Impact (22 page)

For a long, frozen second, it looks like their plane is going to crash right into ours.

I can just see it through the broken window. It's coming in off our left wing, rising up from below. I can't see into the cockpit, but the door in the side of the plane is open, and one of the Nomads is leaning out. He has a rifle, and he's trying to get a bead on us again, trying to steady his shot against the buffeting air.

He fires. The bullet goes wide, and the plane drops out of sight.

“It's OK,” Harlan shouts, his mouth next to my ear. “First shot was lucky. Son of a bitch'll never—”

The second seaplane collides with us.

The bang feels like the world tearing apart. My stomach plummets as our plane lists to the left, tilting sideways. It's all I can do to keep my balance. With a roar, the second plane appears on the right, its wingtip only just missing ours.

Whoever is flying that plane is insane. He'll take both of us out at once. A hit in the right place will damage an engine, shear off a wing.

The other plane drifts away, as if it's taking a run-up. Then it banks towards us, filling the windows.

There's an angry shout from our cockpit. Eric is leaning across, hands wrapped around the control yoke, pushing the Nomad pilot aside. We tilt again, the nose dropping, and the incoming plane roars above us.

The Nomad in the cockpit grabs Eric's head by a fistful of hair, smashing him into the yoke. Eric is in an exposed position, bent over, and he can't reach around to stop the attack.

I launch myself up the body of the plane. Finkler is just behind me, almost rolling across the wall. I can't do anything about the attacking plane, but I can do something about the Nomad in the cockpit.

I reach through the gap between the two front seats, and wrap my arm around the man's throat.

He tries to fight me, tries to push me off. But I brace my knees against the back of the seat, and pull. He can't stop himself being hauled upwards, even as his fingernails rake across my cheek.

I twist my body sideways, dragging the man through the gap between the seats and into the body of the plane. I can just see the other seaplane through the cockpit glass–it's coming up from below us, trying to find an angle. Eric is trying to haul himself into the pilot's seat, trying to grab the yoke.

The attention slip costs me. The Nomad lands a blow on my eye socket, setting off a burst of stars in my vision. He's wriggling out of my grip, his chin pushing against my arm.

Finkler and Harlan are grabbing his arms and legs, trying to hold him down. But we're all awkwardly balanced, the confined interior of the plane not letting us move around. The Nomad takes the advantage. With a sudden burst of strength, he rips out of my grip, his body swinging sideways. He nearly falls out of the open door, but manages to grab on, his fingers snagging the edge.

His eyes meet mine, and I can see him getting ready to move, getting ready to throw himself back inside. The second seaplane is in view, moving in from behind us, coming in fast, a white ghost against the dark sky.

I don't think. I just move. My foot slams into the Nomad's chest. He swings sideways, his fingers ripped from the edge of the door, just like the one who tried to climb in off the platform. Except this time there's nothing to break his fall.

The shock and anger on his face are unbelievable. Then he's falling, tumbling out. Slamming into the other plane.

Its wing takes him at his waist. For an instant, he just hangs there, stuck fast by the rushing air. Then he slips sideways, his upper body dropping right onto the whirling propeller.

There's a grinding bang. The propeller knocks the Nomad sideways, his body spinning out of view. The engine starts to tear itself apart. Grey smoke billows out of it as the housing comes apart in shreds, the propeller curved inward now, starting to tear up the wing itself.

The plane tilts, as if the mangled engine is pulling it to the ground. Then it's gone.

For a moment, I'm perfectly balanced in the plane's unstable interior, hands just touching the wall. I'm reliving the Nomad's expression again–that horrified shock as he realised he was falling. That was me. I did that.

I don't feel anything. Not a thing. And for the first time, that doesn't bother me.

“Eric!” Harlan shouts.

The sound drags me out of my thoughts. I turn to see Harlan leaning into the space at the back of the cockpit. Just past him, I can see Eric in the pilot's seat, hands on the controls. He's gripping them so hard that his skin has turned white.

He's never flown a plane before–never even been inside one, for all I know. He might have the knowledge, gleaned from books, but that's all he's got. And now he's at the controls, a thousand feet up. The plane starts to tilt, its nose pointing towards the ground.

I stagger up towards the cockpit, squeezing through the opening and slipping into the seat on Eric's right. It used to be fabric and foam padding, but it's been worn down to a bare skeleton, and the struts jam into my back. There's a second stick in front of me, moving in tandem with Eric's. I can just make out the dark shapes of mountains through the smeared cockpit glass.

The plane levels out a little. We're still descending, but more slowly now. Eric is staring straight ahead, mouth open. Sweat drips from his chin, landing on his vise-grip hands.

I say his name, but it gets lost in the roar of the engines. When I reach out to grab him, I find that he's trembling, his shoulder vibrating under my hand.

Finkler shoves his way through the opening, hunting for something. He reaches up behind me and jams something over my head. A pair of headphones, huge and bulbous, catching my hair and trapping it against my scalp. I adjust them, pulling the microphone stalk down as Finkler puts another pair on Eric's head.

The sound of the engine is muffled now. I feel on the stalk for the transmit switch, clicking it into place. A thin crackle of static emerges over the engine.

“Eric,” I say. I have to repeat his name before he looks at me, and, when he does, there's naked terror in his eyes. This isn't the commander I saw back at the hospital. This is someone who is coming face to face with his worst fear.

I see his lips moving, but I can't hear him. I point to the stalk, and after some fumbling his voice comes across the channel: “—do it. Can't do it.”

“Yes, you can,” I say.

He shakes his head, letting go of the control yoke and gripping the mic stalk with both hands. The plane dips even further, sliding me forward in my seat. I grab my own control yoke, moving more on instinct than anything else, pulling it backwards. We start rising, but I've pushed it too far, overcorrecting the movement. The yoke feels heavy in my hands, the plane both sluggish and impossibly sensitive.

“Eric, listen to me,” I say. “I can't do this by myself. I don't know how.”

“You think I do?”

“You've read the books. You know how this thing works. Eric,
please
.”

“No.” He's shaking his head. “We need to go back to Whitehorse. We'll find someone else.”

It would be so easy to get angry, to scream at him. It's not just that I could–I
want
to. But getting angry isn't going to work–not this time. I don't have the first clue what I'm doing. Eric needs to figure out how to fly this thing, and soon, or we're going to crash. I have to help him understand that he can do it.

A memory tugs at me. Carver, back on the station. We'd been captured by Mikhail's Earthers, and to escape I'd taken a little girl hostage. Ivy, her name was. I held her round the throat, used her to buy us some time. Carver gave me hell for it, told me that I was trying to handle everything myself, acting before my friends could help me.

I reach out, grabbing his hands, pulling them gently off the stalk. Then I place them on the control yoke, holding them tight, before returning my hands to my own controls.

My eyes meet his. “We're going to do it together,” I say. “We'll pull it up. All right?”

The terrified expression hasn't left his face. But after a long moment, he nods.

“Here we go,” I say. Together, we pull back on our control yokes.

The plane levels out, and then slowly begins to climb.

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.”

Finkler's voice comes through the channel. “Can you hear us up there?”

I twist round, looking through the gap in the seats. As I do so, I get a better look at the plane's interior. It's old–ancient, actually. The walls are caked with rust, and the floor is a mess of struts and hinges, the seats they once held long since removed. There are a few battered plastic crates scattered across the floor of the plane, and, at the back, there's a loose mesh netting hanging from floor to ceiling, with more crates stacked tightly behind it. Finkler and Harlan have found headphones of their own, pulled down from brackets mounted on the wall

Eric is staring straight ahead. “Yeah, I hear you,” he says, barely moving his lips. He seems… not calm, exactly, but a little more focused. We're not going to crash, at least not right away.

“How much fuel do we have?” I say.

His eyes don't leave the windshield. “We're lucky. They'd filled her up. Probably getting ready to head out in the morning.” He glances at me, and his face hardens. “Before you say anything: yes, I'll take you to Anchorage.”

I don't know
what
to say. Despite everything that's happened, he's still got every right to turn this plane around and return to Whitehorse. He'd be putting his people's needs above mine, and I wouldn't be able to fault him for it.

He sees my confusion. “That plan of yours was the stupidest, most insane thing I've ever heard. It should have got you killed, and you know it. But you went out there anyway. That counts for something, at least to me.”

There's a long pause.

“Thank you.” It's all I can think to say.

“But let's get it straight,” he says, and I can hear the strength coming back into his voice. “We're not sticking around. Once we get you there, you're on your own. I'm taking this thing back home. That's assuming I don't mess up the landing and kill us all.”

“Fair enough.”

There's a square screen to his left, full of strange shapes, and he taps it with a fingernail. “The plane's got some working nav software on it. We'll head for…” He checks the screen. “Cook Inlet. It's just up past Anchorage. If we get down safe, we can get you onto the shoreline. We should have enough fuel to make it back OK.”

I sink back against the seat. The plane is rocking gently from side to side, steadily climbing, and Finkler and Harlan are talking in excited bursts as they dig through the containers at the back of the plane.

Eric looks around for a long minute, hunting across the control panel. “Hit that button there,” he says, pointing to a spot on my side, where there's a bank of toggle switches. I reach over and grab the one I think he's pointing to, on the far left.

“No, that's the—” Eric says, and then I flip the switch and our headphones explode with noise.

My eardrums feel like they're tearing in two, like every frequency in the spectrum is trying to jam itself inside my head. I grab my headphones, trying to rip them off, but one of them is caught on my ear. Eric launches across the space between us, scrambling for the switch.

At the last second, just before he turns the switch off and kills the radio, I hear something.

Something that shouldn't be there.

“Jesus,” Eric says, shaking his head as he sits back in his seat. He yanks the control stick downwards, jerking the plane back up. “That was the radio. The one I was
pointing to
is the autopilot switch, so if you could—”

“Turn it back on,” I say.

“What?”

“Turn it back on. Right now.” I don't wait for him to do it. I reach forward, and flip the switch. Eric stares at me, wincing at the noise. Then he grabs a dial just under the bank of switches, and twists it all the way to the left.

The sound is still a jumble of noise, but it's softer now, almost inaudible. Eric is staring at me like I've gone mad.

Slowly, very slowly, I turn the volume up. A little at time. My eyes are closed, as if it'll help me find the signal in the noise.

Nothing.

I must have imagined it. My shoulders sag. For a second there, I thought—

The voice comes across the transmission, almost buried by the noise, split in two by the static: “—anyone hear me?”

Eric is staring at me, confused. “So some kid's got hold of a transmitter. So what?”

“We have to respond,” I say, my voice curiously breathless. I'm hunting the panel for a transmit button, but I can hardly make sense of the labels: DOPPLR and TFREQ, RFREQ and OFFSET.

“Finkler!” Eric shouts, not bothering to use his headset. I hear clunking footfalls, and then Finkler's flushed face pokes into the space between Eric and me.

“Mind giving us a little warning before you mess with the radio?” he shouts.

I grab his shoulder, jamming my headphones back on. “I have to transmit,” I say. “Outside the plane.”

“Hey, whoa,” Finkler says, his face serious. “I mean, I don't know if—”

“
Please.
”

“Do it,” Eric says.

Finkler shakes his head, his eyes wide, but leans forward until he's on all fours, half in and half out of the cockpit. He toggles some switches and adjusts some knobs, his tongue sticking a little out of his mouth.

“Hurry,” I say.

The voice comes again, and my heart almost explodes out of my chest. The sound is fainter this time: “—Control on Outer Earth transmitting. If there's–out there—”

“My God,” Eric says, staring at the radio.

Finkler twists a knob, and reaches over to flick a second switch, his arm nearly colliding with my face. Then he leans back, and touches a button on the centre console.

The static vanishes.

For a second, I think we've lost her, but then Finkler gestures at me to speak.

“Anna?” I say. “This is Riley. Come back.”

Finkler releases the button. The static returns. There are more artefacts in the noise now, strange blips and clicks, as if my words have disturbed a strange god, slowly coming to life.

Then, almost inaudible, I hear Anna Beck's stunned voice. “Riley?”

Finkler and Eric are staring at me in shock. Harlan has arrived, too, his face visible above Finkler's back.

“I can hear you!” I say.

Anna's reply is fractured “—shit, you're alive! How–others, are you—”

“Anna, what about everybody up there? Is Outer Earth OK?”

“—dying. The reactor's cut out, and—”

“Anna, say again?”

“—send a ship back to Earth, but we don't know—”

“It has to be passing right overhead,” says Finkler, as Anna's voice cracks apart in the static. “That's the only way this is happening.” He grabs my shoulder. “You've probably got about fifteen seconds, maybe less.”

Hearing Anna's voice, knowing she's alive, after the breach in the dock, is almost too much to take. I hit the button again. “Anna, listen to me carefully. If you can make it back to Earth, aim for a place called Whitehorse, in the Yukon. We'll be waiting for you.” I don't know what Eric might say about that, and right then I couldn't care less.

Her voice is even fainter now. “—ley, I copy, we'll come–you. As soon as I—”

And then she's gone. There's nothing but static

“You have to tune it,” I say, pointing to the radio. “Get her back.”

“She's out of range,” says Finkler, giving a helpless shrug.

“There's gotta be something we can do.”

He reaches forward and adjusts the dial marked DOPPLR. The squelches and clicks mutate, lengthening and twisting into new sounds. He grunts in frustration, turning his attention to TFREQ, then RFREQ. After a long moment, he drops his hand.

“Nada,” he says. “Doppler offset didn't catch her. She's out of range.”

He looks genuinely distraught, like he's let someone die. I reach up and put a hand on his, squeezing tight.

“Were we just talking to someone in space?” Harlan says.

“Who was she?” Eric says. “And did you just seriously invite
more people
to live with us in Whitehorse?”

I don't have a chance to answer. At that moment, another voice cuts across the static.

“—broadcasting from a secure location in what used to be Anchorage, Alaska. There are at least a hundred of us here, and we have managed to establish a colony. We have food, water and shelter. The—”

I flick the radio off.