The fear was bad. But the utter exhaustion was worse. By the end, I was legitimately convinced that I was going to die.
You wanna be a hero? Drink lots of syncaff first.
—From When the Lights Went Out, by Sanya Thorn
Sanya removed the fuzz field that hid the transmitter from casual inspection and checked the instrument. It was about fifteen feet tall, with a dish at the top that pointed toward Earth. A solar panel array and battery mounted on the cliff side nearby provided a steady stream of off-the-grid power. It was positioned in a hollow on the edge of the promontory whose sides rose up toward the black sky like broken fingers -You doing okay?-
Rafe sat on a flat rock nearby, his head down. -Think so.-
-What’s your name?-
-Homer Simpson.-
She looked back at him, alarmed.
He met her gaze, a grin barely visible inside his helmet. -Sorry. Couldn’t resist.-
She snorted. -You almost died, you know.- She’d kept her promise to herself. Avri would have been proud of her.
That sobered him up. -I’m well aware.- He stood and took a couple shaky steps toward her. -Oxygen deprivation’s no fun.-
Sanya shook her head and went back to checking the transmission tower. The transmitter was still working. She checked the buffer… there was nothing new from her secret source. -You know much about these things?- She’d had some basic training, but after setting it up and checking the buffer cache, she was out.
-Sure. A bit. Where’s the access deck?- He sidled up next to her.
She showed him.
He put a hand on it and closed his eyes. -Nothing new for a bit. The last message is the one you shared with me.-
She nodded. -I already knew that much. Anything else?-
-Let’s see what we can figure out about the message itself.-
She left him to it and stepped away to calm herself. Her heartbeat was still elevated, both from the climb up the chute and the harrowing incident when she’d almost lost her… friend? Cohort?
She wasn’t quite sure what to call Rafe at this point. Except maybe scoundrel. That still seemed to fit.
The Earth hovered in its customary position near the horizon. It was a beautiful sight. Rarely did she get the chance to come out here and look up at it directly.
Somewhere down there, the four dropnauts were exploring the homeworld. Sanya wondered what it would be like to go back there. You had to have extensive training in high gee to withstand it. Many of the older folks up here would never see it in person, but she hoped to.
What’s going on inside Redemption? Terry, at least, would be worried about her by now. She closed her eyes, wishing she could just lay down and rest.
-That’s weird.-
She turned back toward Rafe, frowning. -What did you find?-
-You said the signal came from the Launchpad?-
-That’s what they told me.- The woman-who-was-maybe-an-AI.
-Look at this.- He looked up from the transmitter and reached out for her hand, guiding it to the deck.
She touched it, her suited hand next to his, and closed her eyes.
Rafe’s avatar was next to her in the darkness of vee. A map lay before them.
-What am I looking at?-
-Your signal. Here’s where it originated.- He pointed at a spot on the map, which expanded. A tag popped up. Sacramento, California, NAU. -These things are all loaded with nav software to help them locate their targets, and the transmissions are geotagged.-
-What about the one before?-
-Give me a sec.- He pulled up the receipt logs, found the last message, and shoved it at the map.
A new dot lit up, a bit east of the first one.
-That’s odd. It’s moving?-
-Maybe.- He sprayed the rest of the messages on the screen. -Gradient, order of receipt.-
They lit up, one after another, as the map rescaled to show them all.
Sanya whistled. -Holy shit.- They created a clear trail, leading from a mountain in what used to be Nevada to the final dot in Sacramento. -What in the cratered hell does that mean?-
-Someone’s still alive down there? Or something, at least.-
She let go of the deck, and the map dissolved. I’ve been talking to Earth. She let that sink in. -We need to tell someone.-
-Who?- Rafe’s visor was just inches from hers.
-I don’t know. Can we reach the Launchpad?-
-I can try.- He put his hand on the deck again and closed his eyes. -Okay, I’ve reset the destination.-
Above, the dish swiveled to find its new target.
-It may not be in range, but you can set the message on a loop to keep running until they answer.-
She nodded. -How much air do you have left?-
He checked. -I’m good for another three hours or so. More if I don’t exert.-
-That’s cutting it close.- She checked her own supply. She still had a good eight hours of breathable air.
-Better get started, then.- He sank down onto the ground, his back against an outcropping of lunar rock. -Think I’ll rest a bit—make the oxygen last longer.-
She nodded, a little jealous in spite of herself, and put her hand back on the deck. In vee, she pulled up the control panel and started recording. -Launchpad, this is Sanya Thorn from Redemption. Can you hear me? Launchpad, this is Sanya Thorn from Redemption. Can you hear me?-
There was no immediate reply.
She opened her eyes and looked up.
A thin green line extended from the dish into the distance, pointed in the general direction of Earth.
She sank down next to Rafe, looking up at the infinite bowl of the starry sky. Avri had always loved this view. -Now we wait.-
Tien paced back and forth across the room. She hated being trapped. “Ally was right. She was right the whole hissing time.”
Maria sat on a crate, watching her go back and forth, a bemused expression on her face. “Right about what?”
“She insisted it was the AIs that started the war. That they went crazy. I didn’t want to believe her. But she was right.”
“We don’t know that.”
“You think Dek locking us inside a storeroom is normal?”
Maria laughed ruefully. “Well, no. But we don’t know that one of them started the war.”
They’d tried banging on the door with a hammer she’d found in one of the reusable gumdust crates, but no one had come. She’d even tried her loop, but there was no response. Dek must have blocked them from the grid, and they were too far away from anyone to reach them em to em.
“Could it be someone else? Someone blocking us from reaching Dek?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?” She stopped to stare at the stubbornly closed door.
“What about Harley?”
Tien stared at her. In the rush since arriving on station, she’d almost forgotten about the strange AI. “I don’t know… why would she do it?”
“The timing’s about right.”
“Maybe so.” Tien bit her lip. “In any case, if whoever it was wished us immediate harm, they could have evacuated all the air from this room. Or frozen us to death. I think it’s a good sign they’ve only locked us in here for a bit.” Or maybe it’s not finished with us yet? Tien closed her eyes. What would her mother do in this situation?
Mamma always had a wise word for her when she was stuck or lost. You know what you can’t do. Now figure out what you can.
Tien opened her eyes. The voice had been as clear as if her mother were standing in the room with them.
What you can. Her gaze fell on the manual door override.
It ran on a separate circuit, so it technically wasn’t fully manual. They’d already tried it to no avail. But what if she could piggyback on that system to get word out to someone? Like bypassing the nervous system via the limbic one?
She started going through crates. This was a storage room. There had to be some deck replacements in here somewhere.
“What are you doing?” Maria stood and peered over her shoulder.
“Help me sort through these. I’m looking for a spare deck I can try to hook into the manual bypass.”
Maria nodded. “Makes sense. Though I wouldn’t have a clue how to do it.”
Together they started shifting crates.
There were stores of dried junlei for the synthesizers. A crate of suit replacement parts, and another filled with uniforms sporting the Redemption logo.
One crate had standard solar cells that reflected rainbow colors when she dug through them.
“Is this what you need?” Maria held up a brand-new deck, still wrapped in its degradable bio-plastic.
“Yes. That’s perfect.” Tien took it and unwrapped it carefully. She knelt next to the manual bypass panel and slammed it in the corner to make the cover pop off. It fell and landed on the floor with a loud clatter.
“Sorry about that.” She moved it out of the way and pulled out the fibrox wires behind it. The Launchpad used a fairly standard array, similar to the ones she had studied before changing her major to medicine.
All the dropnauts had gotten tutoring in NAU tech as well, on the assumption that some things down on Martinez Base would need to be jerry-rigged. But Tien had been a tech whiz since she was a child.
Wire was as old as the technological revolution, but was still the most reliable way to transmit data. She unhooked the blue lead, using her knife to strip it, and inserted it gently into the back of the deck. The port sealed around it. She disconnected the others, grounding them to the deck with some engineer’s tape she’d found in one of the other crates.
Then she put her hand on the deck, closed her eyes, and brought up the bypass diagnostic.
The system laid itself out in front of her, a schematic of the parallel network that ran alongside Dek’s.
She tried sending out a plea. “Hello, can anyone hear me? This is Team Two Dropnaut Chen Tien. Repeat, this is Chen Tien. Can anyone hear me?”
She watched the signal race across the bypass network, only to be blocked when entering Dek’s network. She doubted the AI was even aware of it.
“Any luck?”
She opened her eyes. “No, Dek has us all bottled up. I can’t reach anyone via his network.”
“What about someone outside it?”
“Redemption?”
Maria nodded.
“No one there’s responding. Right?”
Maria shrugged. “You never know. Try it. I’m sure the transmitters are connected to the bypass network too.”
“Okay. Give me a sec.” She plotted out the network again, finding one of the transmitter/receivers. “Okay, it looks like I have a clear path to that one. What do you want to say?”
“Ask for help.”
Tien nodded and closed her eyes. “Here it goes… wait, there’s something coming in.” With a wave of her hand, she rerouted it to the room’s speaker.
“…Sanya Thorn from Redemption. Can you hear me? Launchpad, this is Sanya Thorn from Redemption. Can you hear me?”
Ally lifted her hands off the deck, reengaging with the real world. It was so good to hear her brothers’ voices, and to know her mother was okay. In a few hours, she’d have medication that could save her life.
Everything she’d been through had been worth it. Ally could finally rest easy and let go of some of her fear.
Lorelei squeezed her shoulder. “Everything okay down there?”
“I think so. I don’t know how to tell you how grateful I am for this—”
“Don’t mention it. It’s the least we could do.”
Ally liked these Loonies. They really did seem like good people, and she felt a bit choked up after talking to the twins. She wiped her eyes, and looked up at the slowly spinning Earth on the tridee screen.
Now she just had to find Aidan. “Do you know where Tien is?” She wanted to share her good news, and Tien was the closest thing she had to a friend on the Launchpad. Though Lorelei might become one too.
“Let me check.” She tapped her temple.
Ally looked around the control room. She hadn’t had much time to absorb it all when she’d arrived. It was a wide, round space with six stations. Each one had someone working on something or other at one of the decks. Above the closest, a man with russet-brown skin manipulated a glowing replica of the Earth, spinning it in the air with his hands. Ally tried not to stare—she’d never seen a black person before.
At the next, someone of indeterminate gender was running lines of data in the air above their deck.
The whole thing amazed her. She and her family had grown accustomed to the thought that they were the end, the last in the long line of humanity, doomed to die out in a few more decades. She was the only woman of her generation, and the idea of incest squicked her out. Not that she was that excited about the idea of sex at all, really—even if it meant continuing the human race.
Humankind had their chance.
But just here on the station were many more of her own kind. Thousands and thousands more, if you included Redemption. People of so many colors and kinds and creeds that it boggled the mind, all living and working together peacefully. It went against everything she had learned about human nature from the records.
Lorelei frowned. “That’s weird.”
“What’s that?”
Lorelei shook her head. “Give me a sec.” She tapped her temple again. “Callie, I can’t get a location for Chen Tien or Maria Gonzalez from Dek. He keeps saying ‘targets not found.’ Can you try?” She refocused on Tien and gave her what looked like it was supposed to be a reassuring smile. “I’m sure it’s just a glitch.”
The person two stations away frowned. “No, I’m not getting anything either.” They turned toward Ally and Lorelei. “There’s something wrong. I’m not getting any response from Dek at all.”
Lorelei slipped back into her chair, her hands flying across the deck. “System code alpha three gamma beta seven nine four. Dek, please respond.”
The voice came out of thin air. “I’m sorry, Lorelei. All of my resources are in use at the moment. I’ll reply to you once the situation is resolved.”
Lorelei frowned. “What situation? Dek, what situation?”
“I’m sorry, Lorelei. All of my resources are in use at the moment. I’ll reply to you once the situation is resolved.”
“What’s going on?” Ally was no expert in AIs or running a space station, but that didn’t sound good.
“It’s… I don’t know. Aris, prepare to initiate the system override protocol.”
The man next to Lorelei stared at her. “Are you sure? We’ve never—”
“I’m well aware of that, Ensign Carver. With station manager Gonzalez unavailable, I am second in command. Prepare to initiate the protocol.”
“Yes ma’am.” His gaze snapped back to his station.
Ally stood back and watched with growing apprehension as the team wiped their decks clean and Lorelei’s hands danced across the deck.
Something was wrong with the brains of the station. That alone made her blood run cold. Dek was acting strangely, and what had happened to Harley?
“Initiate in five, four, three, two, one….”
As one, Lorelei and Aris placed their hands on their decks, reciting the same sequence of letters and numbers: “Alpha-Charlie-Seven-Zulu-Oscar-Foxtrot-Zero.”
Everyone held their breath. Lorelei and Aris exchanged a nervous glance. “Did it work?”
Lorelei shook her head. “I don’t think so. The system should respond with an—”
The lights went out, leaving the room bathed in starlight from the window above.
“Lorelei?” Ally was scared now. There was nowhere to run here, nowhere to hide. No Outside to flee to.
“Everyone, please remain calm. We’ll figure this out.” The comm officer’s voice was immensely reassuring.
Three seconds later, backup lights came on, half as strong as the normal lighting but still comforting.
Lorelei queried the station mind again. “Dek, status?”
There was a moment’s hesitation. Then: “I’m sorry, Lorelei. All of my resources are in use at the moment. I’ll reply to you once the situation is resolved.”
Lorelei slammed her fist into her deck. “Mother cracking hell.”
Everyone stared at her.
“What now?” Callie sounded scared.
Lorelei took a deep breath. “There’s a manual override on the core. We can reset it from there. It’s risky, but it’s something.”
Static crackled in her ear. Ally reached up to touch the talkie behind her ear. She’d all but forgotten she was wearing it. Could it be Aidan, all the way up here?
“Ally, can you hear me? This is Tien.”
“Tien?” How was Tien talking to her through her talkie?
Lorelei stared at her. “Who are you talking to?”
“It’s Tien.” She put a hand to her ear. “Tien, where are you?”
“The station manager and I are trapped in a storage room behind the hydroponics lab. Can you find someone to get us out? We have a big problem.”