Anna Beck leans over the control panel, her mouth inches from the mic set into the edge of the touchscreen.
She opens her mouth to speak, then stops.
It takes her several attempts to form the words. “Shinso Maru, please respond. This is Outer Earth. Do you copy?”
Nothing. Just static, ebbing and flowing.
“Shinso Maru, can you hear me?”
Her voice breaks on the last word, and she sits back, head bowed. This isn’t the first time she’s been in the Apex control room, and it’s not the first time she’s tried to find a sign that the asteroid catcher survived. Why should now be any different? She’s not going to hear from the Shinso. She’s not going to hear from anyone. Earth is silent–the last time any signal was picked up was decades ago. One by one, they all winked out.
Anna Beck doesn’t cry. She hasn’t shed a single tear, and she’s not going to now.
The Apex control room is a long and narrow space, with banks of screens bordering a thin strip of metal flooring. Most of the screens are dead. The few chairs that remain are battered and worn. Anna is sitting in one of them, elbows on her knees, staring at nothing.
Nobody comes here any more, mostly because there’s no point–most of the technicians who used the systems are dead, and what’s left is running on automatic, humming away while they wait for the reactor to die. The control room is the one place that Anna can virtually guarantee that she’ll be alone. She’s afraid that if she runs into anyone she won’t be able to keep Dax’s plan to herself. And she can’t tell anyone about it. Not yet.
Because it might be the wrong choice.
Anna laughs. There’s no humour in the sound. She’s thinking about the people she killed during the siege in the dock, when she squatted behind a barricade with her long gun and fired again and again and again. She’s thought about them a lot in the past few days. Why shouldn’t she? Nobody should have to take a life, let alone five or six of them, one after the other.
And yet, it doesn’t bother her. Not as much as it should have. The choice to do it was cut and dried. Those people–the Earthers–were coming to hurt her and her friends. They wanted out, and they didn’t care what was in their path. She did the right thing–no, she did the only thing.
This isn’t so simple.
Objectively, Dax is right. That’s the worst part. It does make sense to send the people who give them the best chance of survival. That doesn’t stop it from being completely insane, a plan that takes the chance of life away from almost everyone on the station, without their consent.
Anna could let it happen. She could let them die, and give humanity the best possible chance. Or she could tell everyone, and accept that in the chaos that comes afterwards–and Anna knows it’ll be chaos, knows it in her bones–there might still be deaths.
Every time she thinks she’s made her decision, every time she starts to rise from her chair, she falters. This isn’t just a group of people in a thought experiment. This is her parents. Achala and Ravi Kumar. Marcus, and Ivy, and the rest of the kids. These are people she knows.
Which ones will die, and which ones will live?
Without really realising she’s doing it, Anna leans forward, idly trailing her hand along the onscreen frequency band. “This is Outer Earth,” she whispers, not expecting an answer but not sure what else to do. “I need help. Please. If anyone can hear me, this is station control for Outer Earth. Please respond.”