Despite all my frustration and adrenaline, I can’t bring myself to move unsafely back to the dinghy. We follow all protocols getting out of the spire: ascending back through the severed tower, descending down the shorn half to the crater slowly, taking a break halfway across the walkways to drink water. It takes almost as many hours to get back as it did to arrive, and there’s no sign of Verity Co. The dinghy hatch closing behind us feels like defeat, not victory. Kieran starts up flight protocols and autodocking procedures while I numbly buckle Pumpkin in. He’s more compliant than usual, so he probably feels defeated too.
“Why?” I put my head in my hands. The dinghy is lifting off, making my anxiety-addled stomach flip. “Why here?”
“They’re everywhere,” Kieran says.
How I wish it weren’t true, but lo. They really are everywhere. Verity Co. is the primary acquirer, collator, and distributor of alien information back in our home systems. See, they copyright all the information they collect, then charge a sum for the use of that information. Doesn’t matter who uses it. Government. Scientists. Researchers. Grad students. Their own employees. They’d put the cure for death behind a paywall if they could, and they come close, trust me.
About four years ago, on my first tagalong mission for the Archivists, I contracted a weird virus exploring one of our home systems’ moons. My fellow Archivists called it popping the cosmic grape, and it was one of those common, almost expected contractions rookies like me were prone to. Also it gave me blisters that looked like grapes. Anyway, I had to pay a doctor twice the usual copay because she had to pay Verity Co. for the patented information on how to treat me. Didn’t matter that she’d seen enough of the case to treat it blind; she was using the info, so coin went in the slot.
Verity Co. stands in the way of everything the Archivists are trying to sow: freedom of information, respecting the source of that information, and using exoplanet data to empower the progression of technology and culture on our home planets.
I love our mission. I believe in it. And today, I’ve failed it.
“You heard what the person in the projection said, right?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Kieran says. We’re angled toward space, practically vertical. The whole dinghy shakes like it might fall apart, but we’ve done this enough times to know it won’t.
“They knew,” I say.
“You think so?”
“Why would they lie?”
“Maybe they just hoped,” Kieran says.
The dinghy carries out its autodocking procedures once we’re past the atmosphere and in orbit. It zeroes in on the Waning Crescent’s signal and pulls us into the claustrophobic underside bay. We disembark and run through the airlock, letting the med-tech sanitize and scan us for anything weird. It dings its approval, and we’re finally back aboard, seven and a half home-standard hours later. We strip out of our suits and help Pumpkin do the same before rushing to the cockpit. The silence is aching as Kieran steers us through orbit and runs scanners, but there’s nothing. Verity Co. is long gone.
“Shit,” I say.
“We had no way of knowing they’d be there.” Kieran closes the scanning data and gestures to the uplink I’ve been squeezing like a stress ball. He’d been able to get a partial copy from the cache, and here it lies. “Give me that.”
I give him that, thoughtlessly, because instead I’m thinking about how I want to scream that I knew something was there, that the clatter had been our only hint. “Your radar didn’t pick up heat signatures?” I demand, even though mine certainly didn’t.
“It’s Verity Co. You know they’re stealthed so well they practically don’t exist.” He plugs in the uplink and pulls up a file called PlanetDesignated357.Cache0001.copy. He begins an upload to the Crescent’s mainframe.
“And you seriously couldn’t detect their ship in orbit?”
“It’s an automatic process. What more could I have done?”
“Look out the damn window, maybe?”
He turns on me, glaring, looking more hurt than mad. That pulls something taut in a line from my stomach to my throat. I know I’ve done wrong, but I’m too mad to stop. “I knew we should have been worried about that sound. Settling. What the hell settles, Kieran? The planet’s dead.”
“Okay.” He turns back to the dashboard and starts opening files from the copy. “Well, while you’re freaking out, I’m going to see if the cache has a civilization map we can use to find the planet they sent their science team to. What was it called?”
“Nebul,” I say. “And I’m not freaking out.”
“You’re freaking out.”
“They knew what was coming for them!” I cry.
Pumpkin jumps into Kieran’s lap and circles a few times before curling into his namesake pumpkin shape.
“And we lost it!”
“I don’t know what we can do about it now,” Kieran mumbles.
“It’s like you don’t care.”
“I care. But there’s nothing we can do about it now. It’s done.”
I bite the inside of my cheek because what I have to say next isn’t very nice. I don’t want to feel this way. On some level I know he’s right. There’s no undoing what’s happened. But I’m so mad at him. At myself. Because I could have done more. I should have done more. I could have tackled the Verity lady; I could have climbed to the ceiling somehow and made extra sure the dark was just dark and not a guise for something else; I could have taken the shot the woman had been aiming, because the data she was stealing was more important than my life.
More important than my life.
I wince in that involuntary, all-consuming way that comes when a not entirely pleasant memory strikes like an electric shock.
We’re only here once, I remember, and I’m in the hospital room with my mom, a long time ago. She laughs through a cough and pats my hand. And what a thing my one shot has been.
“I’m going to my cabin.” I stand up, and pause at the arched entrance to the hallway. There’s more I want to say, but it teeters between sympathetic and scathing. I don’t trust myself to make the right call, so I leave quickly.
I lie and listen to music for so long that the peaceful acoustic beats actually manage to do something for my mood. Something, but not everything. Music’s a miracle mood-lifter, but it can only do the job if you let it, and I hold on to stress and grudges like a lemur does to lychees. It’s not my best trait, I know. I’m trying to let it go.
A notification pops up on my cabin’s computer, a loud, specific ding that means it’s work-related. I haven’t received a call or message from Archivist HQ since receiving coordinates for the cluster we’re in now, which means it’s Kieran being official. Maybe he’s a little mad too. I check the message.
Hey, it says, I’ve found it.
I lean closer to the screen, daring to hope.
Planet Nebul in what the native species called the Iari system. It’s an easy day-and-a-half’s jump away. Guessing I should launch?
I feel the day’s worth of stress start to evaporate. My shoulders ease up from the buckling force of what I let slip from my grasp. President Blyreena sent their scientists to Nebul—answers to Nebul. Maybe we’ll beat Verity Co. there. Maybe they’ll be too stupid to decrypt and decipher the cache. Maybe they’ll think they’ve found everything worth finding in this cluster and leave.
Launch, I send to Kieran, equally (and maybe a little spitefully) curt and official. In a second message I relent and write, Thank you. In a third: I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to send it.
The ship rumbles in preparation for the jump. I don’t know how all that stuff works. Quantum physics, teleportation, jump-space boundaries, yada yada. But I know the feel of the ship when it’s preparing to leap, how space outside the viewports turns into long lines of passing stars and the black flurry of emptiness and dark-matter shadows. We jump.
Another notification pops up: Almost half the cache was copied, Kieran says. It’s all uploaded to the main server.
Thanks, I write, and right on cue, another notification informs me data has been dumped into my Archivist drive. There’s a new file, titled Planet 357. I stare at it a little while.
Relief at having a new course, a new chance at finding answers, has given way at last to guilt. It should have been me who found the star map in the cache copy. I should have been the one to find the path to Nebul. Kieran really backed me up today, and I need to do better. Starting now. I’m tired and mostly spent, but some things just have to be done right away.
I sift through the subdocuments until I find the map Kieran mentioned. It takes a little while, but I find the name of the planet we just left. Not the number-ridden designation the cosmic maps from back home gave it, but the name Blyreena and their people knew it as.
I change the file name to Panev.