Transient Echoes (16 page)

Mei hesitated to answer. She knew they were right, but having someone else do the job could result in another accident. It could mean another Travis.

John stepped forward. “I’ll do it.”

Mei scoffed. “No.”

“Hold on,” muttered Tabata. “Lieutenant Finn’s genes are the same as yours, Doctor Curie. He’s a hybrid, so his body would be resilient enough to withstand some of the radiation. If anything happens to the suit, he should still survive as long as the exposure is marginal. Having him go makes sense, objectively.” He glanced at John. “Though, I imagine it’ll hurt, if you actually encounter such a situation.”

“I can handle it,” said John.

Mei’s heart was pounding. She pictured John on the ground, dying the same way Travis had. She didn’t know what to do.

John went to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said, as if to answer her concerns. “I risk my life for a living. This won’t be any different.”

“A gun can’t protect you from radiation,” she muttered.

Zoe cleared her throat. “I’ll monitor his suit. We’ll know he’s in danger before he does.”

John smiled. “You heard the lady. I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“If you can carry the coil on your own, I can activate it remotely from here,” said Bart.

John clasped his hands. “Great.”

Bart turned the machine off. “There’s still plenty of daylight left. If we hustle, we can get the coil moved in less than two hours.”

“Back to work, then,” said Zoe, sighing.

Everyone dispersed rather quickly, leaving Bart, John, and Mei behind.

“You gonna be okay?” asked John.

She glared at him. “I didn’t need you to step in and save me, John.”

“I know.”

“Why, then? And don’t say you’re protecting me.”

He considered her question. “Because someone has to, and it couldn’t be you. I’m the only one left.”

Her gaze fell to the ground. She opened her mouth to respond, but before she could, she felt a pair of thick arms wrap around her, gently squeezing her chest. John nuzzled the top of her bald head, and she felt a gush of relief.

By the time he pulled away, she no longer felt like arguing.

******

Mei watched through John’s eyes as he brought the Fever Killer to its new home, dangerously close to the edge of the irradiated zone.

He’d driven a dirt cab for half an hour, talking with her for most of the way. She considered asking him to come back, tell him to forget about the job, and they’d go home together, but the danger was real, and it wouldn’t stop because of her childish fears.

The rain came when he was halfway there, beginning with a soft patter against the cab windshield before turning hard and violent. The wind roared so loudly it sounded like a scream. A few minutes later, the storm had manifested, covering everything from the Ortego site to their camp.

John parked a quarter kilometer from where the radiation levels were at their weakest, no danger as long as he stayed in the suit.

Or maybe there was. She suddenly wasn’t sure. A dozen questions rattled in her head, giving her pause. Had she really sealed his suit properly? What if he accidently loosened it in the cab or while carrying the coil? John could be clumsy…what if he tripped and fell? A chill ran along the nape of her neck, and her tongue went dry. She smacked her lips, clearing her throat.

John opened the door of the cab and walked to the attached rear trailer. The bed was drenched with rain. He lowered the gate and snagged the coil, sliding it to the end and hoisting the tube on his shoulder.

“Don’t drop it,” said Bart. He was right behind Mei, peering over her shoulder. “If you do, there’s not enough time to make another.”

“Relax,” said John. “You’re acting like I haven’t done this before.”

“You haven’t,” said Mei.

He scoffed. “As far as
you
know.”

John lugged the Fever Killer several meters from the dirt cab, pausing now and then to reposition himself or switch shoulders. His visor showed the way, indicating which direction to head with a digital green line imposed on the screen. A set of numbers in the bottom right corner counted down the distance to the installation site. Mei had programmed in all of this, hoping to make things as easy as possible for him. Right now, the visor said he was less than two dozen meters from the spot.

He stopped, wavered slightly. A sharp whistle filled his helmet.

“What’s wrong?” asked Mei.

“The wind’s getting worse,” he said, but she could barely hear him.

“You’re almost there,” she said.

“What?”

“Can you hear me, John?” she yelled.

“Barely. Hang on!” he shouted. The whistle grew until she could no longer understand him.

Instead of talking or screaming, she pulled the keyboard out and typed a message. It appeared a second later on his visor.

KEEP GOING. ALMOST THERE.

If he said anything, she wouldn’t know. The counter on the visor indicated he was getting close. Twenty meters. Fifteen. Ten.

He stopped a few more times, moving progressively slower as he neared the goal. The rain fell harder, and the wind blew the drops into his visor so hard they slid sideways.

There was a clap of thunder outside the tent, and several people jumped. Sophie yelped, knocking a few tools off the table she was sitting on. Bart gathered them and motioned for her to stay where she was. She nodded, chewing on a tuft of her hair, an embarrassed look on her face.

Mei kept her eyes on the monitor. John was nearly at the mark. Five meters. Three. Two.

He stopped. He seemed frozen, so she typed a quick message.

SOMETHING WRONG?

He shook his head, and the camera in the visor moved with him. He lifted the coil from his shoulder and set it on the ground. Now came the digging. He unlatched a small shovel from his side and pointed at the dirt directly before him.

YES. RIGHT THERE.

The shovel was barely eight centimeters long, but could be extended with the press of a button near its center. John touched it, but nothing happened. He tried a few more times with no success. At last he clasped both ends and attempted to manually extend it. Nothing worked.

Mei began typing a message to him, but stopped when she saw him drop to his knees and begin digging with the tiny shovel. He flung clumps of soil to his side, one after the next, never slowing. Thunder cackled as the rain beat down on him. Flashes of yellow and white ignited the ground as lightning flashed overhead, reflecting off the hilt of the shovel as well as his silver gloves. Mei fought the urge to close her eyes.
It’s okay
, she told herself.
Nothing can hurt him.
She repeated the words in her mind, mouthing them a few times.
Nothing can hurt him. Nothing can hurt him. Nothing can hurt him…

She didn’t care if it was a self-imposed delusion. Sometimes lies were better than the truth.

John dug a hole half a meter deep before stopping. He tossed the little shovel at the freshly made pile of earth and glanced at the coil at his side. Pressing his hand against his knee, he pushed himself to his feet, stumbling a few steps in the process.

He wavered there a moment, doing nothing.

JOHN ARE YOU ALRIGHT?

He raised his hand, giving her a thumb-up. The glove glistened in the rain, shaking slightly as he kept it there. Why was he trembling? Could it be the wind? Maybe the rain was too cold.

John lifted the Fever Killer and set it gently in the ground. Several clumps of mud slid from the peak of the hole like chocolate pudding, dripping into a soup of brown slime and shredded blue grass.

He tossed shovel loads of dirt back into the tiny pit. By the time he had finished, a small puddle was already forming at the base of the coil.

Bart touched Mei on the shoulder. “Don’t forget the switch. He needs to activate it.”

She nodded, and typed the message to him. John gave her another thumb-up. This time, his hand was noticeably slow. He flipped the coil’s latch open, revealing a control pad. Every Framling Coil required a digital numerical code in order to activate. This was a remnant of the original design, created for obvious security purposes that were now obsolete. Bart intended to get rid of them in the future, but right now there was no time.

The activation code was simple. Mei had requested it herself, knowing John would remember it. She watched as he typed the numbers in, nodding each time the glowing green digit appeared on the screen.

04-14-2332

The day they’d been born.

John took a step back, and the Fever Killer rattled with a loud hum as it roared to life. A moment later, the casing shuddered, and the drill inside plummeted into the ground, letting loose a wild
CRACK
and securing its place.

Lightning ignited the northern sky like a spider’s web. The flash was so bright it could have been a sunrise.

John turned and headed back toward the dirt cab. When he reached the front of the vehicle, he touched the hood and stopped. He bent forward, bobbing his head, like he was out of breath. Mei was about to ask if something was wrong when he let go and got into the driver’s seat.

He pressed the ignition button, and the dashboard lights came on. As he pulled around and began the drive back, Mei noticed his gloves sliding, almost drooping, as he loosely gripped the steering wheel.

When he finally arrived, she was already outside, standing in the rain, dripping wet and waiting to greet him. The cab slowed, but didn’t stop. Instead, it plowed directly into the nearby fence, bowling the hood to reveal the engine inside. The metal warped instantly. Steam filled the air around the guts of the cab as the cold rain hit the exposed engine. Mei ran to the door. The rainwater was flowing over the window, too thick for her to see. Panic took hold as she quickly opened the door.

Inside, John was hugging the wheel, his face against the visor. There was a rip in his suit where the shoulder met the neck, and his face had turned a bright red.

Bart and the others came running from the tent. “Holy shit, did he crash the cab?” he asked.

Mei wanted nothing more than to scream, but she tried to stay composed. “John?” She touched his shoulder. “Are you alright?”

He didn’t answer.

Her eyes swelled and her throat closed. “John?” She shook him. “Say something, please.”

He let out a soft groan. “…Mei?”

“Oh, God!” she shouted, clutching his sleeves with both her hands.

“Sorry.” He raised his head, his strained eyes blinking and half-opened. He had the look of exhaustion on him, like he’d been sleeping for days. He smiled, but his lips were shaking. “Hope I didn’t worry you.”

She hugged him close, wrapping her arms around his chest. “John, you idiot,” she said, and all at once she was crying, warm tears mixing with the cold rain.

PA
RT
2

Facing it, always facing it,

that’s the way to get through.

–Joseph Conrad

Everything is theoretically impossible,

until it is done.

–Robert A. Heinlein

Ch
ap
ter
11

Documents of Historical, Scientific, and Cultural Significance

Open Transcript 616

Subtitled: The Memoirs of S. E. Pepper – Chapter 5

March 19, 2185

PEPPER
:
There is something to be said about the stars, I think, which doesn’t get mentioned as much these days. Most of the people living in this city were born sometime after the Great Calamity, but still a few of us attempt to pull the images out whenever the mood strikes, and we surrender ourselves to nostalgia. I often lay awake at night, immersed in mental slideshows, recalling the night sky…twinkling dots amid the dark, begging me to dream. We used to give them stories, playing connect-the-dots with the cosmos. “There goes Orion, the hunter, chasing Taurus with his mighty steel. Look at how proudly he stands.”

Little did we know how truly mighty our blinking specks could be. If only we could see their true beauty, these mammoth balls of burning plasma a billion times the size of Earth, floating gently in a vacuum, igniting the fabric of existence. Among them, orbiting planets, as varied and complex as any our imaginations could conceive. What would we have said to justify such wonders? This is common knowledge now, of course, but at the time it remained a distant realization.

Studying the stars is a humbling experience, many astronomers used to say. Sadly, they’re all dead now. All are gone and forgotten, their collective knowledge a lost and unusable truth. After all, what good are the stars when we cannot even look at them? What’s the point?

I do not know the answer to those questions, and I am certain someone will say it is a waste of time…a valid argument, I suppose, when one considers our current predicament.

Still, I know the stars exist. Our ignorance about them will never change this fact. They will go on, regardless of whether or not we acknowledge them. They will live, expand, explode, and shatter across time and space until all the void is black again, and we are nothing but a shadow of a thought.

Perhaps in this sea of endless possibilities there exists another world like ours, capable of supporting life. Such a place may be far removed from us. For all we know, it may very well be outside of what we call existence. But on that rock, wherever it is, floating in the light of another sun, perhaps there is a thinking thing with eyes and wonder in its heart, staring at its own sky, naming dots of lights, and dreaming. Like so many things, I do not kn
ow if this is true.

But I hope.

End Audio File

Unknown

October 21, 2350

Terry raised his head
from the river, taking a deep breath of the fresh Variant air. The suns drifted high above him, and the midday heat blazed against the cool, rapid water as it collided gently with his cheeks. He took a deep breath and sighed, not to indicate his frustration or boredom but rather his content. He could not imagine himself in any better place. Not on this planet anyway.