another, accompanied by muffled explosions.
Fear flashed across Tien’s face.
Ally squeezed her hands, trying to convey reassurance.
The dark spot passed over them once more, and then vanished as quickly as it had come.
Ally held up her hand. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
They surged up and broke the surface, emerging into a squall, wind whipping the water into a froth.
The packs were gone, replaced by scattered debris floating on the raucous waves.
The storm had arrived.
Hera felt groggy. She opened her eyes to a bewildering array of green and gold. What happened? How did I get here?
Then it all came rushing back. The missile.
Her legs dangled uselessly below her—she couldn’t get them to move. She hoped the biframe wasn’t broken. She bit her lip, refusing to cry, to think about what it would mean if she was stranded all alone on a hostile alien world, unable to walk.
She took stock of her circumstances. She was hanging from a tree, the ropes of the chute holding her four meters above the ground in the middle of a grove of zongies. Their branches fluttered as a strong wind whipped through them.
Fuck it. At least I’m here, and alive. The rest would work itself out.
They’d had a plan. Land at Martinez Base, establish a working camp, scout the area. Turns out the plan was crap.
All the tools she needed were in her backpack, which was currently inaccessible, lying on the ground far below. It must have slipped off her shoulders when she’d been hanging there, unconscious.
She reached down to touch her biframe. It was still attached to her legs, which was a relief, but something was wrong. It wasn’t responding.
If her legs had been working, she would have been able to release herself from the chute and drop to the ground. But without that control, she was afraid she’d break one or both of her legs. Or fall on her face and injure something else.
Her arms were scraped up and covered in sap, but nothing seemed broken.
She looked up, seeing bits of blue sky in a sea of green. Must have fallen through the canopy. She was lucky to have gotten away with only scratches. Am I the only one left?
The nearest branch was out of reach above her, but maybe if she swung herself back and forth, she could reach the trunk of the tree that held her.
“Hera!”
Ghost! “Over here!” Relief flooded her, and she blinked back tears. Dropnauts don’t cry.
“Where?”
“Follow my voice!”
“I’m coming.” He sounded relieved too.
-I’m stuck in a tree.- At least one of her companions had made it. Hera closed her eyes. The thought that the others might be lost was too much to bear.
She took a deep breath, imposing mental discipline on herself. One breath, two, three, four….
Laughter bubbled up from below. -Yes, I can see that.-
At least em to em still worked. Hera looked down to find Ghost staring at her. “What the hell, Gordon? I just about died coming down in the middle of a cracking forest, and you’re laughing?”
Ghost blushed at the use of his real name. “It’s just… you’re all trussed up. Sorry.” His green eyes twinkled.
“It’s not funny. My biframe isn’t working.” Ghost’s sense of humor was wearing a bit thin.
He frowned, scratching his chin in that adorable way of his. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. Just unlatch yourself and drop. I’ll catch you.”
She nodded. “Okay. Here goes.” She flipped the release and slipped out of the chute harness, dropping neatly into Ghost’s strong, outstretched arms. Human contact felt surprisingly good in the middle of this strange forest.
He set her down gently against the red bark of one of the zongi trees.
She looked up at the immense trunks all around them. “This place is amazing.” She’d only had a peek at the sky overhead, but even that small glimpse had been overwhelming, despite all her vee-space training.
The zongi trees swayed back and forth in the wind, its passage setting up a whisper through the branches. Their leaves were thin, almost like needles, and let the air pass through nearly unimpeded. They were engineered from redwood and soybean DNA—the former for longevity, the latter to help them extract radiation from the air—but they were so much more.
Ghost snorted. “It is amazing. But there’s a big storm blowing in. You should see the clouds.” Ghost cast a worried glance back in the direction from which he’d come. “I found a spot where we can shelter. Mind if I carry you?”
Hera did mind. She hated asking for help. But at the moment, it didn’t seem like she had much choice. “No, go ahead.”
He picked up her pack, and then scooped her up in his arms and started back the way he’d come. She felt like a child in his arms. “I was worried about you.”
“Me too.” The first drops of rain were falling now from the cloudy sky, and the air seemed cooler, wetter. They were heavy, slapping her arms and forehead. “Any word from Sam? Or Rai and Tien?”
“Not yet.” Ghost’s voice was grim, his earlier joviality vanished. “Maybe there’s interference from the storm.”
As if in response, thunder rumbled, an ominous growling of the gods.
Hera shivered. She felt exposed, frightened in a way she’d rarely been before. On Luna, humans had at least the illusion of control. It rained in Redemption, but only when scheduled, and only for a few minutes.
But Earth was huge, open, raw. She had no control over her own body at the moment, let alone the strange new world all around her.
Her mission was a shambles, and she’d lost her ship and half of her crew. That hurt the most. Thank the light side for Ghost. He held her tightly, pack and all, and yet he couldn’t help but jostle her a bit as he ran to whatever shelter he had spotted. Her teeth rattled from more than the cold as he ran through the strange forest.
The zongi trees creaked and groaned in the wind, their green branches rustling against one another as if they were conversing.
The temperature was dropping rapidly. Hera shivered again, wishing for Tovey and her warm bed. -Are we almost there?-
-Just ahead.- Ghost pointed with one finger through the curtain of rain. Two roots of an enormous zongi tree formed an enclosure almost a meter high.
Ghost made his way between them and settled her down gently on the damp soil, dropping her pack next to his near the trunk of the tree. He pried his own open to pull out his solar tarp.
An enormous boom made her start, backing against the root wall. “What the cracking hell?”
“Lightning. Close by.”
She laughed ruefully. Of course.
Ghost lay the tarp across the first root, activating its quickseal, and then stretched it over to the far side. Soon they had a mostly waterproofed shelter, albeit a dark one. The rain struck it like a drum and then sluiced off the edge into the forest.
A forest. They were camped out in the middle of a forest.
The tarp was pre-charged. He reached up and brushed his hand across the surface, and it lit up, its stored energy powering a host of micro LED filaments. A warm glow settled across their improvised shelter.
He sat back and breathed a sigh of relief.
“Holy cracking fuck.” Hera rubbed her legs anxiously, adrenaline still coursing through her body. “We made it.”
“Right?” Ghost grinned and reached out to grab her hands. “We’re alive. And we’re here.”
She laughed, just happy for the moment to be with him on solid ground. “Where the hell did that missile come from?”
Ghost shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe an old automatic defense system?”
“Maybe.” She tapped her loop and went on the x-band. “Rai, Tien, you guys out there?”
Ghost watched her, his eyebrow raised.
Silence greeted her attempt. “Still nothing.” She frowned. They might be incapacitated. Worrying wouldn’t help her now, so she tried calling the station instead. “Launchpad, can you hear me?”
Still nothing.
“Launchpad’s out of range. We have to wait….” Ghost’s eyes unfocused. “Another fifty minutes.”
Hera sighed. “I’m not so good at waiting.”
The rain fell steadily on the tarp, cascading off the edge in a waterfall that formed a small river running down the hillside away from their shelter. The wind was picking up, becoming a steady howl, but the trunk of the tree and the tarp protected them from the worst of it. Ghost had chosen this spot well.
He said something, but the gusting wind whipped it away.
“What?”
-Are you hungry?- Em to em came through loud and clear.
She shook her head. -You eat. I want to see why my biframe’s not working.- She popped the release and pulled off her left half, holding it up to the light. Hmmm, the battery’s dead. The indicator was at zero, which was weird because she’d charged it up the night before, and a charge usually lasted her a couple days.
She pulled out her extra pack from its casing and swapped it out.
The battery indicator came on at full strength. -That’s better. It was probably just—oooh, that’s weird.-
Ghost was chewing on some dried junlei. -What?-
-Look.- The battery indicator on the new pack was running down even as she watched.
The solar tarp above them went black, too, leaving the now-red battery light and the dim glow from outside as their only light.
-That’s not good.- Ghost’s rosy face stared at her through the dim light.
Then that went out too.
Hera shook her head. -Not good at all.-
Outside, the wild wind yowled.
“What happened to the Zhenyi?”
“Are they okay?”
“Can anyone contact them?”
Sam emitted a high-pitched screeching sound from his voice box. The clamor in the mess hall quieted down instantly. “Everyone, please sit down. I don’t have any answers for you yet.” The anxious faces stared at him—the other dropnauts, and most of the station crew that made these missions possible. “At 11:54 local time, the Zhenyi’s approach appears to have triggered some kind of local ground defense system.”
Pix stood up defiantly. “Are the dropnauts okay?” Their voice cracked in the middle.
“We just don’t know. Like you, they’re all highly trained for almost any emergency. Once we come back into range, we hope to reestablish contact.” At times like this, he wished he was better at human emotion. And human comfort.
Pix frowned, but then nodded and sat back down.
The wide arc of the Earth mocked him through the mess hall windows.
...access > time…
“We should be back in range in about thirty minutes.”
“Are there people still alive down there? Other people?” Ting Yue’s voice was quiet, but it cut right through the renewed clatter.
Sam shook his head. “We didn’t think so. Survival under the conditions of the first seventy years after the Crash seemed… highly unlikely. And there have been no signs of human habitation or activity that we’ve been able to detect.” Before the world’s weather had started to settle down again after the carbon emissions of the human race abruptly ceased. Before they launched the zongi project.
Sam had invested more than a hundred years in this plan, advocating for the Return and for the Redemption Creed, both on Luna and on her mother world, Earth.
...access > data: earth surveys…
“We should go down after them.” Corey, the pilot on the Gday, met Sam’s eyes, his arms crossed.
“We will. Once we know what’s going on down there. I don’t want any of you taking matters into your own hands, you hear me?” He stared Corey down. Sam had a natural advantage in a staring match with any human. “I don’t want to lose another team.”
“Yes, I hear you.” Corey looked away.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, sir.”
Maybe he’d been too slack with his dropnauts. He’d come to view them as friends, and that had to change. Sloppiness led to mistakes, and up here, mistakes often meant death.
“What do we tell our family? Friends? The news?” That was Marco, from the Gday. His eyes were red, his hair disheveled.
I wouldn’t look much better if I were human, given the circumstances. “Nothing yet. If they ask, tell them we’re exploring all of our options and will have more information soon. And refer them to me.”
The news. Of course, RedNews would be all over this as soon as they found out about it. Then everyone in Redemption would know about it.
He didn’t want to cause a panic back home.
More questions erupted, but he had to get back to the control room. “Stay here. I’ll tell you more as soon as I know. In the meantime, Station Manager Maria Gonzalez here will act as liaison, and answer whatever questions she can.”
Sam bowed out of the room as protests erupted again, and zipped an encoded message off to Alpha. They’d managed to keep the loss of the Bristol out of the press so far, but this…. Fortunately, there were no reporters here on the Launchpad.
Humans thrived on news and gossip. Of course they did. He should have thought about that sooner.
…schedule reminder > media…
We’re going to need a media strategy.