Matthew Barash Science Fiction / Fantasy

email the author at: mbarash at lookatusgo.com

ONE

The horn blasted into Bryce’s ears, his head banged against the head of the bunk. And in a matter of two seconds he went from blissfully out of it to a radiation-alarm-sized hangover. He grabbed the bunk with both hands while the room swirled and bobbed about him in an exceptionally cruel fashion.

When the swaying dropped below reentry-buffet levels, he risked opening one eye. The light was low, other than the throbbing red one above the hatch. Closing his eyes for a long moment did nothing to alleviate the steady pulsing light. Perhaps it wasn’t just some figment of his pickled neurons.

One eye. The other eye. Yup. Definitely an alarm. That’s what it was.

He let his head roll to the left. A long row of three-tier bunks, all empty. Transient quarters. They looked the same on every single ship in orbit. Though not usually this big.

Stellar One. That was it. If he was on the colony ship, where was his shuttle?

He flopped his head to the right and something sharp poked his cheek. Releasing one hand from his death grip on the mattress, he inspected the new affront to his aching head. A jotter. He dragged it in front of his face. One eye wasn’t focusing too well yet so he closed it. The screen blurred even worse. He closed the other one. No better. By squinting, he could just make out Cappy’s scrawl.

E-run. Melissa jumped at a chance to do her first solo as engineer. Didn’t complaint about getting your pay scale either. She’s way cuter than you are, too.

Hell, Melissa was cuter than all of them put together. Flaunted it too, not that she shared with any of the male crew. Cappy had signed the message with his usual yellow, smiley-face. The man was so retrograde. He even wore shit-kicker boots and a cowboy hat when flying. Let Melissa have the money, he’d just dump the creds on some bartender anyway. Though an emergency run paid double, which would have been nice.

Bryce tapped for an update. Lazy Jane was grounded an extra eight hours for a tank imbalance. Cappy’s signature wasn’t so smiley this time. He must be some kind of pissed at his assistant engineer about paying the pump-out fee. He’d warned Cappy that Melissa wasn’t ready yet. He hadn’t taught her any of the quasi-legal tricks, like tank-purge during the reentry burn, never mind the really elegant sleights of hand.

Revised lift time, twenty minutes. Another hour to orbit and dock. Time enough for him to shower, grab some breakfast, and be lounging in the Lady J’s arrival airlock with a trashy novel just to rub it in. Perfect.

He cleared and slotted the jotter. Swung up in bed, remembering too late to duck. He clipped the top of his head on the next bunk up. Head between knees. Deep breaths. He rode the edge of nausea like a skysurfer riding the edge of atmosphere skip. He kept it down. He’d landed a shuttle in worse shape than this. Hadn’t enjoyed it, but could do it. Getting out of the transient quarters might kill him though.

Once on his feet, the room thought it would be fun to flip him into a wall or two. Fighting against the vagaries of his inner ear’s attempts to sabotage him, he staggered toward the hatch.

Red light. Blinking. The damned alarm. He’d forgotten about that. Probably just another stupid drill.

The hatch irised out of the way. The central lounge was a vicious assault on his aching optic nerves. Bright light. White walls. Dozens and dozens of people. Bright blue technician shipsuits. Iridescent orange of the space workers, vacuum welders, fitters, jet operators, and the like. And in their midst, the bright, command red of Johnson Merkar, the new fabrication foreman. Right, last night’s party was to welcome him aboard.

Every person turned to inspect Bryce at his entrance. No reaction. Not one smile from anyone, not even either of the two brunettes he’d been chatting up last night. Three heartbeats and then they all turned their attention back to the vidwall. Abandoned books and jotters were scattered on tables and chair arms. A card game was at a dead stop, half the hands showing on the table, cards dribbling one by one out of another player’s hand and floating to the floor. Just when a guy needed a bit of sympathy, nothing. Who cared about a drill simulation anyway? Just a bunch of orbital data. Screw ‘em. He barely had an hour before he had to be in position to harass Cappy. How should he treat Melissa? A sad shake of the head. A curt bark of a laugh. Or perhaps a bit of sympathy. Nah! She was a good kid, just green, but he had a professional image of reticent surliness to uphold.

He was most of the way to the bathroom before the images on the vid sank through the mush inside his skull. Something there wasn’t right. He looked back at the wall and walked square into the partition between the bathroom and the exit hatch.

The lower part of the vid showed Earth orbit. Nearly a hundred tracks circled the planet. The high L5 colonies at the LaGrange points, the corporate factories, solar relays, even some of the low-orbit comm and tourist stuff. Stellar One was picked out with a bright blue circle.

An orbital diagram of the sun and the first three planets dominated the upper portion of the wall. A swath of solar flare washed from the sun out past the orbit of Mercury. Damn big flare. Some of the older satellites were not going to do well. Ground communications would be screwy for days.

He glanced at the numbers down the side and turned for the bathroom. The number clicked in and he stopped as a shiver rooted him to the spot. They were like nothing he’d ever seen. Blinking a couple times didn’t nothing to fix the problem. Flares took two, even three days to get from the sun to Earth. This one was moving at a third of light speed, total time in transit, twenty-four minutes.

Nothing moved that fast, especially not large chunks of the solar corona. The rest of the data he needed wasn’t on-screen. Maybe they didn’t have it yet. If there was—

“Launch Control. Stellar One here. Can you confirm our arrival in Earthshadow prior to flare arrival?”

Someone in command was thinking. But her voice! Calm and cool as could be. The numbers were scaring the shit out of him and there wasn’t the slightest quaver in the announcer’s speech. Might be asking if Launch wanted a glass of iced tea while he was considering his answer.

“Jeffers? Thought Olias would have taken over.”

“He, uh, feels that the officer of the watch should ride it out even if it’s her first watch.” Her voice was filled with chagrin. So, she had emotions, how did that get through her command training? Those who wore space black were nearly automatons in their dedication to duty. Cappy was the only exception he’d ever met, but then again, he’d dropped out and hocked his life to buy an aging cargo shuttle.

Launch laughed. Sounded like Jacobson. Good man. Head of Hanoi Launch. Also, had been his mother’s beau right before her murder. High mark in his favor. She always chose the very best with impeccable taste.

“Tell sub-Commander Sunra that he is a pompous jerk and remind him that he owes me a fifth of scotch before you leave orbit. And it had better be a good bottle, twenty year at least. Of course, he’s also right. You’ll do fine, Jeffers, or he wouldn’t have given you a watch at all. Let’s see. Um, yes. Can confirm your arrival in Earthshadow three point six minutes ahead of flare. But it’s a big one, you may meet it coming out the far side.”

“Appreciate the confirmation. I show flare arrival in twelve minutes . . . mark.”

“Confirm your mark.”

“Is this due to the Wanderer?” A faint voice sounded from the background of one of the links.

Ouch. Dumb question. Someone just lost a lot of points.

“No kidding. How often do hundred-kilometer wide asteroids plunge into the sun? What is most irksome is that no one predicted this. It splashed in twenty-seven hours ago. We thought we were done with it.”

“There was Offus and Menzer.” Officer Jeffers had done her reading.

Jacobson, hemmed and hawed a bit, probably accessing his console. “Christ! Everyone reviewer thought they were nuts, but there it is. Lana!” His shout into the microphone blasted out so loud that everyone in the transient quarters flinched. “Get these guys for me. Damn! Look at these numbers. Get them fast. I don’t care if they’re in their mistresses beds or each others, I want them online in thirty seconds.”

In the lower left corner of the vid wall, not far from the taller brunette’s hips, was a data feed Bryce hadn’t noticed. It was odd. Providing information that was already outdated even as it changed. He shifted to peek between her and the shorter one’s elbow to locate the source. It was from Icarus One, one of the solar observatories they’d launched to watch The Wanderer splash down. They were inside the orbit of Mercury at the moment. Their data had taken six minutes to arrive at the speed of light, by which time the flare was thirty million kilometers closer. Their data was two minutes out of date by the time it arrived and getting farther behind every moment as closer receivers picked up the trace.

As if on cue, another voice joined the conversation. It was broken, a weak signal with a lot of interference.

“Icar . . . One. Lost contac . . . Ic . . . Two.” A blinking red circle appeared in the wall projection. Exactly in the path of the flare. At the very best, their electronics were fried and they’d need a bit of rescuing. At the worst, Bryce looked away from the flashing circle. There were people out there. He was pretty sure that Jimmy Stevens had shipped out as their engineer. Research missions, long, dull, but good pay. Best not to think about it too much.

“Estimate thirty . . . metric tons solar mass in flare. Repeat. . . .’ty times ten eighteenth . . . ‘ons.”

This wasn’t some little communications problems for a few days. That was the mass of the Mediterranean Ocean. That was a lot of plasma.

“Entering Earthshadow.”

He hadn’t been paying attention. Now the Earth would be between the flare and Stellar One for the next, he checked the orbital data, twenty-eight minutes. If the flare was still passing when they came out the far side of the orbit, it wouldn’t be a good thing.

The center of the flare was going to hit square on the Atlantic Basin. The exact epicenter was Bermuda.

He barked out a single laugh.

Everyone in the room spun to stare at him. He clamped his mouth shut. It was a joke no one else would appreciate. One by one they turned back to watch the unfolding drama.

Bermuda. The seat of the world government. The home of the Premier. The palace of his parent. Of course the joke was that not even the entire focused malevolence of the sun could touch him, radiation wouldn’t dare to hurt the old bastard. Upper case. Old Bastard. Yup! That was more than appropriate. Big letters. Huge. Old Bastard!

Another alarm pierced the station. Imminent collision! Nothing like its bray. Every spacer in the room jumped to their feet and took a step forward, himself included, even with nowhere to go. The light over the hatchway changed from pulsing to steady red. They were in full lockdown. No one was going nowhere.

Bryce kept clenching his fists. His hands were desperate for a console. For steering jets. To manually overcrank the flow gates into the engines. To get the hell away. But there was nothing to do. Nothing to grab. Nothing to prepare for despite his body’s trained insistence on immediate action. All they could do was cover their ears and watch as the collision alarm ring out its obligatory thirty seconds. No one returned to their seats. For better or worse they were stuck with each other until the crisis was past. He scanned the room. He’d been stuck with worse, no panicky civilians to coddle so they’d pay the remainder of their fare after touchdown. Hardened spacers, almost every one, and the rest were at least space-trained.

The officer with the chill voice counted down the last thirty seconds to arrival aloud, as if it made any difference in the impact of thirty-billion billion tons of molten stellar material. People were grabbing their chairs for support. The cute brunettes clung to each other, maybe he should have tried chatting them up at the same time. It was almost amusing when he noticed his own desperate clinging to his bit of wall. Even he wanted to survive. A bit surprising that. He’d have to think about it.

“Three. Two.”

If he lived.

“One.”

Nothing.

No sound.

No thud of impact.

No high whistle of escaping air. No whoosh of imminent death by vacuum.

On screen, a sparkle formed along the horizon. Small at first, just a brightness like an Aurora Borealis. Well, if that’s all it was going to be after all this buildup . . .

It grew brighter. Grew until he could see the computer shuttering down the image, but it wasn’t going fast enough. In moments the entire wall was a wash of glare that had him shielding his eyes.

When he dared peek again, the computer’s compensators had kicked in, or the wall had partially burned out. The horizon was a sheet of light ripping out into space.

Someone was still working upstairs. Cameras bobbed and switched about in a vertigo inducing array. In moments one locked onto African Solar Power’s platform, another onto the Shelxxon asteroid refinery station. And a tiny comm satellite in low Earth orbit. The last didn’t make any sense until he studied the orbital data. It was the closest object to Stellar One. It would slip out of Earthshadow just twenty-three seconds ahead of them. Not much of a warning.

Shelxxon slid past the horizon first. For a moment, it iridesced with reflected sunlight, sparkling brighter than the full moon on a perfect night. The next it was gone, torn spaceward by the flare. The camera zoomed in for a close-up of African Power’s platform. They could actually see the leading edge shatter and vaporize even as a couple of single-person skitters jumped off the back of the station. Too late to reverse orbital speed, they were all gone in a moment.

One of the card players, a big, broad-shouldered welder, barfed all over the game. Not that anyone would be going back to it for a long while. A chain reaction followed that had five or six leaning against walls making hideous retching sounds. Bryce swallowed hard and managed to keep it down though the bile burned hot and angry, wanting out.

Several had dropped back into their chairs. A couple fell all the way to the deck, having wandered away from their seat elsewhere in the room. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Interestingly, the brunettes were standing up to it better than some of the toughest-looking plas handlers. For the thousandth time, Bryce wished his brain would shut up its need to observe and catalog and let him cower like so many others, but it wasn’t designed that way.

The imagers were scanning around for fresh bait. One picked out the full moon. It was no longer a soft yellow. It shone with the brightness of devil’s fire. Armstrong City, Tycho, Neil’s Dome, all gone. Not a one of their domes could take this. Million and a half people. Zap. Gone.

He checked the orbits of the outer planets. Mars was in conjunction, right in the path.

Another collision alarm blasted out. The officer’s voice sounded over the comm.

“Attention, Mars. Attention, Mars. Solar flare will impact . . . six minutes after you receive this message. Six minutes. This is not a drill. Full collision protocols. Repeat. Not a drill.”

He gave her points for being on the ball. Not that it would do any good. Bryce had always wanted to see the fine, crystalline dome that nestled in the first dozen kilometers of the Marineris Canyon. Port Lowell would survive the harshest Martian sandstorm with an excess loading factor of five times for safety. The sun was about to brush it aside as if it humanity had never walked upon the red planet.

More scanning about. A billowing cloud of orange and brown flowed toward to the camera so fast that everyone who could move was scrambling back from the vidwall. The only one who stood his ground was Johnson Merkar. His head was turned a bit to the side, and from his vantage, Bryce could see that he was wincing. But he was tough, he faced the onrushing demon with firmly planted feet.

The camera pulled back, then another joined in and a third as the computer struggled to integrate and interpret the image.

Then the screen blanked. Nothing at all on the wall. No orbits. No reports. No data.

He willed it back on. Willed it with all his might. Reached deeper than he did for anything except self-defense against his parent. There were some places it simply wasn’t safe to go no matter how bad the crisis.

The screen flashed back on and there was a unified gasp of relief from the lounge’s occupants that echoed his own.

Then the silence returned. There was no data. No pretty necklace of orbits about a shining planet. Nothing. Just a single image filling the wall from deck to ceiling.

For a moment it looked like the sun. A giant ball of fire. But then the brown of smoke clouds washed across the brilliant oranges and red-golds.

Fire! Earth was burning. The atmosphere had been ignited. For an instant, the conflagration had torn apart. A group of islands he didn’t recognize were lit brighter than daylight from above by the burning oxygen and the ground fire below, then they were gone as the fire and smoke washed over the dark side of the planet.

Gone. Everyone on Earth. Gone.

Cappy was—

A man screamed and bolted for the hatch to the corridor. He ricocheted off Bryce, smashing him back against the wall. He scrabbled at the hatch as if with sheer will and bare fingers he could tear open a decimeter of plas.

His screaming echoed about the lounge. No one approached him as his fruitless digging turned into a steady pounding of fists soon split open and bloody with the force of his blows.

Someone moved. A blur of red brushed past Bryce. Johnson Merkar grabbed the man by the front of his suit and lifted his feet clear of the ground. Merkar backhanded him sharply.

His cries rose an octave.

Another backhand had no better effect though it snapped the man’s head cruelly to the left.

Merkar hauled back and punched his face so hard that Bryce could hear bones crumble and shatter.

The scream stopped.

Merkar tossed the man headfirst into the closed hatch. Hard.

He slid to the ground, leaving a bloody trail on the door. The fabrication boss moved back to his place in front of the vidwall and once more crossed his arms over his chest.

The screamer was silent now, except for a long, slow sigh escaping his slack jaw. His eyes were open as blood dribbled out of his mouth and nose.

“Departing Earthshadow in thirty seconds, mark.” He wanted to strike out at that passionless voice. Stop it. Somehow, if he could stop that voice, none of this would have happened. He could wake up from another hangover in a different transient quarters. With no alarm blaring. With Cappy and Buzz crashed out in the next bunks over. Melissa and Vicky on the bridge humping away in the astrogation chair.

While they were watching the fire, space had gone dark. The perfect cylinder of light that had roared past the Earth was gone as if it had never been.

The little comm satellite slid out of Earthshadow. It sparkled as the sunlight hit it. And continued on its way in a lazy orbit, probably desperately searching for where all its terrestrial signals had gone.

Again the countdown. Steady. Implacable. Gibberish to his ears.

Then they saw the sun again. Unchanged. The brightest star in a field of a million others. No dimmer for its expulsion of material and its scorching the face of the of its most populous planet.

A round of applause and cheers filled the room. People were hugging, thudding each other on the back. A lot of them were shaking Merkar’s hand, as if by adding to the day’s death count, he had personally averted their own demise.

The Earth was gone. The moon as well. And the screamer. And, oh God, if only there was one, Bryce begged the pain around his heart, please help him. Cappy, Melissa, Buzz, and Vicky. They would have been back aboard hours ago if he’d made the flight rather than Melissa. He’d killed them as surely as Merkar had killed the screamer.

Bryce slid down his bit of wall until he landed on the deck.

The screamer was silent, a pool of blood spreading out before his lifeless body.

And Bryce wanted to laugh. Of all the possible people in the solar system that had died, that should have died, that deserved to die a hundred times over, why was he the one who fate had chosen to spare?

He began to laugh, couldn’t stop it. But he did it silently. For only he would understand the scale of the cosmic joke.

# # #

It had been there a moment ago. Japan was there a moment ago. She’d seen it through the clouds. A little archipelago of islands. Home. The only one she’d ever understood. The last view of the surface revealed before the fire closed over the Earth. Imaging radar presently showed the Alaskan peninsula. Visual showed nothing but billowing clouds.

The room was so silent that she wondered if her hearing still worked. Ri tapped a fingernail lightly on the blinking red indicator of the hatch lockdown control. She heard the clicking. Her ears still worked.

A quick glance to the side showed the Captain collapsed in her chair. Her short gray hair, her impeccable, space-black jumpsuit a sharp contrast to her blankly staring wide eyes. Not far behind her Rejash Menala wept silently, his tears falling on the silver wings of a ship’s pilot.

She took a deep breath before glancing sidelong to the other side. Olias Sunra, the meanest, toughest, and most dedicated officer she’d met on ship, sat blank-faced as well. His mouth wasn’t hanging open like the captain’s but he wasn’t seeing what was before him either. She changed the big screen view from radar image to the comm satellite and back.

No reaction. That scared her almost as much as what they had all just witnessed. Everyone else was at or near their stations. None were in any better shape.

A quick review of ship’s status showed the four completed rings spinning about the ship’s axis. The fifth, half-finished, hung still against the stars. It wasn’t due to be spun up for another month. No leaks. The initial radiation blast, mainly gamma, had been stopped by the hull. The heavier, slower, more damaging particles had been blocked by the Earth.

The Earth. The blank orb was mesmerizing. She shut down the main viewer.

The command crew came back to life slowly.

Ri accessed the crew rosters. The entire command crew of fourteen was aboard except for the biome specialist. Marcus James on a collecting expedition for the Savannah biome. He was in the plains of Alberta, Western United Canada. Had been.

The seven biome teams were at full complement, another forty-five. Three hundred and six general and specific ship’s support personnel. Eleven thousand, three hundred and fifty-four fabricators, plas workers, and other construction specialists and their support including medical and food services.

Total personnel aboard: 11,718.

“That’s all?” The captain’s voice was barely a croak.

Ri aimed the deep space radar at the moon and overlaid a camera image. She started to program in close-ups of the various Lunar colonies, but stopped as the radar’s readings came back.

The surface was no longer a soft yellow-gray of reflected sunlight. It was a glistening mirror of gray and red. The radar returned a strange double-bounce, two surfaces, one clear, one opaque, barely two feet apart.

The moon’s surface had been turned into glass.