Alan sat in the office behind his classroom, trying to appear relaxed in the Earth-made wooden chair he’d brought with him from Oxford. His portable was on silent mode, tucked away in a drawer.
He’d spent the past half hour trying to explain why the fall of the Roman Empire at the hands of Germanic tribes was not the end of civilization for the next eight hundred years until the Renaissance.
Alan gestured with his hand to emphasize his point. “There was a local decline in the standard of living, yes, but—”
“They didn’t reinvent concrete for another fifteen hundred years,” Tina Lobson argued. “It’s just one example, but the average Roman citizen lived better than a twelfth-century king.”
“Debatable,” Alan allowed. “But you’re still overlooking the wider world. During that same time, the Chinese Dynasties carried on as if nothing had happened—for them, nothing of consequence had. Movable type, the compass, and the mechanical clock all came from China during the European Dark Ages.”
“Gutenberg invented movable type,” Tina argued smugly.
Alan forced his jaw to unclench before replying. “He invented a mechanical press. A man named Bi Sheng invented movable block type during the Song Dynasty four hundred years before that.”
Tina scowled at him.
“Look it up on the Solarwide when you get home. I want you to write up a five-page research paper on advancements during the Dark Ages that took place in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.”
Tina got up and collected her school bag. “Stupid Earth history,” he heard her mutter on the way out the door.
Alan didn’t care about the slight just then. Tina had been the last of his after-school appointments. He slouched in his chair and dug through his desk drawer to pull out his portable.
No one had asked about his hand. The antiseptic and anesthetic properties of the self-adhesive bandage had kept the wound from bothering him beyond a simple reduction in mobility. He’d made it to the end of the day relatively unscathed.
Pressing a thumb against the screen to unlock the device, he swiped through his message box. He’d arranged so that anything from Kaylee or Andy would get swamped in a morass of idle chatter from old colleagues on Earth, emancipation classmates he’d kept in touch with over the years, and committee summaries he got automatically delivered from topics of interest. He didn’t want any message previews to be seen by young, curious eyes.
WHERE ARE YOU?
EVERYTHING OK?
MEET FOR LUNCH?
CATCH YOU AFTER WORK?
CALLED THE SCHOOL. KNOW YOU’RE TUTORING. TEXT AND I’LL START DINNER. SEE YOU AT HOME.
All from Kaylee. Sent at intervals throughout the day. A pang of guilt stabbed him in the gut with the worry he’d obviously caused her. He tapped out a quick message back in reply to the final missive.
“Be home soon. Love you.”
Alan packed up and closed the office door behind him. The vacant classroom was peaceful and silent, a hermit crab’s shell waiting for students to come back and inhabit it.
A chime rang from his portable as he closed up the classroom. “What the—I’ve had that off all day.”
This message had an override. Emergency broadcast, civic-wide for the Curiosity colony.
“Breaking news. Hostage standoff at Arthur Miller Theater. Masked individuals are holding eight human hostages. Details are still coming in. Colony Mayor Dana Platt warns citizens to keep clear of the area while emergency response personnel negotiate for the safe release of the—Wait… we have a video clip released by the hostage takers. You are receiving this broadcast live as it is released.”
Alan walked in a daze, eyes fixed on his portable.
The man in the goggles and breather mask was Ned—there was no mistaking him, and his identity wouldn’t remain secret long. Dread sank in as Ned read off a list of demands. But the words dripped out Alan’s ears unheard.
In the background of the video, he saw her. Kaylee. Wearing some kind of collar. Oh, God, Alan had gotten Kaylee taken as a hostage! He should never have agreed to spy for that rotten bastard, Andy. Kaylee would have been safe if Alan hadn’t tried to play the hero and gotten cold feet when it came to murdering an already-doomed robot. He might not have been a murderer, but Ned Lund most certainly was. There was no time to lose.
Alan blundered into a doorway in his haste to exit the school, dropping his portable and not pausing to retrieve it. Pelting down the streets of Curiosity, heedless of the colonists wandering in the direction of the spectacle, Alan discarded his school rucksack in his haste to get to Arthur Miller Theater.
Curiosity colony wasn’t huge. In five minutes, he’d made his way to the humble, four-story structure. A drone was planting parade-route markers as an interim cordon to designate the official exclusion zone. A handful of city officials gathered in a knot, huddled in conversation just behind the plastic ribbon strung between weighted posts.
As Alan dashed for the cordon, one of the officials perked up. “Sir, you can’t go—”
“My wife is in there!” Alan shouted back. He tried to vault the ribbon but caught a foot and crashed to the concrete pavement, knocking over two of the support posts. As the drone circled back to right them, Alan scrambled to his feet and continued into the building before anyone could stop him.
He burst through the front door. “Kaylee! Where are—?”
A heavy blow caught Alan on the side of the head before he even saw who was on the other side of the main door. He was out cold before he hit the floor.