Liwei was halfway across the big central panes of the crop module when a soft beep sounded in his ear and a warning light flashed across his helmet display, crimson dawn blurring out the endless backdrop of stars.
Flat against the impregnable glass with his guide lines radiating from his suit, an outlandish and fragile spider traversing a bubble suspended in nothingness, he let training take over, freezing all movement. Blinked his suit gauges into the hud. His oxygen supply was low, and falling fast. Too fast to complete the walk as planned.
Somehow he must have sustained a puncture that his suit’s SmartSkin sensors had failed to pick up. A minor incident, easily stitched up with a sealant gun or a tube of hardcaulk, if only he’d detected it inside. Out here, with nothing but the thin scrim of atmosphere the suit contained, it could spell serious trouble. A death sentence, if he allowed his mind to drift that way and panic to take over. So he didn’t.
Instead, his free arm sought the tension of the tether holding him clipped to the agrifuge struts. Found nothing but slack. Liwei turned to the side, saw the other end of the line drifting away from the clip, unsecured. Tiny as the leak had to be, it was spinning him head over heels, propelling him into a slow, irretrievable tumble away from the glass, into the vacuum.
Letting himself roll into the spin always felt like suicide in training, but Liwei was an experienced spacewalker, had learned to override planetside-evolved instincts to preserve himself in space, where different rules applied. Death beckoned from the void, cold stars scintillating across an unimaginable gulf. Below him, then above him, the lights of the agrifuge shimmered, the artificial fields underlit by ultraviolet tubes, a swaying, rolling sea of green.
Liwei’s fingers found the safer controls, thumbed off the catches. He adjusted for the jet from the ruptured tank, which was pushing him sideways as well as away from the glass. One chance was all he would get. He waited for the spokes to roll into his viewfinder, for the hub to align between them, and fired the thrusters.
The airlock seemed tiny at this distance, his positioning graphics skewing wildly like they always did before the guiding program locked in. Liwei kept his breathing steady, his eyes on the vector: inside his gloves, his palms were steady and dry. If he missed the airlock, or overshot the station’s central module, he might have enough fuel to decelerate and make another pass. Xiao, the chief engineer, might have just enough time to pull on a suit and attempt to retrieve him. A trapeze act, like the ones he’d watched in the circus as a child, no less lethal for the absence of gravity. The station’s emergency manuals laid out the steps for a rescue protocol, but to Liwei’s knowledge one had never been attempted before.
All this passed through his head as the central module of Jùb?opén V surged in his visor, fist-sized at first, then growing to immense proportions, its pitted exterior lined with observation ports and extensions and maintenance walkways. He had time to register his angle of approach, the panicked voice jabbering in the suit’s audio feed, before his brain dredged up a warning: he was coming in too fast, the airlock yawning open like a great mouth, intent on swallowing him.
Galvanized beyond fear, Liwei shot his palm thrusters into reverse, sending a silent prayer into the eternal night. It went against his ideological conditioning, would go on his record if he’d spoken it loud enough for the suit to pick up, but he was well past caring. He felt the jolt of deceleration, felt his hands clench on the controls, fingers aching with effort. The horizon tilted, the vast edifice falling toward him slowed down. But the correction had thrown him off vector – a slight miscalculation, yet enough for the airlock door to dip under his feet.
Liwei whipped round and made a grab for a handrail, missed. Slammed into the wall and bounced, sending a burst of unintelligible alerts across his hud. Flailed around for a loose cable, a projection, anything to slow his agonizing slide over the edge of the station.
This was how you died in space, the lessons warned. There were hundreds of ways, but in most cases it started off as a small thing, innocuous at first, leading to another, and then the primate brain kicked in, reflexes acquired in an environment where up and down mattered, and you were truly lost. Blowouts and system failures were anticipated by the designers, with failsafes and multiple redundancies built in to mitigate the risk. A snapped line, or a moment’s inattention, killed with remorseless certainty.
Somehow he arrested his momentum, worked the thrusters with gentle taps, tiny jets nudging him backward, until his gloved fist closed around the airlock rail, pulled him inside.
Liwei lay on the floor, fighting the urge to throw up, as air pressure thrummed into the lock. He tore off his helmet, but could not get his shaking legs to hold him up, even in microgravity. The numbers on his suit gauges danced wildly in his vision. His oxygen gauge had maybe five minutes left. It was just his imagination, but he thought he could feel the sucking of the vacuum just outside the door, seeking a way in. Determined to get him next time.
“Close call,” Xiao said, stabbing the keyboard as if intent on punishing it for some unknowable crime. “Even if you hadn’t screwed up the return trajectory like a snotnose who’d just pissed his pants, the lack of air would have gotten you. There wasn’t anywhere near enough for a second try, even if you were really good at holding your breath. Which you’re not.”
Liwei shook his head, fingering the outer shell of his spacesuit. The hole in the oxygen tank was barely noticeable, a tiny pinprick in the metal. “Any bigger,” he said, “and it would’ve blown me clean off. I’d have blacked out before I could react.”
“You got lucky.”
“Or someone else got unlucky,” Liwei said, raising his gaze to meet his friend’s. Xiao seemed to be about to argue, then simply shook his head.
“It was no accident,” Liwei pressed on. “Both the suit leak and the safety line went at the same time. Not to mention the situation with the crop module. We’re being sabotaged.”
“Careful how you phrase that.” Xiao sighed, pushed a strand of hair out of his eyes. Few of the crew aboard Jùb?opén V bothered with personal grooming anymore. With the water shortages, personal hygiene had been the next to go. “The system has logged your walk as unscheduled maintenance. Elevating it to a security concern will require evidence.”
“It’s not like anyone cares.” The leak could have been caused by a micrometeoroid hit, Liwei thought. One of those supposedly one-in-ten-trillion accidents that happened with disturbing frequency. Or a nanoexplosive device, expertly placed, untraceable. “Have you checked the logs? Surveillance should show who had access to the equipment before my walk.”
“No good,” Xiao said. “Remember the all-hands evacuation drill we had earlier this week? If this was deliberate sabotage, anyone on the station could have done it.”
Liwei snorted with disgust, tossed his glove at the wall. It slowed down as soon as it left his hand, tapped the bulkhead, then began to float downward until the chief engineer grabbed it with a reproachful look.
“There’s more,” he said, clipping the glove to Liwei’s suit. “Dao wants to see us. As soon as you’re back from the walk. He didn’t kick up a fuss, and you know he hates being kept waiting. So it must be something big.”
“Just when I thought nothing worse could happen today,” Liwei said, rolling his eyes. “Maybe I should have floated away. Let myself go. At least then I wouldn’t have to sit through another one of Chairman Dao’s enlightening speeches.”
“I can tell him you’ve been sent to the medbay for observation. You almost died out there.”
Liwei bounced to his feet, bobbed up and down in microgravity, like a boxer loosening up. “Then I’m just delaying the inevitable. Better to take all my medicine at once. Besides, it’s inspiring to hear about taking a triumphant step for the Motherland, carrying the Great Revolution into space. Sweeping away the demons and ghosts of primitive man’s superstition out here at the Ultimate Frontier.”
“You know he can probably hear you,” Xiao said, but he was already laughing. He bounded down the agrifuge tunnel, limber like a dancer. “Dao’s ass is on the line too, don’t forget. Every yield below quota is a black mark on his record.”
“If he had a record worth keeping clean, they wouldn’t have sent him here in the first place.” Liwei followed his friend down the tunnel, glad to feel the pull of his own weight again, no matter how subtle. “With cadres like Dao spearheading our Leap to the Stars, it’s a miracle we haven’t crashed back down already.”
Liwei sat in front of a bank of green-tinted monitors, under an array of faded red banners proclaiming the glory of the Revolution and ideological slogans. Holographic portraits of Paramount Leaders long dead and embalmed flickered on the opposite wall, glowering at him with mild distaste. Furnished to resemble the office of an up-and-coming Cadre back on Earth, the cabin had fallen into gentle disrepair two political officers ago, and the chief engineer – Xiao’s predecessor – had quietly and unofficially designated the space a repository of old communications equipment. Over time the clutter had become part of the decor, and the incoming political officer had been none the wiser.
Like the portraits, the face of Political Officer Dao Junfeng also flickered and twitched. Its skin was sallow and bore a wreath of red around the eyes and temples where tiny capillaries had burst. A history of bad diet and bloating in low-grav and the occasional vacuum decompression was written into those scarlet blotches. Dao was a veteran of the Three Heavens Space Program, probably a peasant Cadre from the Republic’s interior, who had bought into the Party line of BUILDING A BRIDGEHEAD TO THE STARS, or latched onto it as a way out of the endless dustbowls, away from the ration cards and water allotments, seduced by the siren call of the orbital colonies.
Liwei couldn’t blame Dao: he’d followed a similar part himself out of the monstrous shipyards of Tianjin-Nanjing, where fire roared and smoke belched every minute of every day, where vast lodging domes covered every inch of the bleak, lead-colored sky. Despite Dao’s pigheadedness and petty tyranny, Liwei almost felt sympathy for the Cadre. A good maintenance tech could always find a berth, but political officers were a dime a dozen. When his term on Jùb?opén V was up, Dao would end up tormenting workers in an industrial zone somewhere on the frozen northern border, or, if he was really unlucky, holding a midlevel administrative post in the Vale Marineris colony. A quick death from a pressure blowout seemed vastly preferable.
“What happened on your walk?” Dao asked. He tried to look stern, but his face, puffed up from extra fluid, could not quite retain the expression. “Chief Engineer, I hope your report is already filed. The Standing Committee will not tolerate further failures.”
Just like that, Liwei felt his sympathy evaporate into the vacuum. “With permission, Comrade,” he said. “I executed an authorized extravehicular activity to investigate unanticipated water losses from the agrifuge ring. There was an equipment failure. My oxygen tank became damaged, as did my safety tether. I established control and engaged my safer propulsion unit to return to the hub. Chief Engineer Jia performed a comprehensive review of the protocol.”
“We were fortunate.” Dao’s tone indicated the opposite. “A double equipment failure is unacceptable. Do we know what happened?”
Xiao fidgeted his hands. “Comrade Political Officer, I have analyzed the situation from several angles. There is no indication that the oxygen unit was defective. It passed the last testing exercise without remark. Likewise, all tethers were found to be in working order. I believe we can rule out accidental damage and malfunction.”
“You would say that, wouldn’t you, Chief Engineer?” Dao’s eyes gleamed with malice. “Neglect and inattention, Comrades. We have had more than our fair share of that on this station, and I do not intend to tolerate any more. Neglect and inattention cost lives and production units. Tomorrow I’ll speak to the crew-”
“If it pleases you, Comrade,” Xiao cut in, his face darkening. “I invite you to review the maintenance logs yourself. Every piece of equipment undergoes careful testing. We should look elsewhere for the cause of the failure.”
“Sabotage,” Liwei said, relishing the expression of sheer terror that quivered on Dao’s round face. “Chief Engineer Jia and I have gone over the sequence of events, and it is the only explanation that fits. First one of the water cyclers in the crop tube. Then the temperature gauges in Segment Four. This is the third irrigation leak we’ve had to patch up in as many months.”
Dao waved his words away, flustered. “Nonsense, Master Technician. Defeatist nonsense. This is open space. Equipment fails. Micrometeoroids-”
“Statistically, it’s an impossibility,” Xiao said. “Agrifuges are built to last centuries. All essential systems are shielded.”
The political officer rubbed the bridge of his nose, groped in vain for the long-banished cigarettes in his breast pocket. “But what would be the saboteur’s goal? If someone wanted to cripple or destroy Jùb?opén V, they wouldn’t bother poking holes in irrigation pipes. They would damage our solar arrays, or disable the tokamaks, or start a fire in the crop tunnels. They would cut your throats while you slept.” The thought seemed to cheer him up, for he flashed a weak smile. “We must not give in to wild theories. Broken tethers seem like a very inefficient way to get rid of people.”
Xiao and Liwei exchanged helpless glances. “I don’t think they wanted to kill me,” Liwei said, unsure of his own reasoning. As loath as he was to admit it, Dao had a point. “It felt more like a message. A warning.”
Dao shook his head vehemently. “You listen to me, Comrades, and you better listen carefully. I will not tolerate subversive rumors on my station. Where there is sabotage, swift and decisive action is required. Where no such action is possible, morale suffers. The workers’ commitment to the Five Shining Ideals is brought into question. Where workers’ commitment is brought into question, the political officer’s future becomes doubtful. Are you following so far?”
Both men nodded, their eyes fixed on the floor. Satisfied, the political officer fiddled with his databracer, flicked a set of images and numbers onto the cabin’s main screen. The feed showed the interior of the agrifuge’s farming tunnels – entire quadrants of soybeans and vegetables yellowed and sagging, fallen leaves swirling around the air ducts, crop-tending robots puttering through dry dirt, raising clouds of dust. It reminded Liwei of the blasted drought-stricken landscapes of the Inner Republic: all that was missing were scrawny villagers lining up in front of famine relief banks.
Dao caught the look on Liwei’s face and nodded. “This, Comrades,” he said portentously. “This is the crisis we should be worried about. Eleven per cent decrease in yield between harvests. We have the men on one bath per week. Barely enough to stave off dehydration. Yet we keep losing water.”
He swiped across the screen, accelerating the process by a week, a month, a year. Withered stalks hung from the substrate pods like bunches of straw. The green ring of the agrifuge turned a dun brown, opaque with dirt. Jùb?opén V became a dead star spinning in the sterile black vacuum.
“This is a disaster.” Liwei knew he should hold his tongue, but the words came anyway. “Comrade, we need to alert the Standing Committee immediately. Request assistance. New parts for the hydrocyclers, a resupply of water. Otherwise we’ll be forced to shut down.”
“How would you like me to phrase that request, Master Technician?” Malice gleamed in the political officer’s eyes. “Ask for emergency supplies to cover up our own waste and abuse, while our comrades on other stations go without? Commission an official inquiry into a drainage problem? The only demotion would be a recall and a punitive assignment to some backwater. For all three of us, in case I need to remind you.”
He was in his element now, hands clasped behind his back, packing the cramped cabin with as much officious rectitude as low-grav would allow.
“The truth, Comrades,” he said, squaring his shoulders, “the truth is that our space program is on its last legs. The Politburo has declared it dead, and we know that the Politburo makes no mistakes. Ours is the last standing government on the planet not bought by the transnationals. The last remaining superpower in a world that does not need superpowers anymore. Our Paramount Leader speaks of a Third Great Revolution.”
He paused for effect, evidently satisfied by the stricken faces of the other two men. “The decaying and immoral corporations have no interest in space. Being up here costs money. There is no short-term return on investment. Mars is a fever dream whose fever has already broken, and the lunar settlements are an expensive disappointment. Instead of fueling our Second Great Leap to the stars, the agrifuge program is barely staving off starvation back on Earth. Our food elevators, the enormous triumph of our spirit and industry, have become a lifeline, not the launching pad they were envisioned as.”
“So much for not being defeatist,” Liwei said. Xiao elbowed him sharply in the ribs. But Dao was on a roll: he nodded absently, as if the master technician had expressed agreement.
“Space has turned into the graveyard of human ambition.” He spoke this sententious phrase with the air of a prophet, frowning at no one in particular. The Jùb?opén project is just another tombstone. Before the year is out, this station will be put out of commission. The crew will be heading back where they came from, looking for new jobs.”
Dao seemed to catch himself, hurried to explain. “Naturally, dedicated comrades and distinguished workers such as yourselves have nothing to fear. Especially those who have forfeited their ability to return to Earth. With the appropriate recommendation in the right Uncle’s ear, a promotion may even be wrought out of the whole sorry ordeal. A permanent posting to a colony of your choice. Provided, of course, that certain terms are agreed upon.”
Liwei felt his breath seize for a moment, the cabin reeling around him. “What terms would be required?” he said slowly, trying to keep the anger out of his voice.
“E-eh.” Dao raised his hands defensively, but a sly look had crept across his crude features. “Don’t put words into my mouth, Comrade. All I’m saying is that quotas are arbitrary things, set by faceless bureaucrats with nothing better to do than harass hard-working members of the proletariat. If these same bureaucrats are planning to decommission us, if they expect the harvests to keep failing, it won’t look suspicious if they fail by a slightly larger margin. Output numbers are easily adjusted. Who’s to say if we’re ten tons behind quota, or fifteen? It’s a matter of small corrections to the harvest logs. Corrections a political officer is authorized to make.”
“Such a political officer,” Xiao said skeptically, leaning against a bulkhead, “would risk the highest sanction down on Earth. As would anyone caught helping him.”
“Not so,” Dao said, shaken but unbowed by the words. His eyes shone feverishly, almost with desperation. “The records will be destroyed anyway. The station will be stripped down, and the hull brought down in a controlled crash. Even if someone tries to reconcile the figures, there will be nothing to reconcile against.”
Liwei studied the political officer. What Dao was proposing was a guaranteed death penalty, if they were caught. But to Liwei, returning to Earth would equally spell death, painful and lingering. He had exceeded his safe stay in space: his native world was no longer home. It would crush his fragile bones in the titanic embrace of its gravity, squeeze his blood vessels until they burst. Treatment could slow the symptoms down, but it would not cure him, even if he had the means to pay for it. The Republic would euthanize him and put up his hologram in some dusty, forgotten museum. Hero of the Third Revolution. Better a quick death by needle, or by firing squad.
“What’s our role in this?” Xiao asked, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Keep the ‘fuge running,” Dao said, a touch too eagerly. “Slow down the losses. The books will show one set of numbers, the bills of lading another. A small discrepancy. Noticeable, but explainable.”
“Who would buy this discrepancy?” Liwei said.
“Who wouldn’t?” Dao scoffed, spread his arms. “There are two billion starving mouths outside of our borders. Fears of another nuclear exchange are driving prices higher than ever. Our old foes in the West have crumbled into the dirt. Their corporations have made things even worse. They will pay whatever they’re asked to pay to stave off their day of reckoning.”
“What about the split?”
“To be negotiated,” Dao said defensively. “A split commensurate with the risk being undertaken would be the most appropriate, of course. After intermediary costs have been deducted. We need to grease the wheels so they don’t squeak. Otherwise it’s payment on delivery. Special drawing rights to a numbered account with a biometric code. Or corporate scrip of the recipient’s choice, at interorbital exchange rates.”
Liwei did a quick calculation in his head. It wouldn’t be a fortune, even with food prices soaring. But it would be plenty to retire on. If they could keep the agrifuge spinning and the lights on. If they could root out the hidden conspirators among the crew. “What’s the prognosis?” he heard himself say. “How long do we have to pull it off?”
“Pull what off?” Dao smirked. “Remember, Comrades, we are simply discussing a theory. But ten months would be a reasonable expectation. Perhaps another two or three, if a competent case is made before the Standing Committee.”
Xiao and Liwei said nothing. The chief engineer’s face was expressionless, but Liwei saw that his knuckles were white, his nails leaving red crescents in the meat of his palms.
“Anyway.” Dao clapped his hands once, dismissing them. “It would be best to keep this between us. Find those leaks. Keep those crops growing. We all have our own part to play in the Revolution. So make sure there are no more accidents. Or, if there are, that they’re happening to the right people. Eh? We don’t need that sort of attention now.”
The glass wall of the outer ring crackled and popped as the station swung out of the Earth’s shadow, into the relentless brilliance of the sun.
Jùb?opén V was an older-model agrifuge, a vast wheel spinning noiselessly around its central axis to provide crucial artificial gravity for the root systems in its substrate pods. Built over almost three decades, it was pieced together from mismatched odds and ends, with features ranging from a synesthetic arcade to a missile defense system from the Deterrence Era. The hundred-odd crew slept in the hub, around which wound the transparent loops of the farming tubes. Eight tunnel spokes stretched between them, some hosting service robots and remote-controlled machinery, others crammed full of outdated and incompatible gear. At the slightest change in temperature, the passages creaked ominously, vibrating with the hiss of eroded rubber seals. To Liwei, it looked like they held together with repurposed parts, spit and a prayer.
Suspended from a gantryway, hovering above the pods, he watched the sunlight spread across the greenery, the permaglass sparkling with millions of dazzling diamonds. A fragrant breeze whispered in the leaves, the movement of air created by the station’s oxygen cyclers and the warming, expanding front inside the sunlit tube. Clean wind in his face, the smell of growing vegetation: something he’d never experienced down on Earth, but got to enjoy every day at the station. The same humanity that had destroyed the atmosphere and biosphere of its home world had created the impossible here, the miracle of life in the dead bleakness of space. The meaningless irony of it all never failed to move him.
Minutes later, he was upside down between the irrigation pipes, shining a laser pointer through the main ducts, trying to locate the new leak. Probably a tiny hole somewhere in this section: finding it would be a sisyphean task, a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack. A service robot could have run the diagnostics faster and with greater precision. But Liwei craved solitude, and wanted to work through the unsettled feeling that had taken root in his mind. The notion of a shadow poised over him, some unseen but impending catastrophe. If he turned his attention to a repetitive, monotonous task, if he let his subconscious chip away at the big question in the background while his higher functions were engaged, he knew he could get to the bottom of it.
Small acts of sabotage, things going wrong here and there, nothing that could not be explained away by coincidence. Only the day before, there had been an air cycler failure in one of the uninhabited residential modules. It had been resolved quickly and with minimal damage, but now the crew were on edge, overreacting to the smallest incidents. In the extremes of his suspicion, Liwei had tried to imagine that the crisis had somehow been manufactured by Dao himself, a desperate ploy for a much-needed rehaul of the station, or to deflect blame for the harvest failures. But no matter how hard he tried, the pieces stubbornly refused to fall into place.
Liwei heard the sliding of rings along the topmost guiderail before a shadow blotted out the light. Xiao hung above him, shielding his eyes to peer down. He offered a weak smile, looking almost contrite, as if caught doing something he shouldn’t.
“Thought I’d find you here,” he said, and Liwei heard the off-key note in his voice. “Doing Chairman Dao’s bidding, I see. Not a grain of rice wasted, if it can be smuggled out for an illegal profit.”
“Dao can go to hell,” Liwei said, surprised by the intensity of his own anger. “My job is to keep this place running. That’s exactly what I intend to do. Dao or no Dao.”
“I take it you haven’t been thinking about his offer, then.”
Liwei bit his tongue. Thirty feet below him, two figures in green worksuits – the station’s resident agrobiologists – were inspecting the crop plants, taking substrate samples. They paused at a brown, withered patch, their arms waving in discussion, or argument. He waited until they moved out of earshot, let out a breath he had not been aware of holding.
“A man like Dao does not make offers,” he said. “Telling us was part of his plan. Now we know what’s going to happen, and are expected to go along with it.”
“Or else what?”
“Or else he’ll make sure we can’t get in his way.”
The red dot of the laser pointer danced behind the pipe. Liwei pulled himself closer, applied the sealant gun to the hole. Logged the location in his databracer.
“I’ve seen this happen before,” he said, craning his neck to look up at Xiao. All he could see was the empty rail, a hint of movement at the edge of his vision. “A government project on its last legs. All the rats start making their moves. Space swallows everything. Records disappear. People, too, if they’re unlucky.”
“Do you feel unlucky?”
Liwei started. The chief engineer was right above him, the sunlit backdrop reducing his face to a dark oval. A heavy wrench hung from his hand, held loosely, almost nonchalantly. The knowledge of his own helplessness suddenly struck Liwei – flat on his back, at the other man’s mercy. He imagined the tool swinging, the dull crunch of impact, the long fall down the tube. Even in low-grav, the damage would be enough to conceal the killing blow.
No reason to think that. Still, his muscles clenched, his skin crawled with unwelcome anticipation.
Xiao followed his gaze, stared at the wrench in his hand, as if unsure how it had gotten there. Finally he clipped it to his belt, looking embarrassed. An awkward moment of silence passed.
“So where do we go from here?”
Liwei righted himself up, trying not to read a double meaning into the question. “There’s no one we can take this to,” he said. “The Standing Committee won’t care, even if we could get the message through to them. The foreign transnats won’t risk antagonizing our government. Dao is right. Space is no longer a frontier, but a big, cold graveyard.”
“It wasn’t always like that,” Xiao said, sounding wistful. “There was a time when we dreamed bigger. Do you remember? We were the first nation on Mars. The first to establish a lunar mining colony. Europa by the end of the century – a symbolic conquest on the bicentennial of the Revolution. Now it’s back down the gravity well. Back to the nest we beshitted trying to soar to the stars. Back to the dirt.”
Liwei slid a little further down the rail, telling himself he wasn’t doing it to stay beyond the reach of the wrench. “It’s different for you,” he said, fighting an uprush of bitterness. “You have something to go back to. You can go back. I’ve stayed offworld too long.”
“The therapy-”
“The therapy doesn’t help. Not that I have the money for it. This is my home now.”
Liwei realized that he was staring at the foliage below. It’s not just the physical change, he thought. Could I leave this place in my head, my heart? Do I want to?
Xiao seemed to struggle with some terrible inner storm. “Perhaps there is a way,” he blurted out, not meeting Liwei’s eyes. “If someone stayed behind after the evacuation. Tried to make it habitable. There are several million tons of space junk floating between the Earth and our Lagrange point. Old satellites, weather platforms, obsolete government installations.”
“Stay here?” Liwei frowned. “That’s not possible. Systems decay. Entropy sets in. Without spare parts, without a working reactor, it would be-” It would be a coffin, he wanted to say, floating among the stars. But was that really so terrible, considering the alternatives?
Xiao was right. There had been a time when the world had dared to dream big. Liwei had dreamed, once. Down planetside, in the smoke and noise of the machinery, staring up at the sliver of poisonous sky, the distant gleam of stars. Was it possible that the dream was over, before it had properly begun?
The chief engineer gave an embarrassed shrug. He kicked off the wall and floated away on the rail, two fingers touched to his temple in mock salute. “You’re right,” he said. “I suppose I prefer the dream to reality. Because, if you think about it, what do we have to lose?”
He was walking under lush trees, leaves rustling above him, crunching under his feet. Sun dappled the grassy floor, teased him through the canopies. Liwei dug his toes into the rich soil, ran his hands down the rough bark. Round fruit weighed down the branches, and he realized he was in an orchard. Some part of him knew that this wasn’t real, that the trees no longer existed, uprooted decades before his birth to make room for rectangular high-yield farms. That the cracked riverbeds and strictly metered water rights could no longer sustain such a paradise. But they were here, wherever here was, and he clung to the vision, filling himself with it, wanting it to never end.
The light broke around him and his surroundings began to change. Dead, parched grass under his soles, brown leaves raining on his head, blowing in the hot, dusty wind. Of the magnificent trees only dry poles remained. The sun was no longer a source of life, but a killer, a destroyer, the thirsty earth withering in its ferocious glare.
Liwei turned, thinking to escape, to turn back and head for the green idyll he’d just seen, but the dessicated ground crumbled under his feet. A sinkhole as wide as the horizon upended up beneath him, a funnel dragging him deeper, no matter how hard he scrambled to escape it. Water gurgled inside the swirling vortex, drained into nothingness. Gravity clamped him in its iron fist, crushing his weakened muscles, compressing his unaccustomed lungs.
When he turned his face up to scream, mud cascaded down, filling his mouth, and he was falling out into dead space, the world collapsing around him with a cataclysmic roar, dissolving into the dark.
He surfaced from the dream into a chaos of noise, confused and disoriented, so soaked in sweat that for a moment he was back in the nightmare – drowning, being flushed out into the vacuum.
Something held him fast, restraining his movement. Liwei struggled, breathless with panic. The straps of his sleeping hammock. Realization brought the world back to him. He was in his cubby, and the klaxons were blaring like all hell had broken loose. Through the walls, he could hear massive hatches opening, the evacuation alarm reverberating through the station, the shouts and thumping of bodies moving through the tubes. Something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. He had to escape.
Oddly, the urgency calmed him, his body following long-ingrained patterns independent of his frantic mind. His hands released the straps, his feet pushed off the wall, propelling him out the door in a graceful parabola. Out of the dormitory ring, into the tunnels. Red emergency lights pulsed at regular intervals, illuminating shadowy figures rushing past him. The spoke was already full of people, but most of the crew were old hands, disciplined in spite of their terror. Liwei bounded up to a shuttle tech, grabbed her by the arm.
“What is it?” he said, raising his voice above the din of the klaxons. “What happened?”
The woman only shook her head, dark hair fanning out around her face like a halo. Liwei let her go, intercepted a pair of maintenance workers in yellow jumpsuits.
“Tokamak failure,” one of them shouted, pulling himself along the guiderail. “The central coils have become unstable. It’s all hands to the evacuation points.”
“Evacuation where?”
“Does it matter?” Someone seized him by the shoulders from behind, started to shove him up the tube. “Away from here. Come on. You’re holding up the line.”
Liwei broke free of the grip, propelled him through the hatch to the one of the docking ports. A whey-faced security noncom was checking crew names off a list, his hands shaking on his tablet.
“Where is Chief Engineer Jia?” Liwei screamed at the noncom. “Which port did he go to?”
A terrible, rending groan shuddered through the walls. Lights cut out and flickered back up. Shrieks and please erupted around him, snatched verses of Buddhist prayer. Hope the Ideological Commission isn’t listening, Liwei thought, suppressing insane laughter.
The security man shook his head, torn between the urge to dive into the shuttle and discharging his duty. “Who? I don’t know, and I don’t care. My job is to get thirty inside that shuttle. Did you hear me? Thirty, and we can leave.”
Another tremor raced through the port. “Come,” the noncom said, abandoning his post to jump into the shuttle. “It’s too dangerous. We have to go now.” Then, seeing the Master Technician take a step back and fling himself back into the tunnel, like a fish in low-grav, he made an obscene gesture. “Lunatic! We won’t wait for you!”
Liwei flew down long-neglected passages, which were shaking like the inside of a drum. Dust floated out of old air ducts: already the station’s spin was slowing, robbing it of the mild gravity induced by the agrifuge. There was no time to let himself think his actions through, to feel the slightest shred of doubt. Swinging from rail to rail, he gave himself up to the giddy, vertiginous sensation of plummeting through space, the way his body had learned to move in all its years of freedom. His lithe muscles working in perfect unison, his brittle bones not weighing him down, his finely attuned sense of balance maneuvering around twists and corners and piles of abandoned equipment.
Was this not the way man was meant to move, his body free from the manacles of planetside gravity, all those millennia of imprisonment just a dark dream before this new and exhilarating wakefulness?
Soon he was soaring past the storage ring, plunging into the great dirty heart of the station. Deeper and deeper, following a hunch he didn’t dare examine closely. Here there were fewer lights, and more dark corners. A thin coat of grit lay everywhere, swirling without settling. The filth of humankind, carried into the sterile, pristine haven of outer space.
Thick steel rose before him, the containment wall of the reactor. The access panel was already dead. Liwei strained his ears, but could only hear the irregular beat of the tokamaks, the dull, distant clunk of the shuttles detaching, blasting off into the void. He looked around until he located a fire extinguisher, extracted it from its safety webbing. Engaging his magnetic boots for leverage, he drifted down to the floor, braced himself, and slammed the cylinder against the containment wall. He kept hammering, ignoring the pain that spread through his shoulders, calling out Xiao’s name over the emergency sirens.
It came to him that he might die – either in a colossal explosion, heat and light blooming in the vast darkness, or slowly, agonizingly, as the reactor failed and the life support systems went offline, one by one. But Liwei discovered that he felt no fear at the thought. Death was preferable to sinking back to the dirty, smoke-belching cauldrons of the Earth, seeing its blackened ramparts close over the sky. Even if there was a chance of his body surviving, his spirit would never recover, forever yearning for freedom among the stars.
A porthole opened in the containment wall and Xiao’s bristly, unkempt face appeared in the riveted circle. Liwei lowered the fire extinguisher uncertainly. For a moment that seemed to go on forever, they stared at each other through the reinforced glass. Then hydraulics hissed and a sealed hatch popped open. Liwei disengaged his boots and pulled himself through.
He found himself on the tokamak’s control bridge, rows of monitors blinking, service gantryways leading down to the reactor’s shielded core. Stacks of boxes, carefully wrapped in webbing and secured to the walls, took up most of the remaining space. Liwei read the labels: dehydrated meals, a portable air cycling unit, water squeezebulbs. An entire synesthetic unit pilfered from the recreation room, bolted to the floor on his left. Enough to keep a small group alive and sane for several months.
Xiao’s disembodied face floated out of the dimness. He didn’t seem threatening, but Liwei hefted the fire extinguisher nevertheless. As if reading his thoughts, Xiao held his hands up, used his feet to bring himself to a halt, well out of reach. His expression was inscrutable.
“You should have left with the others,” he said. “It would have been easier for everyone.”
Liwei wanted to hurl abuse at the chief engineer, to bash his head in with his makeshift weapon. “How noble of you, Comrade,” he said, nodding toward the reactor. “Staying behind to try and save the station. They ought to give you a medal.”
Xiao sighed. He kicked over to a panel in the wall, scanned his hand, and pressed a finger to the touchscreen. The alarm died out; the lights came back on.
“There’s nothing wrong with the reactors,” he said, pulling himself down into a seat. “But I’m sure you’ve figured that out already. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Why did you stay?”
“I told you,” Liwei said. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
The chief engineer nodded, his eyes distant. “I couldn’t let them have it,” he said, as if to himself. “Our sweat and toil. Years of getting the crop program off the ground, and that bastard, that bureaucratic louse, was going to have it shut down.”
Liwei scoffed. “Spare me the sob story,” he said angrily. “It was you all along. Wasn’t it? Little things going wrong, here and there. You knew you were forcing their hand. But to what end?”
“The Revolution has lost its course,” Xiao said. “We now have dominion over the cradle from which we have risen. But it’s a dying world, a cesspit of ashes and filth. Down there, our dream of conquering space is all but forgotten. But up here it lives on.”
In the dim light of the computer terminals, his eyes blazed with fire. “An entire generation has grown up in the orbitals, in vacuum and low-grav. A new humanity, free from the fetters of its homeworld, both physical and emotional. We can foge on. Turn that dream into reality. With the right kind of visionary-”
“Visionary?” Liwei spat the word back at the chief engineer. “You’re a fraud, Comrade. A liar and a thief, a would-be murderer.” He took a few steps toward Xiao, who pressed himself back into his seat. “You cut my line that day,” Liwei said. “Sabotaged my equipment. You would have let me die screaming in the void. Do you deny it?”
A shadow crossed Xiao’s face. “I was sure you would be safe. It was necessary. Dao was forced to put an end to spacewalks after that. Which made it easier to create leaks. In the end, no one got hurt.”
Liwei felt his hands clench into fists. “You forced an evacuation. Robbed men and women of their livelihoods. Now you expect me to believe it was all for some nebulous higher cause.”
“I expected you to at least try to understand,” Xiao said, rising and walking over to the strapped-in boxes. He was very pale – either with anger, or because he’d just begun to grasp the immensity of what he’d done. “But it doesn’t matter either way. In a few hours, this agrifuge will be under external control.” He gestured at the supplies. “Food, water, shelter. We’ll make the necessary modifications and repairs. Establish a new society, away from Earth. A collaboration of like-minded individuals, free from planetside control.”
“Free?” Liwei felt blood rush to his head. “Use your brain, Xiao. The Standing Committee has the agrifuge under remote control. They have already given their verdict. Your orbit will be allowed to decay. Everyone on board will die.”
“Not if they believe there’s reactor trouble.” Xiao managed a small smile. “Disposal of hazardous cargo is regulated by international treaties. Both the UN and the transants will call foul if they think the station is a nuclear threat. We have allies in the General Assembly, ready to apply diplomatic pressure. By the time the dust has settled, Jùb?opén V will be a living, breathing community. By salvage rights, it won’t belong to the Motherland anymore.”
“That’s why you faked the meltdown.” Despite his resentment, Liwei had to admire the ingenuity of the scheme. Its very desperation, the infinitesimal likelihood of its success, had proved to be its strong points. “To have the station declared inoperative.”
Xiao nodded. “By law, any spacefaring craft may lay claim to a vessel in peril. Don’t you see I had no other choice? They were going to strip everything. Systems, crop rings, both tokamaks. Down to the smallest panel and cable. They would have rendered it useless.”
He held out a tentative hand, as if trying to calm Liwei. “You can stay here,” he said. “With us. We’ll need an experienced maintenance tech. Lots of work to do before we can restart production again.”
“With us?”
The chief engineer’s eyes darted nervously toward the door hatch. “A shuttle is on its way,” he said. “Settlers from one of the old weather platforms. The first of many. Once they make landing, Jùb?opén V will belong to us. What do you say? Equal stakes. No Standing Committee to tell us what to do, no Party line to toe. We’ll have the freedom to set our own destiny.”
“But not for the crew,” Liwei said. Furtively, he clamped one boot magnet to the gantryway, his gaze never leaving Xiao’s. It’ll be in his eyes, he thought. Don’t watch the hands, or the feet. Especially in low-grav. “No one asked them what their choice would be. This freedom you’re proposing sounds a lot like the line the transnats are peddling. Free will, free choice, while they profit off the sweat of the workers.”
Xiao’s tongue flicked across dry lips. “It would have been too risky,” he said. “Any one of them could have betrayed us to Dao. This was the only way that made sense.”
“That’s what they always say,” Liwei said. “Cadres, executives, free market propagandists. Tough decisions for the greater good. Usually their own.”
“Believe what you will,” Xiao said, and now Liwei saw the flash in his eyes, the set of his jaw. He kicked off the wall and came right at the master technician, hand unfurling from his side, swinging a pistol-grip tool. Liwei flung himself to the side, pivoting on one magnetic boot, the tool missing his head by a hairsbreadth. In zero gravity, every twitch added up, a merciless equation. The force of the swing combined with the momentum of Xiao’s charge, sending the chief engineer stumbling forward, flailing to reverse direction. He was bulkier than Liwei, his bones and muscles not as shriveled by weightlessness, and his superior strength and size worked against him now. Quick as a flash, Liwei unclipped his foot off the floor and threw himself at his opponent, inertia carrying them down the bridge, grappling and fumbling, jostling for position.
They smashed into the bulkhead with a teeth-rattling impact. Something gave in Liwei’s shoulder, but adrenaline made him impervious to pain. Warm droplets misted his face: a gusher from Xiao’s nose, flinging blood in a radial spray, blinding them both. The chief engineer was dazed, wide eyes rolling madly in a mask of red. Reaching up, Liwei grabbed loose webbing from the wall, used the long straps to bind the other man’s hands tightly. It wouldn’t hold Xiao long, but a few minutes were all he needed. He was faster than his opponent in this environment, a bird with hollow bones wheeling in its own contained sky.
Xiao’s pleas followed him out of the reactor core, echoing down empty, cable-clogged passages. Liwei felt his heartbeat ratchet up, filling his ears with the roar of blood, his vision graying at the edges. He had to stay conscious, keep his wits about him, at least until the attack was repelled.
His angle was off and he slammed into the weapons room door like a drunk, clumsy in his eagerness. But the panel responded to the touch of his hand and the weapons room door slid open, then closed smoothly behind him. Grimy LEDs and displays, never used before, blinked to life under his hands. The seat he strapped himself into squeaked and smelled of new plastic. Bolts clicked, locking him inside. A three-dimensional schematic of the station wrapped around him, loading layer by layer, as he clamped the targeting sights over his eyes.
I have to do it, he thought, his mind fuzzy, his head heavy like a blood-filled balloon. The distant thought of a vessel rupture came to him and was instantly dismissed. Liwei forced his attention on the particle guns, which were humming, powering up. A weapon made to destroy incoming missiles, designed for a war that never came. Now he was about to use it, fire the first shot at an enemy who couldn’t fight back. Did he really have it in him?
Metal clanged against the door, followed by Xiao’s horrified voice. “You can’t do this, Comrade. There are women and children on board that shuttle. This is not who you are. This is-”
Through blurring vision, Liwei saw the spacecraft coming, a superannuated freighter, majestic in its approach. Thrusters blazing to slow it down, to adjust its course toward one of the empty docking berths. Targeting beams converged – killing algorithms designed to facilitate the snuffing out of human life. They could probably destroy the freighter without his help: his role was reduced to pulling the trigger, making the lethal decision.
For all its dreams of the stars, the ape still clung to its primitive instincts: bashing heads open, thumping its chest, baring its teeth at threats real and imagined. Liwei wiped a bloody tear from the corner of one eye. The Second Great Leap Forward. The banner of Progress and Prosperity flying on distant worlds.
Was it possible that cliches were all he could think of in this terrible moment? Was it possible that cliches were all that there was, that there ever had been?
Frantic pounding at the door. Someone was calling out his name, a senseless, droning litany. In the augmented vision of his sights, the freighter was growing, turning, docking clamps opening to catch hold. His finger on the trigger switch, Liwei floated in the emptiness, floated above the world, trying to make up his mind.
Damir is the author of the sci-fi thriller “Kill Zone”, the occult mystery “Always Beside You”, and short stories featured in multiple horror and speculative fiction magazines and anthologies, including the Lovecraft eZine, The Dread Machine, Strange Aeon, and Scare Street’s “Night Terrors” series. An auditor by trade and traveler by heart, he does his best writing on cruise ships, thirty-plus thousand feet in the air, and in the terminals of far-flung airports. He lives in Virginia and reviews horror movies, discusses books, and shares his unsolicited opinions on just about everything on his blog, Darker Realities.