Impact (37 page)

Anna wraps the blanket tighter around herself. It's all the way up to her chin, tucked in around her crossed legs, but she can't stop shivering. She's lost her beanie–she can't even remember it coming off her head. She feels naked without it.

The family's hab is the only quiet space they could find–the only space where a thousand people weren't trying to talk to her, where she wasn't getting bombarded by a million questions on all sides. The door is shut, but she can still hear voices from the corridor. She tries to tune them out, closing her eyes. She knows she won't sleep–she's way too wired for that–but it helps.

Dax and Arroway and the rest of their group are in the sector brig. They all came back into the escape pod airlocks, every one of them–it was either that, or drift in space for the rest of time. Anna doesn't know what'll happen to them. Dax was sobbing when they pulled him out of his suit. He tried to reach for her, but she got away as quickly as she could, not wanting to look at him, at
any
of them.

She made it almost ten steps before collapsing.

The door to the hab slides open. Voices snap into focus. “If we could just see her—”

“
No.
” Frank Beck's voice is thunderous. “She's been through enough. Get out of here.”

He doesn't give them a chance to answer–just slams the door shut. Then he stands there for a moment, his shoulders heaving.

Anna slides off the bed, letting the blanket fall to her feet. Cold air pricks the skin on her arms, but she barely notices. She walks over to her dad, wraps her arms around him and pulls him close.

They hold each other for a long moment. “What were you thinking?” Frank says, his voice muffled by her hair.

“I—”

He pulls apart from her, thrusting her to arm's length. “
What were you thinking?
” he bellows into her face, then almost immediately pulls her back into a hug. It's such an absurd, theatrical performance that she wants to call him out on it, make a joke, say something clever. It's his shoulders that stop her. They're trembling, and she feels tears staining her scalp.

So she says nothing. She just holds him.

Eventually, her father gives her a squeeze and they pull apart. He wipes his face, not looking at her, and sits down heavily on the bed. Anna grabs the discarded blanket on the floor, and sits next to him, cross-legged, wrapping it around her legs.

“I'm sorry,” she whispers.

He actually laughs–or tries to. “Are you, now?”

“Dad, come on.”

He drops his head. “I know.”

It's then that she realises she never told him about Riley. About the radio conversation. She does so, and the more she talks, the wider his eyes get.

“Anna, that's…” He leaps up off the bed, pacing the floor. “That's
brilliant
. And they told you where to come down?”

She nods.

“Brilliant,” he says again. “I've got to tell everyone. We've got to tell the crew on the
Tenshi
.”

He's moving towards the door when Anna says, “What's going to happen?”

“Hmmm?” He looks over his shoulder at her.

“To–you know, to Dax and the rest of them?”

“Oh,” her father says, as if it's an irrelevance. “We don't know yet.”

“Are they going to be taken out of the lottery?” It's the only outcome she can think of. How could they let any of them have a place on the
Tenshi Maru
?

Her father comes to a halt, staring at the door. After a moment, he makes his way back to the bed, sitting down next to her.

He sighs. “I don't think they should.”

“
What?
”

“So do a few others. They'll have to stay in the brig, to be sure, but—”

She shakes her head. “They were going to leave us here. They were going to take the space suits and
leave us
.”

“Well—”

“No. Dad, you can't be thinking about letting them go.”

He puts a hand on her knee, and she subsides.

“They thought they were better than us,” her father says. “That's the whole reason they went in the first place, wasn't it?”

“Yeah…”

“So what better punishment than making them exactly the same as everyone else? By making them take the lottery just like all of us here?”

She opens her mouth to reply–and finds she has nothing.

That's when the full realisation hits her. There's still going to be a lottery. There's still going to be some who go, and some who get left behind. Nothing she did–working out what Dax was planning, contacting Riley, the insane trip through space–none of it changes that. She's not going to be able to save her family, or Ravi and Achala Kumar, or Ivy, or Marcus, or anybody else. It's all going to be left to chance.

And that's the worst thing of all. Because it's only way to do it.

She reaches over and pulls her dad into a fierce hug. She buries her face in his shoulder, and this time it's her turn to cry.

“It's going to be OK,” he says, holding her tight.

Anna wants to believe him. But she's not sure that she can.

I sit on the beach for a long time, staring out at the water.

Someone found me clothes. A threadbare collared shirt made of a stiff, blue material. Black pants. There's even a pair of shoes, scabbed with dirt. The clothes come from someone much larger than me. I don't know who they belong to, but at least they're dry.

I'm dimly aware of the activity on the beach. Harlan is arguing with Eric, saying that they need to bring the workers with them. Eric is saying that they'll never fit them all in the plane, and Harlan responds by telling him that they'll make multiple trips if they have to. He sounds almost jubilant–not surprising. He survived Anchorage.

The workers are talking in a big group. One of them protests loudly, saying that they should retake the ship, that all the guards are dead.

I let it wash over me. I don't know what's going to happen next. It's too big a task, too many people to find homes for, too many loose ends to tie up. I can't even do anything for Prakesh–he's stable now, but unconscious, bundled up inside the plane and being tended to by the man with the grey hair. So I just sit.

It's all I can do.

Someone crouches down next to me. Koji. There's dried blood on his face, crusted under his right eye. His hair hangs in lanky strands on his face, and his overalls are patchy with seawater.

“I can go,” he says, “if you'd rather be alone.”

I shake my head. I feel like I should want to be by myself right now, but I find I don't care very much.

Koji sits cross-legged on the sand, wincing as he does so. “They don't like me very much,” he says, nodding to a group of workers. One of them scowls back at him. “I was hoping you could tell them… I mean, if…”

He trails off, looking embarrassed.

“I think I'd like to hear that story now,” I say.

“Story?”

“About my dad.”

Koji looks out at the horizon. He's silent for so long that I'm on the verge of prompting him, and then he says, “The
Akua Maru
didn't make it through the atmosphere. There was… an explosion. Something in the reactor went wrong.”

“I know,” I say.

Koji continues as if I hadn't spoken. “There's no way we should have made it down. We were going thousands of miles an hour. But your dad did it. He pulled it off. Two of us died during the descent, but there were still eight of us who made it down.”

He looks at me. “Your dad saved my life.”

“What happened? After you landed?”

He shrugs. “The ship was a wreck. Fusion reactor was still intact, just about, but it wasn't working. Everything else was done for. And Kamchatka… we couldn't have come down in a worse area. It was
cold
. Cold enough to freeze your bones inside you.”

He attempts a smile. “Your dad kept us going. He organised us. He made sure we got enough to eat, that we stayed warm enough. We wouldn't have lasted a week without him.”

When I speak, my voice is as brittle as thin glass. “But you came here.”

He continues as if I hadn't spoken. “Your dad was a hero, but he wasn't a miracle worker. We were running out of supplies, so three of us decided to head east, see if there was anything out there. Your father and four others stayed behind. He kept trying to contact Outer Earth. He said they'd send another ship–that it was just a matter of time. Did they? Did Outer Earth ever send a rescue?”

I don't know what to tell him. He sees my dad as a hero, as the man who saved him. How do I tell him that he went insane? That he killed the rest of the crew? He was down there for seven years, and after he finally got the ship going again, he set it on a collision course for Outer Earth, determined to destroy the station he thought had left him there to rot. Even thinking about it is like touching a wound that's only just started to scab over.

“No,” I say. “They didn't send anybody.”

Koji shakes his head. “Doesn't matter. Two of us made it across the Bering Strait, turned south. We were half dead when the people on the
Ramona
found us. Dominguez died on the way, but they brought me on board. Made me into a slave, like all the others. Until…”

He trails off, as if not sure how to say it.

“Until what?” I say.

“They didn't call it the Sacred Engine at first,” he says. “When they took us, it was broken. They had plenty of fuel stored in the ship, and a working fusion reactor, but they couldn't get the Engine working again.”

“I don't see how—”

“Don't you understand? I was the
Akua Maru
's terraforming specialist. Our mission was to make the Earth habitable again. Or to start making it habitable, anyway. Our terraforming equipment was destroyed in the crash. The equipment we had on the
Akua
was a more advanced version of what the Engine was: something called a HAARP unit.

“They developed the HAARP over a hundred years ago. It was supposed to fix the climate by effecting changes in the ionosphere, but they didn't get it off the ground before the nukes came raining down. The one on the
Ramona
was a much smaller version of it. I guess the plan was to deploy a bunch of them around the planet.”

I stare at him, my mouth open.

“I knew how to fix it,” Koji says. “Took me a long time to convince them to let me try, but I did it. I got the HAARP working again. Even then, Prophet made out like it was all his doing.”

He shrugs. “Still, they made me one of them. Problem was, the ship's fusion reactor was dead, so I had to figure out how to run the HAARP using the fuel supplies–
that
took a lot of work. Almost couldn't do it. It wasn't nearly as efficient, and if it had gone on much longer… Where are you going?”

I'm on my feet, arms tightly folded, walking away from him. I can't stop shaking, and this time it has nothing to do with the cold.

When I was in the Outer Earth control room, pleading with my father not to destroy the station, he told me that he had to finish the mission. He spent seven years in Kamchatka, freezing, desperately trying to stay alive so he could reunite with his family. When Janice Okwembu reached him, told him that my mom and I were dead, the only thing he wanted was to take revenge.

But it doesn't matter what he became. He landed his crew safely, and he made it possible for the Earth to recover. The chain of events led Koji here, to the one place where he could make a difference. What Okwembu did set in motion everything that happened to me, and what my father did–bringing that ship down intact–ended up saving the world.

I can never see my dad again. But I'm standing here, on a planet everybody thought was dead and gone, because of what he did.

He finished his mission.

“Dad,” I say, and then I feel another wrench of emotion so powerful it doubles me over. My tears fall to the sand.

I walk away, leaving everyone behind. I walk until their voices have faded to a dull murmur over the wind. After a while I stop, looking out at the ocean, at the horizon beyond it. I stand for a long time, doing nothing. My mind is as clear as an empty sky.

Strangely, it's a good feeling–like I can fill my body up with whatever I want. Like I'm finally free to choose what goes inside me.

There's a sound, off to my left. It takes me a second to realise what I'm seeing.

Janice Okwembu is crawling up the beach. Her clothes are sodden, streams of water cascading off her. She's coughing, her fingers clawing the dirt.

And the empty space inside me fills with white-hot rage, expanding outwards at the speed of light.

Okwembu focuses on putting one hand in front of the other. It's the only thing she's capable of doing.

She doesn't know how long she was out in the water. After a while, there was no feeling left in her hands and arms. The boat kept her above the surface, just. Half the time it felt like it was going to pull her down with it. When she got within a few feet of the shore, a swell finally capsized her. By then, she was so cold that it barely made a difference.

But she's
alive
.

One hand, then the other, pulling herself along the sand. She forces herself to think ahead. It's hard, as if the pathways between her synapses have frozen shut. She has to push the thoughts into being, mould them, concentrate to keep them in place.

First, she's going to get to her knees. Then her feet. Then she's going to see if she can stay standing. After that, she'll find a way to get warm. She doesn't know how yet, but, right now, that's all that matters.

She stops, trembling, then gets a knee underneath her. The front of her shirt is caked with sand. She almost falls over, puts a hand out, and winces as her numb fingers take the weight.

The ice in her mind is melting slowly. She'll have to make fire somehow–she remembers a history lesson, in a distant Outer Earth schoolroom, where the instructors talked about their ancestors making fire. How did they do it? Doesn't matter. She'll figure it out. Then, after she's got fire, she'll find food, and water. She still has the data stick–no telling if the saltwater has damaged it, but it's not important right now. The
Ramona
won't be the only civilisation out there, and she knows the remaining workers are somewhere on the shore–she caught a glimpse of them as she came in. Would they accept her? Did they know she was with Prophet? Maybe she could—

Running footsteps, hissing on the sand. Okwembu looks up, and then Riley Hale kicks her in the stomach.