Earth Below, Sky Above

VII

Wilson felt rather than saw the emergency bulkhead springing up in front of him and saw Hart Schmidt on the other side of it. Wilson grabbed Lowen and tried to push his way through the now thoroughly panicked crowd, but the mob pushed him and Lowen back and into their flow. Wilson had just enough time to see the shock on Schmidt’s face as the bottom and top bulkheads slammed shut, separating the two of them. Wilson yelled at Schmidt to get to the shuttle. Schmidt didn’t hear it over the din.

Around Wilson, the screams of the people near him reached a crescendo as they realized the bulkheads had sealed them off. They were trapped in this section of Earth Station.

Wilson looked at Lowen, who had gone ashen. She realized the same thing everyone else had.

He looked around and realized that they were at shuttle gate five.

No shuttle here, Wilson thought. Then he thought of something else.

“Come on,” he said to Lowen, grabbing her hand again. He went perpendicular to the crowd, toward the shuttle gate. Lowen followed bonelessly. Wilson checked the doorway at the shuttle gate and found it unlocked. He pulled it open, pushed Lowen through it and closed it, he hoped, before any of the mob could see him.

The shuttle area was cold and empty. Wilson set down the bag he was carrying and began to dig through it. “Dani,” he said, and then looked up after he got no response. “Dani!” he said, more forcefully. She glanced over to him, a lost look in her eyes. “I need you to take off your clothes,” he said.

This snapped her out of her shock. “Excuse me?” she said.

Wilson smiled; his inappropriate remark had gotten the response he’d hoped for. “I need you to take off your clothes because I need you to get into this,” he said, holding up the CDF combat unitard.

“Why?” Lowen said, and a second later her eyes widened. “No,” she began.

“Yes,” Wilson said, forcefully. “The station is under attack, Dani. We’re sealed off. Whoever’s doing this has the ability to peel the skin off this station like an orange. We missed our ride. If we’re getting off this thing, there’s only one way to do it. We’re jumping off.”

“I don’t know how,” Lowen said.

“You don’t have to know how, because I do,” Wilson said, and held up the unitard. “All you have to do is get into this. And hurry, because I don’t think we have a whole lot of time.”

Lowen nodded, took the unitard and started unbuttoning her blouse. Wilson turned away.

“Harry,” Lowen said.

Wilson turned his head back slightly. “Yeah?”

“For the record, this was not really how I planned to get undressed with you,” Lowen said.

“Really,” Wilson said. “Because this was how I planned it all along.”

Lowen laughed a shaky, exhausted laugh. Wilson turned away, to let Lowen retain her modesty and so she couldn’t see the expression on his face as he tried to ping Hart Schmidt.

Earth Station gave a shudder, sirens went off and that was enough for Jastine Goeth, the Clarke’s shuttle pilot. “Buttoning up now,” she said, and sealed the door to the shuttle.

“I have two people left,” Abumwe said. “We wait for them.”

“We’re leaving,” Goeth said.

“I don’t think you heard me,” Abumwe said, using her coldest Don’t fuck with me voice.

“I heard you,” Goeth said, as she worked her departure sequence. “You want to wait? I’ll unseal the door for you for five seconds so you can get out. But I am going, Ambassador. This place is blowing up around us. I don’t plan to be here when it breaks apart. Now leave or shut up. You can string me up later, but right now this is my ship. Sit down and let me work.”

Abumwe stared at Goeth for several seconds in cold fury, which Goeth ignored. Then she turned, glared one of her staff out of a seat and sat.

Goeth pushed the “Emergency Purge” option on her control panel, which overrode the station’s standard purge cycle. There was a bang as the shuttle bay’s outside portal irised open with the bay’s atmosphere still inside, sucking out through the dilating door. Goeth didn’t wait for it to open all the way. She jammed the shuttle through, damaging the door as she went. She did not believe at this point that it would matter.

Schmidt saw the bulkheads go up, saw Harry yell something at him he couldn’t hear and then took off running again toward gate seven, which he could see at the far end of the section. Schmidt knew at this point that his time had likely expired, but he still had to get there to see for himself.

Which was how Schmidt saw the shuttle leave, through the wide window of the seating area just as he came up to the gate.

“So close,” Schmidt whispered, and could barely register the words over the screams of those trapped in the section with him. They were all going to die in here together.

He wished they wouldn’t be so loud about it.

Schmidt looked at the seating area, shrugged to himself and collapsed onto one of the benches, staring up at the ceiling of the gate area. He’d missed his ride by a matter of seconds. It was sort of appropriate, he supposed. At the end of the day, he was always a half a step behind.

Somewhere in the section, he could hear someone sobbing, loudly, terrified of the moment. Schmidt registered it but didn’t feel the emotion himself. If this was the end, it wasn’t the worst end he could imagine. He wasn’t scared about it. He just wished it weren’t so soon.

Schmidt’s PDA went off; the tone told him it was Wilson. The lucky bastard, Schmidt thought. He had no doubt that even now Harry was figuring out some way out of this. Schmidt loved his friend Harry, admired him and even looked up to him in his way. But right now, at what looked like the end of his days, he found the last thing he actually wanted to do was talk to him.

“Two new missiles launched,” Lao said. “They’re heading for our shuttle.”

“Of course they are,” Coloma said. Whoever was doing this wanted to make some sort of point about people leaving Earth Station.

Fortunately, Coloma didn’t have to stand for it.

She went to her personal display, marked the missiles heading toward the shuttle and marked the ship that had fired them. She pulled up a command panel on her display and pressed a button.

The missiles vaporized and the ship that launched them blossomed into flame.

“What was that?” Balla said.

“Neva, tell the shuttle pilot to go to Earth,” Coloma said. “These ships are firing Melierax missiles. They’re not rated for atmosphere. They’ll burn up. Get that shuttle as deep into the atmosphere as it can go, as fast as it can go.”

Balla passed on the order and then looked back at her captain.

“I told you the CDF was expecting one ship. So they gave me one of their new toys: a drone that fires a beam of antimatter particles. It’s been floating alongside the Clarke since yesterday. I think they wanted it to have a field test.”

“I think it works,” Balla said.

“The problem is that it has about six shots to it,” Coloma said. “I put a beam to each of the missiles and three beams into that ship. I’ve got another shot left, if I’m lucky. If there was just one ship out there, that wouldn’t be an issue. But there are fifteen others. And I’ve just made the Clarke a target.”

“What do you want to do?” Balla asked.

“I want you to get the crew to the escape pods,” Coloma said. “They’re not firing at us now because they’re still trying to figure out what just happened. That’s not going to last long. Get everyone off the ship before it happens.”

“And what are you going to do?” Balla asked.

“I’m going to go down with the ship,” Coloma said. “And if I’m lucky, I’m going to take some of them with me.”