Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #226 (9 page)

"Kellman?” somebody says. “This is Riaz. Where are you?"

I don't answer immediately, but eventually I pick it up. “Still inside."

"They're attacking the bus. As soon as the last volunteers are onboard, we're going."

I stand there, holding the radio, gazing absently around the empty room.

"You hear me?” he says.

"I hear you."

Crossing to the window, I gaze out. The drawing room overlooks Montague Place; to the left, just visible on the corner, is a fire exit and stairs. I might be able to reach it via the window ledge. Or I could stay here with you. I'm still considering my options when I hear the door handle turn, followed by a pounding as my minder realizes I've locked him out.

"I guess I'm coming,” I say into the radio.

Leaving it on the desk, I crawl through the empty window frame. The ledge is about six inches wide. When I stand up, the toes of my boots hang over the edge. I shuffle along, back pressed against the wall, staring down at the thirty foot drop to the courtyard below. I imagine falling, smashing my bones on the rubble-strewn cement. I don't feel fear at the thought. I don't feel anything.

Then somebody's shouting at me. When I reach the fire escape, I look back. My minder is leaning out the window, training his pistol on me. We stare at each other across the gap, but the gun is an impotent threat. He can kill me if he wants, and keep me here with you. I start shambling down the metal stairs, leaning on the rail for support. I fall twice. Each time, I'm slower to get up. As a moving target I'm not exactly nimble, but the expected bullet never comes. The next time I look up, from the courtyard, the window is empty.

I don't know if he's gone to cut me off, or help his friends, and I don't waste time trying to figure it out. Gasping and choking, covered in dust and ash, I stagger across the courtyard, circling the museum towards the main entrance on Russell Street. At the corner, I drop to a knee and peer around—getting my first glimpse of the skirmish going on out front.

Our guards have retreated to the bus, forming a protective half-circle around it. Several of them are crouched by the front end for cover. In the seats, behind windows spiderwebbed with cracks, I can see the hunched forms of terrified volunteers, heads bowed as if in preparation for a plane crash. The last stragglers are still being ushered onboard.

A handful of Hibs lie sprawled across the courtyard, either dead or wounded. More have arrived to fill their ranks, taking up position behind lampposts, concrete benches, chunks of rubble—anything that's on hand. The bark of gunfire is intermittent but consistent. As I watch, a masked Hib stands up and lobs a flaming bottle at the bus. It pinwheels through the air, and comes down near the radiator grill—shattering into a pool of flames.

The only route to the bus lies straight through the centre of the firefight. I already feel like I've run a marathon. I can taste blood in my throat. My legs are just barely holding me up, and my whole head seems to be throbbing, like a giant heart planted on my shoulders. I'm in no shape to run a gauntlet like this, but it's not like I've left myself any alternatives.

I start sprinting.

I don't bother dodging or ducking—just take the most direct line. Something hurtles past my head. A rock, maybe? Then a scarecrow figure rushes towards me, face twisted into a grimace. We converge, bounce off each other. I stumble and scramble on, kicking away his clutching hands. Bullets zip by like angry bees. Dust kicks up at my feet. Shit. They're shooting at me. At first I assume it's the Hibs. Then I realize it's coming from the bus. Without my mask and hardhat, covered in grime, I must look like another crazed attacker. Impossibly, that makes me want to laugh. I raise my hands, wave them frantically in protest.

"Don't shoot!” I shout. “Don't fucking kill me! I'm one of you!"

Even as I say it, I realize that it's true. I'm one of them, the living. And for a split second, running headfirst into friendly fire, and away from the place that is your tomb, I feel the sweet and desperate desire to survive.

Copyright (C) 2010 Tyler Keevil

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I sprinted through narrow, zigzagging pathways inside the pine-green glacier. I could make out Rossi's black bomber jacket far behind me, appearing and disappearing with each bend. The air-pulses struck the sides of the walls, sending chunks of ice flying.

I dropped, hugged the frozen ground, and waited.

We landed at the Lassel Airstrip near Axelis Colony where I was sure my wife, Miranda, had arrived a month ago with Rossi. Joriander and Hexa hauled my bags down our seedship's ramp while I hugged my hooded fur coat tight. Neptune hovered high in the pale viridian sky. Even with the Wergen force field doming this airstrip, Triton's tenuous atmosphere still mustered a bitter breeze that stung my face like razors.

The three of us trudged across the empty tarmac toward the terminal entranceway. To our left, the towering, cathedral-like glaciers of Triton's North Pole glittered blue-green, capturing Neptune's luminescence.

"Here, Maxwell,” Hexa said, removing a leathery scarf and exposing her white-scaled face to the elements. She threw it around my shoulders and pressed close to me—too close, I thought—for a few seconds longer than necessary.

Joriander followed suit, removing his temp-mitts and offering them to me.

I resisted the urge to slap the gloves to the ground. “Knock it off. I'm fine."

The Wergens hunched their shoulders at my curtness, and I felt a pang of guilt. They continued their steady gait at my side. The ground rumbled and a geyser exploded on the horizon, spewing ice-lava miles into the sky.

Oh, the distances you've traveled, Miranda. He's taken you so far from home. But don't worry, my love. I'm here now.

After a few paces, Hexa placed her four-fingered hand on my shoulder, letting it linger there. “I wish my people could have produced a more effective field over this area, one that could generate more comfortable temperatures for humans. I apologize."

"No need,” I said, shrugging off her hand. “After all, where would we be without you?” Probably relegated to digging caves on equatorial Mars, I thought. Wergen fieldtech had opened up every planetesimal in the solar system to human colonization, the limitations of temperature, radiation, gravity and atmosphere all conquered in one fell swoop. Without their help I would never have obtained transport from Earth to Triton to track down Miranda and bring her home.

Joriander removed a jewel-encrusted sphere from his inside robe pocket and tapped several of the gemstones. In response, the terminal's circular doorway irised open and we entered a cavernous holding area. As soon as the door rumbled shut, a dozen bots, mantis-like devices the size of terriers, skittered towards us. They herded us into an enormous decontamination pen where they scanned our retinas, removed and sterilized our clothes, and ran us through a battery of tests to screen for contagious diseases.

I caught the Wergens staring at me with rapt attention, their large mooning eyes probing my body. I cupped my hands over my crotch. Despite the Wergens’ notorious reticence to discuss their sexual practices, they showed no bashfulness at their own nakedness. They were squat, husky, with reptilian scales speckling their bleached-white skin, and no visible genitalia. Hexa, the female, matched my height, while Joriander, the male, stood a foot shorter. Rumor had it that their sexual organs lay hidden within their flat-topped craniums, which they kept covered at all times, even now, with a leafy headdress. I shuddered. For all of the Wergens’ courtesies, I still felt an instinctive aversion toward them.

But they offered us so much. And I had to do whatever necessary to save Miranda.

One of the bots injected a tracker into my earlobe. Local officials carefully monitored all new arrivals, a practice I was counting on to find Miranda among the hundreds of thousands of Axelis's inhabitants. The bots then sprayed our naked bodies with a microfilament that produced an electrical field evident only by the faintest of blue tinges.

"This will maintain your body temperature at a more comfortable level,” Joriander said. “We won't need the heavier protective clothing any more."

I turned away and donned the standard two-piece blue uniform provided to us, feeling the Wergens’ eyes on my back. The bots then guided us to a raised monorail where the three of us boarded a private railcar headed to Axelis.

We sped above smooth, dark-green ice plains formed over millions of years by a slurry of water and ammonia. And as the minutes turned to hours, the topography below us shifted to a landscape of what I'd heard described as ‘cantaloupe skin', an endless expanse of circular depressions separated by deep, rounded ridges. Ahead of us, Neptune crawled across the skyline, growing smaller as it moved to the west but still filling a quarter of the sky. The Great Dark Spot, a massive storm system, stained its southern hemisphere behind half-formed rings.

"A spectacular sight, isn't it?” Hexa said, leaning toward me.

What did you think, Miranda, when you saw these alien vistas? Did you snuggle in Rossi's arms? To what extent had the neuromone warped your thinking

The railcar wound around a bend between two icy mountain peaks and, all at once, Axelis came into view. The settlement sat in the thousand-mile Great Gulch, a valley of endless rows of low, neon-lit hills beneath a silver web of monorail tracks. The wisp of blue from the Wergen force field stretched from one peak to another. Below us, more than five hundred thousand colonists from Earth, Mars and Werg populated Axelis.

Joriander locked eyes with me in an intense manner that made me uncomfortable. “Did you leave it on the ship?” he asked.

I reached down and unzipped the side pocket of my bag, revealing the airpulser. “No, I'll be needing this."

Joriander averted his eyes.

An air-pulse whooshed past me and the ground to my left exploded. Another shot rang out and I darted into a crevice in the green ice-wall.

My teeth chattered. I was headed in a dangerous direction, away from Lassel, where the Wergen force field would become more and more tenuous. After a few seconds, I stopped running. Eventually nothing would protect me from the moon's deadly natural environment. There was no trace of Rossi. No, the sensible thing for him to do would have been to forget about me. But I suppose he was no more sensible than I was when it came to Miranda.

At that moment, he came around a bend, firing.

The slim, seven-foot administrator sported a platinum-blonde crew cut and hunched over a com terminal. Her height pegged her as Mars-born. “Yes, they do reside in Axelis."

"Do you have an address?” I said.

It turned out that Miranda and Rossi had temporarily settled in the Pretori District in southern Axelis. They were on the long waiting list for the Human/Wergen expedition to Langalana, an unexplored but potentially habitable planet hundreds of light years away.

"Thank you for your help,” I said.

"My pleasure to serve, sir.” She bowed dramatically. “Welcome to Triton."

Joriander, Hexa and I retreated to the rotunda of the Visitors’ Center. From within this hollowed-out hill, it resembled the lobby of any office building on Earth or Mars except that every human that bustled past us was accompanied by one or two Wergens.

We boarded the jam-packed public monorail to Pretori. A smaller contingent of Wergens wedged in among the Earthers and Martians, their bleached-white faces frozen in ecstasy. Joriander and Hexa also seemed dazed into paralysis by the human crowd while I felt relieved by the brief respite from their constant attentions.

The complex where Miranda and Rossi resided, like all the habitations in Axelis, consisted of a green, rocky knoll drilled with scores of catacombs and caverns. I disembarked from the tram and walked a paved path that snaked up the rocky terrain. Hexa and Joriander, eager to please, as always, lugged my two bags up the side of the hill.

Row upon row of windows pocked the entire hillside, standing out like grids on an emerald anthill. Faces stared from behind them, surveying our arrival. I searched for Miranda's visage among them, to no avail.

Making our way through crisscrossing catacombs, I asked for directions from passersby until I reached the cavern where Miranda lived. I pounded on the door. When no one answered, I lowered my shoulder into it, but the door held firm.