Alone out here, p.2
Alone Out Here, page 2
One moment I’m on my feet. The next I’m flung into the air like a flicked insect.
I crash onto my hands and knees as a colossal boom thunders through the walls. I know what the sound is instinctively: thousands of tons of molten rock punching out of the earth’s crust.
I scramble upright, my palms scraped and stinging. Faint screams issue from the Residential Wing, where the second group disappears toward the cabins on an upper balcony. I move to follow them, but a cool voice stops me. It arrives from everywhere, radiating through the empty atrium and throughout the immense body of the ship: T-minus five minutes to liftoff.
I stare up past the walkways in disbelief. Someone went to the ship’s bridge and started the launch sequence with none of our personnel aboard.
Before I’ve made a conscious decision, I’m bolting up the ramp toward the elevator bay. They have to stop this. When I know nothing else, I know we have to do what we’re expected to do.
The elevator deposits me on the tenth floor. I sprint around the balconies and into the Command Wing. The floors are spongy black mesh, bouncing me forward. T-minus four minutes, the voice says.
“No,” I gasp out. As I race forward, the lights and walls begin to tremble, and I don’t know whether it’s the earth moving beneath us or the Lazarus’s forty Cerus engines purring in preparation. I wheel around a bend and flinch back, burying my face in my hands. The hallway ends in an open door to the bridge, where a brilliant glow pierces the windshield, banks of floodlights glaring into the ship.
I lurch over the threshold, peering through my fingers. A dark-haired girl is standing at a dashboard so long that it wraps around in a boomerang curve. Beside her, someone in the commander’s seat is navigating the launch gear with quick, fluid motions. The grid of buttons and joysticks is cast in graduated relief, like the skyline of a model city. Overhead, a low female voice says, Error. Clear launch pad. Error. Finalize inertial measurement unit alignment. Error. Final leak checks incomplete.
The person in the seat flicks a switch and presses a palm down on a screen. Retracting access arm, says the voice.
“What are you doing?” My scream bursts out over the rumble of disturbed metal as the auxiliary power hums to life. “Nobody’s boarded yet!”
I clatter down the dozen steps, hand outstretched to wrench the seated figure back, but then the chair revolves to face me. I stop dead. The woman in the seat is as tall and broad-shouldered as an Amazon, a frizz of honey-blond hair floating around her face. This is the Lazarus’s head pilot, Commander Sara Jefferson. Now I recognize the dark-haired girl as her daughter, Eli, who stood at the commander’s shoulder yesterday like a lieutenant, eyeing our tour group with wary interest.
They must have been here already when we came aboard. They’re why the doors were open, why the lights were on like a welcoming home’s.
Commander Jefferson scans me sneakers to ponytail. If she recognizes me from TV or the press, she makes no sign. She rounds back to the dashboard and says, “We have people aboard. Fifty-four of them.” She points to a screen that shows live video of the hull door, which is now sealed shut. “We’ve been counting.”
“But the crew is still—”
“The crew knows we have to save who we can. The aftershocks are already starting. Every second on the ground is a risk we can’t afford.”
Speechless, I watch the pilot’s hands play over the controls. I thought the countdown was the work of some terrified kid, throwing away hundreds of lives out of fear. This is different, a calculated risk assessment, a matter of protocol. But it feels just as brutal.
“Eli, get her a suit.” The commander aims a finger toward the bunks set into the wall. “Then both of you strap in.”
Eli throws open a cabinet and tosses me a packet of white fabric. T-minus two minutes, says the voice overhead as I tear the pressure suit out of the package.
A hiss makes me glance over. Eli has hit the vacuum seal on her suit, making its exoskeleton constrict her silhouette. As her visor slides into place, I meet my own eyes in the translucent mirror of its surface and see my face layered over hers.
“Suit up,” Eli says. She swings into a bunk and draws the straps into place, moving as efficiently as a dancer or a boxer. It all looks practiced, as if she knew, but—of course—she lives on this complex. For this girl, every waking second would have been colored by the fact that, soon enough, it would be time to go.
The commander’s voice blares over the PA and rings down the halls behind us: Attention, passengers. Pressure suits are stored beneath your bunks. Put them on over your clothes, press the vacuum seal at your left shoulder, and strap in as shown by the instruction card at your bedside. The orders translate themselves into Mandarin, then Spanish, as the commander springs from her seat toward the last bunk.
Halfway there, she goes still. She’s paled to the color of the moon. Her lips move fractionally as the PA repeats her words in Hindi, French, Arabic, Swahili.
She breaks for the exit. By the time she reaches the stairs, she’s in a full-out sprint.
“Mom?” Eli yells after her, but the commander has already reached the bridge’s upper level. She’s flying down the hall, a splash of golden hair disappearing.
The voice overhead says, T-minus one minute. I look down at my pressure suit, knowing it’s time to strap in. I have my orders.
But faces are flashing through my mind. The younger kids paralyzed with fear, clinging to their bunks, and the soldiers trying to urge them forward. The engineers and technicians and astronauts on their way, not knowing that we’re about to abandon them.
I could force the ship to wait. After years of wishing I could do anything to help anyone, I could do this one thing.
The pressure suit falls from my hands. I go for the dashboard.
“Hey,” says Eli. “Stop!” I hear her struggling against her harness, bucking against the straps like a restrained animal. The belts are locked. “Get away from that!” she yells. “What are you doing?”
Truthfully, I have no idea. My fingers skim grids of buttons that clatter gently in their frames. There are hundreds upon hundreds, acronyms printed on every surface. A heading that reads PIL SEPARATION has dozens of keys grouped beneath it, divided into inscrutable combinations of letters and numbers. I scan them, hunting for a kill switch.
As the voice says Thirty, my eyes land on the screen where the commander was typing. The launch sequencer is playing through its final checks. Vent valves locked, it reads. Positron shuttling fields active. Orbital frame aligned. And there, in the corner, above a list of override codes, is a button pulsing red: ABORT LAUNCH?
I lunge for the screen, but with my finger an inch away, I freeze. Commander Jefferson is the professional. She’s right about the risks. What if I press the button, a tremor rocks the ship, the launch pad slips askew, and we die along with everyone outside?
The red words blink, tantalizing me. What should I do? What do I think is right? I can’t remember the last time it mattered what I thought. I feel utterly and terrifyingly free.
T-minus ten, says the voice. Nine. Eight.
The ship’s engines roar to life. My mind becomes a circus of hysterical thought, a whirl of No, no, please wait—not yet not now—give me more time. Not even all the time I want, not even measured in years, not even enough time to say goodbye. Just enough to answer the questions knifing through me: Is it better to stay or go? To risk it all or run for your life? Is it better to live knowing what you’ve done or die knowing what you are?
Seven. Six. Five, says the voice, calm and sweet. Whoever recorded it was smiling, I think.
The deep-tissue roar in the air swells, and as the metal casings over the windshield ease toward each other, I look up, shivers skating across my body, finger still suspended over the kill switch. Through the haze, a fiery light is shattering the horizon, and I think of a sun bursting out from our core, I think of a spirit erupting from a body at the moment of death.
This can’t be true, I think uselessly. It can’t be real, because only hours ago, before I fell asleep, the moon was gazing through the barracks window. The real world is that stillness, that held breath of anticipation. Not this—this panic, this mess of smoke. Maybe this is just another nightmare, in the same genre as my last three years of nightmares, and at the end of the countdown, my eyes will snap open, and I’ll breathe heavily for a minute before rolling out of bed, wanting water.
I look down to see a blank screen beneath my fingertip.
Four, says the voice. Three. Two. One.
Pressure lands on the crown of my head like an anvil. This is not a dream. I topple into the commander’s seat, and it locks backward into a horizontal takeoff position. Spots explode in my vision as millions of pounds of machinery blast off. We move slowly at first, and then accelerate mercilessly, gravity compounding on my skull, my throat, my wrists, pulling down at the soft tissues of my eyes. I begin to slip out of consciousness, choking, my body pinned and trembling like prey, and I feel ashamed, naive, for expecting myself to wake up. The old true world has evaporated, the way old truths do all the time. People used to think the moon was fixed in a crystalline sphere. People used to believe Earth would last forever. The truth is always an unshakable thing until it’s a story people used to tell each other.
For a while I keep myself under. I nearly float to the surface of consciousness every so often, but there’s too much up there that I don’t want to confront. I hold myself in this halfway place instead, not asleep and not awake, seeing blurry flashes of red—the pulsating vessels in my eyelids—and of neon blue, the edges of some dream I can’t pierce my way into. I hold myself under like someone trying to drown.
Eventually my eyelids glide open. Above is pumice-gray plating and light so white that it reminds me of dentistry. There’s no moment of confusion or denial. I remember everything.
A high-pitched whine skewers my eardrums as I ease up in the commander’s seat, touching my temple gingerly. The bridge is motionless. Eli’s bunk is empty, and the alerts on the dashboard screen have been replaced by an abbreviated list of ship systems. The item at the top reads COMM.
Something tightens in my chest. I stagger out of the seat and hunch over the screen to press COMM > BASE. A speaker emits a static hiss, and a world map fills the display. It’s the Robinson Projection, Alaska shrunken, poles flattened, pulsing red dots littering the continents like a pox.
I magnify the United States and tap our launch site, an icon of a spaceship labeled XPLORER INC. COMPLEX. The icon blinks yellow, issuing ripples into the Pacific as a dial tone keens.
But after five rings, I cancel the call, giving my head a hard shake. Trying our launch site is idiotic—of course none of the crew would stay. Hopefully they’re halfway across Nevada by now. I zoom out, ignoring the dozen other icons that stretch down the West Coast toward San Francisco. These complexes used to house the space tourism giants, Spacescape and Hyer and YouMoon, until the world’s astronautical facilities were ordered to focus on designing a ship like the Lazarus. If no one is left at the Xplorer site, the others will be deserted, too.
I touch CAPE CANAVERAL, FL, and the dialer starts up again. This time, someone will answer, someone who can tell me what’s happening on Earth. Any moment now.
After eleven tones, the dialer goes dead.
“No, come on,” I whisper. I press WALLOPS ISLAND, VA, then KODIAK, AK. I hit bases near Cairo and Buenos Aires, near Moscow and London.
“Hello?” I say over the dial tone, beginning to feel dizzy. “Lazarus to Earth. Come in….Is anyone there?”
The tone is a relentless middle C. The map seems to expand before my eyes, Madagascar spreading away from Mozambique, Ireland from England, Sri Lanka from India, the oceans opening infinitely, every landmass huge and empty.
The stations are abandoned. We’re alone.
I lift my bowed head and feel as if I’m falling slowly into the sight beyond the windshield. One thick layer of transparent ceramic is the only thing that separates me from the silvery webwork of the galaxy. At home, I used to watch the night sky through my bedroom window to calm myself down. The stars were perfect, remote, untouchable, everything I aspired to be. Now I’m among them.
I take a step back from the dashboard, then turn on my heel, jaw set. I don’t need to make contact to know what’s happening on Earth. I know the emergency protocol. After the eruption, autocalls and texts would have hit every watch, phone, headset, and earpiece in the world, and by now, millions of people will be filing into sprawling underground bunkers. Three hundred eighty-eight thousand of those complexes were constructed in the US alone over the last three years; the fact swims up from nowhere to bolster me, and details follow. Capacity five hundred per bunker. Highest number of bunkers per capita in West Virginia, lowest in Alaska. I can always trust myself to remember too much.
So, with any luck, Lilly and Marcus will already be belowground with their families. As for my parents, they’ll have been among the first to reach safety. My mother is probably in some Swiss bunker near Geneva. She’ll be making an address from a White House in VR space right now, her hands folded on a digital Resolute desk while my father stands behind the camera with the press team, his thumbs-up bent backward in that hitchhiker’s angle. Once they get word that the Lazarus has launched, they’ll find a way to contact us. That’s right. That has to be right.
As I start up the steps, I turn my thoughts to the fleet. The Lazarus’s blueprint was only finalized for mass production a few weeks ago, but maybe some supply line will have time to manufacture the parts. Maybe a team far away from California will build more ships before the atmosphere becomes too hot and humid to breathe. Maybe…
I reach the top of the steps, and my thoughts of Earth vanish.
In the silence, I thought I was alone, but Eli is standing in the threshold. Sprawled out on the tiles at her feet, blond hair clotted with something dark that hasn’t quite dried, is the commander.
For a moment they’re both so still that the image is unnatural. Then Eli looks up at me. Something has gone from her face. Before takeoff, the flush in her cheeks was violent, her red mouth so thin and taut that it looked like a welt across her milk-white skin. I remember her features distorting behind her visor as she yelled, What are you doing?
That person has sunk into her now. Her narrow face is pale, her lips colorless. Long dark hair shadows one eye, while the other, an electric blue spot like laser light on a plaster wall, moves over me unseeingly.
“What happened?” I manage to ask.
“Not sure….I found her in one of the Planters.” Eli’s voice is husky, and her mouth hardly moves when she speaks, like a ventriloquist’s. “She slipped and fell, I think. Hit her head.”
“You carried her here?”
Eli nods.
Our gazes move downward together. The previous day seems to shrink before me into a video that I am watching over and over again, unable to understand the sequence of events. Not even twelve hours ago, I was stepping out of an SUV onto the complex with a rare feeling of optimism. The sight of the Lazarus glowing against the blue sky made me think, This could actually happen—the fleet could be ready by spring, and when I went home to DC on Monday, I’d describe the ship to Marcus and Lilly, and in September their families would get drawn in the passenger lottery, and everything would be as close to okay as we could reasonably expect. Just hours ago these things felt plausible, and now, somehow, I’m hurtling away from Earth, standing over the body of the one person aboard who was trained for this.
A squeak of foot on tile cuts the air. Eli is making for a bank of lockers set into the wall. Only now do I register that while I was unconscious, she changed into a ship’s uniform. These are dark suits ribbed at the knees and elbows, but cut strategically loose at the armpits and groin—“To prevent friction and sweat collection!” said our tour guide yesterday, bursting with enthusiasm. “With this material, these things are never going to wear out!”
Eli throws open locker after locker. She rummages through orange suits and silver tanks, through manuals and wires. I feel a dull, hot stab of pity. She must be searching for medical equipment. She must still, somehow, think there’s hope.
“Eli,” I say.
She doesn’t turn. I’m not sure she heard, rifling through a locker full of power tools.
I raise my voice. “Eli.”
“Yeah, what,” she says mechanically.
“If you’re looking for the first aid kit, I think it’s on the lower level.”
“First…no, I’m looking for…”
She trails off as she opens another locker. This time, she’s in luck. She seizes a tablet from a charging pad inside and scrolls through, lips shaping words but emitting no sound.
I wait for her to explain. No explanation comes. Finally I ask, “What’s on that tablet?”
Her face turns in my direction. I’m used to people looking through me, but Eli’s stare is so unfocused she could be sleepwalking. “Diagnostic tests. Maintenance was supposed to make sure nothing got disrupted on launch. We don’t have maintenance, so. I’ve got to start on the list.”
“Wait. You don’t—”
She’s turning away, already receding from the conversation again. “Then the walk-through. Inventory…Check everything for the gravity strapdowns…”
“Eli.”
The sound of her name seems to bring her back to herself. She swallows and blinks hard, as if trying to restart her senses.
I don’t let my gaze stray back to her mother. “You don’t need to worry about any of that right now.”
Her mouth tightens to a thin line. “Yeah, I do. Of course I do. This has to get done.”
“It will get done. I’ll do it.”
“You’ll—what?” Disorientation passes across her face. “No, I have to…I can do this,” she mutters, her chest rising and falling quickly. She’s looking around at the bridge, at the cabinets and windshield and dashboard, everywhere but at her mother. “Just give me ten minutes. I’m fine. I’ll—”
