Planetfall (25 page)

We all knew that we'd have to leave eventually, forced to do so by our finite air supply, but no one mentioned it out loud. Then only nine minutes and forty five seconds after she'd gone through the wall, it phased into its faint state again and Suh staggered through.

She was already lifting her helmet off as the wall became solid behind her again. She was distraught, wild-eyed with grief, almost howling with each tear-filled breath. “I took too long!” she said, sinking to her knees and lifting the helmet off before any of us could get to her.

“No! No, Suh!” Winston's pleas went unheeded and she let her helmet drop to the floor in front of her.

As he scrambled to open his medkit, her skin blotched with lurid red rosettes and her sobs became more labored. All the microbial life in the air was invading her body, so finely tuned
to another planet's microbiology. “Nothing matters,” she said to Winston as he fussed around her. “We're nothing. All this is nothing. God is already dead.”

The poisonous air stole her words then and Hak-Kun cradled her as she collapsed in his arms. She had no tears for him, no parting smile or any attempt to make a final connection to her only son. All she could do was stare at the wall she had passed through until she died. We all watched as Winston frantically tried to bring her back, but I knew there was nothing that could be done. Her breath had been bubbling in her lungs; she'd coughed blood over Hak-Kun's and Mack's visors. She wasn't coming back from that.

I didn't cry then. I don't think I quite believed it. After decades of being with her, talking to her in the middle of the night when she couldn't sleep, watching her struggle with the ever widening gap between her and everyone else, I couldn't believe it was over so quickly. And so needlessly. The only thing I felt was anger. How could she do that to us! To her son! I couldn't begin to process what she'd said.

The playback stops and it feels like I'm dropped into my body again, outside my house, where I've been all along. Everywhere I look there are people crying or staring at the city, dumb with shock. Some are clinging to one another. Others have their arms wrapped around themselves as they all process what they saw.

I didn't choose to end the playback there though and when I check the network I'm unsurprised to see that Mack shut my link down. He's standing behind me, still close to the entrance to my house, staring at the crowd.

“Why didn't you tell us?” Pasha says to him, to both of us, as he comes outside too.

Mack looks at me and shakes his head, but I'll be damned if I'm going to hide what's left now. “We argued about it,” I
say. “The others wanted to take her back to Atlas and tell everyone what happened but he—”

“I did what I needed to,” he cuts in. “I had to keep the colony together.”

“The people who died,” Pasha says, “the ones whose pods didn't make it here . . . You were covering it up, weren't you?”

“That was just a terrible accident,” Mack says.

“That's a lie.” This time I cut across him. “I should have spoken up about it and I'm sorry but—” I look at Mack. Do I reveal his crime? Is it my right to condemn him? But he killed those people. He is responsible for their deaths. And the reason I've kept quiet about this is no longer valid. “We argued after she died and it got violent; then Mack got Lois's gun and shut everyone up. He persuaded us all to keep quiet about Suh's death until the colony was established. We agreed that telling everyone when we went back with the air and soil samples would just destroy everyone and we needed to make sure everyone was focused on second Planetfall. We couldn't stay on Atlas. We had to make it work.” I pause under the power of Mack's eyes, silently pleading me to protect him. But he could have killed me. He would have killed me, if he'd needed to. “When we got back to Atlas and were waiting for the first round of vaccinations to be produced, Hak-Kun came to see me. He said he didn't trust Mack to tell the truth once we landed and he tried to persuade me to make a new pact with him, Winston and Lois, to tell everyone the moment we made Planetfall, so Mack wouldn't have a chance to cover it all up. He didn't know—none of us did—that Mack was spying on us. I said we had to trust Mack. That's why I'm here, now, alive. Mack bided his time, monitored them closely and then sabotaged their pods. He cut them off from the network so that when they realized what was happening they couldn't tell
the truth. Or ask for help. Not until it was too late. The other pod that went off course was to stop people thinking it was something to do with the original team.”

When I stop speaking, there is silence. I've done it. I've broken the spell Mack cast and I've broken the colony with it. Pasha moves away from Mack as if being near him is unbearable now. I wait for someone to say something or do something, but no one knows how to handle this. It's all too big, too sudden, to lose so much in quick succession. Kay looks at me with a brief, cold glance. I know there will never be anything between us again now. Not after this.

Nick is the first to come to his senses. “We need time to come to terms with this,” he says, stepping forward. “And there needs to be a trial. I think Ren and Mack should be held beneath the Dome until we're ready to deal with that. Does anyone have any objections?”

No one voices any, and Pasha, Nick and a couple of others surround me and Mack. He looks resigned and avoids eye contact with me. I look back at my house as we walk away, wondering if I'll ever be allowed back into it again.

WE END UP
being escorted by a small entourage. At first I'm fearful that people are drawing closer to try to hurt us, but then I realize that's their fear too and they are actually protecting us. There are angry shouts thrown from the crowd, but most people are too caught up in their own shock and grief to be violent. Mack made sure he screened out those tendencies in the early stages of the selection process. In fact, aside from a few incidents of flared tempers, he is the only one who has ever committed a serious violent act since we left Earth. I suppose he didn't apply his entry criteria to himself.

As I walk I wonder where Sung-Soo has gone. There's no mention of him on the network. I want to explain to him what happened. He's the only one here who doesn't know the truth. It isn't so much the worry that he thinks I killed Suh; it's more the fact that if there's anyone here who deserves to know what happened, it's him. Will he come back? Or has he gone to fend for himself in the wilderness again?

Every now and then I look at Mack. He's fixated on the ground ahead of him, probably trying to work out how to handle this. He won't be able to talk his way out of this though. I want to say something to him but I can't settle on anything that doesn't seem ridiculous. Occasionally I want to apologize, but then another part of my mosaic feels that he should apologize to me, for putting me through this over the years. But I can't blame him for my actions. I could have told everyone a long time ago. And that's why Kay looked at me that way. I'll never be anything but a liar to her now. And out of all of this, that's what makes me start to weep.

Only meters away from the Dome, the darkness is rent apart by an explosion on the other side of the colony. Instinctively we all scream and hunker down as flaming scraps of debris rain down upon us. My ears are ringing and I don't realize one of the burning scraps has landed on my shoulder until I feel the heat. I brush it off and frantically sweep my hand over my head and back.

“Did you do that?” I yell at Mack, thinking he's lost all perspective and somehow set something off to cause a distraction. But he looks just as shocked and confused as everyone else. People are now running toward and then past us from that direction as another explosion tears through the colony not far from the first. There's a high-pitched note soon afterward, like a whistle that's at the topmost edge of my hearing range. I have no idea what makes it and no time to worry about it either.

Our entourage scatters and I'm knocked over, unable to steady myself well enough with a slinged arm. I bang my head and lose a couple of seconds to the pain, expecting MyPhys to make an instant report, but no dialog box pops up. I wonder if Kay has somehow disabled it, then check my stream to see
if anyone knows what's going on. There's no new data coming into my feed. The network is down.

I struggle onto my knees wondering why people are still screaming when a movement next to me makes me twist toward Mack. He's on his knees too, presumably knocked over by the stampede as I was. But there's someone standing behind him, holding his hair in a fist, drawing a blade across Mack's throat. Sung-Soo.

The blood falling from the wound in a torrent paralyzes me. Sung-Soo is looking at me as he cuts, ending the act with a wide arc that flicks the blood away from his blade. He releases Mack's hair and he collapses in front of me. The smile that spreads across Sung-Soo's face as Mack drops speaks of relief and satisfaction.

He must have been in the crowd when I told them what Mack did.

Sung-Soo holds the knife to one side as Mack's blood drips from it. He's dead. His blood is soaking into the knees of my trousers. I'm going to be sick.

“I waited so long to do that.”

Sung-Soo's comment not only chills me, but confuses me too. He sees that in my face and nods.

“Yes, I knew what he did. My father told me everything.”

“You knew Suh was dead all the time you were here?”

“Yes. You started lying to me the first day I met you. Does a true word ever come out of that mouth?”

I say nothing, swallowing down waves of bile, keeping an eye on the knife I'm sure he's going to plunge into me.

“But I needed to work out what you knew. I needed proof. Your pod wasn't sabotaged, so Dad always wondered if you were in on it. He hoped you weren't.” He kicks Mack's slack body in the back. “But he knew that bastard sent them off to die.”

“Are you going to kill me now?”

“You're sick in the head, but you know so much.”

Another statement that confuses me. What difference would either make to his revenge?

“You didn't kill anyone,” he continues. “You're just a coward. You should have told everyone what he did. Then maybe they would have found Dad and the others. But you're too useful to die.”

I struggle to my feet. Behind him I see someone running. It's hard to see who in the darkness, but I know it's a man. He drops suddenly, but I can't see why. What the fuck is going on?

“Sung-Soo!” It's a man's voice and it's unfamiliar. “We've got five. Are there many more?”

“Ten in total,” Sung-Soo calls back over his shoulder and I bolt, using his momentary distraction to make my escape.

He's fitter than I am and uninjured and I know this is an act of futility above good sense, but I still obey my basic survival instinct and plunge myself into the nearest stream of running people. I need to get away from him as priority and I need to know if Kay is all right. I can't see her anywhere, and between the smoke from the fires and the soft glow of the path, it's practically impossible to make one person out from another.

I collide with a woman cutting across the direction I'm sprinting and as we bump off each other I realize I don't know her. There's something about her eyes that's familiar though, and the set of her nose that reminds me of Winston. Her clothes are a patchwork of old coveralls patched many times with strips of rough, untanned leather and she's holding a huge bowie knife that makes my stomach flip over. Its blade's silver has been dulled by blood.

She looks at me for a moment, then at my chest, then does the same with someone behind me and throws herself toward
them. I have to dodge to one side to avoid being clipped by her knife. I see Christophe, a quiet man with a specialty in microbiology, is the target of her attack. There's something glowing on his upper chest, as if someone had fired a pellet of luminescent paint at him, splattered outward from a point just below his neck.

The woman doesn't stab him; instead she strikes him in the solar plexus with the flat of her free hand, and as the poor man staggers back, winded, she hits him on the top of his head with the butt of the knife handle. It knocks him out, and without looking at me or caring about anything else around her, the woman starts to tie Christophe's hands together.

I can hear Sung-Soo laughing. Abandoning Christophe, like the coward I am, I turn and run again. I can't fight that woman. I'd just get myself killed. I don't feel any better about my actions though.

I make it to the edge of the colony and get my bearings. I'm not very far from my house, not that there's anything there that could help me. I can't print a weapon with the network down and Mack owns the only gun I know of. I have no idea where he kept it and I'm not willing to go to his house to search for it and risk running into Sung-Soo or another knife-wielding stranger.

I run out into the grasses, hoping that the farther away I get from the colony, the harder I'll be to spot. I get as far as I can before I have to stop and drop down to my knees, gasping for breath.

“Where are you going, Ren?” Sung-Soo shouts. He sounds amused. “You think I won't find you out there? That's my world. I'll find you no matter where you go.”

I know he's right, but I don't move. There's the faintest gray appearing on the horizon. The dawn is an hour away at most.
I'll be too easy to track in the grasses; anyone could follow the trampled path I made during my flight.

“I'm not going to kill you,” he says. He doesn't sound any closer. “And you're going to come with us. Kay's coming too. This colony won't last a month. You'll be better off with us.”

I twist the corner of my sling, biting into the fabric to try to let some of the tension out. Is he lying about Kay to draw me out?

Us. He said “us”—he wasn't the only one left from his group. It was all a lie; he just pretended to be alone so we'd lower our guard. Those strangers are his people—that woman with the knife is probably Winston's daughter. They're not just seeking revenge against Mack, but against all of us. They want to destroy what we have for depriving them.

“Carmen isn't coming, if that's what you're worried about. She's useless.”

But how could they get so close without setting off the sensors? I shake my head. I'm forgetting that Lois knew how to get around that sort of thing effortlessly. She would have passed on her knowledge. Hell, she might be out there now—Sung-Soo lied about so much that the others may have survived. But if that were the case, why wait so long? And why not just come and join the colony? No. These are the actions of their children who heard stories about us that twisted them and set them against us. Ones that grew up in hardship and danger while we lived soft, cocooned lives of luxury.

I can't stay here. I can't go back. If I try to strike out on my own with no supplies, I'll be dead in a week. I don't know how to survive out there, but Sung-Soo does. He'll find me.

There's only one place I can go where he might not follow.