34 Execution
Tarsi, Kelvin, Leila, and I stood at the main gate, waiting to be noticed. After the four-day hike around the trees and back to base, it took absolutely no effort on our parts to appear physically defeated, ready to throw ourselves on the mercy of the colony. Several times during our hike, I had come uncomfortably close to admitting just such a defeat. I felt broken, nearly to the point of acquiescence. We were all half-starved, barely pausing to eat raw bombfruit, and our bodies were so tender that the soft mosses were causing our feet to split open. We didn’t even have the energy to shout for attention once we arrived. We just waited for someone on the rocket scaffolding to spot us and send the enforcers our way.
They eventually came, just as expected, the glimmer of their guns bouncing up and down on their own emaciated hips. It had been just over a week, but I hardly recognized Hickson with his stubbly beard and gaunt cheeks. The humming in the fence fell silent, then the electric lock clicked loudly, allowing the group on the inside to pull the gates inward.
They came for us with their guns drawn, even though our hands were up. Despite our poor condition, we looked better off than they did. Especially Kelvin, whose mighty bulk had been tamed by malnutrition but not destroyed. He almost looked normal, which made him a giant among the rest of us. It seemed a diet on but one type of fruit is not a proper diet at all.
I nodded to the group of enforcers as they approached. “Hickson,” I said, greeting him in particular. He sneered in response and trained his golden gun at my stomach while the other enforcers looped rope around our wrists. I had a moment of panic that I had been wrong about them, that they would just take us to the edge of the berm’s ditch and pull their triggers—thereby ending our plans—but they didn’t.
Hickson turned his back once we were all secure and walked off toward the command module. The small group of enforcers shoved us through the gates, pointing toward our new home, which was our old home.
“Head to the vats,” one of them said.
????
Our place of birth had been transformed into a penitentiary. The tubes in which we had once lived as a mere collection of cells had become—a collection of cells. A few were already occupied, most likely by those who had attempted to flee over the past week. I saw Julie in one of the first vats, right by the door. She glanced up at us as we filed by, her eyes dim and devoid of life. She looked like an animal, her hair down over her face, her clothes torn and hanging in scraps. There were scratches up and down both her arms.
The enforcers pushed us forward, and in a bizarre twist of fate, I found myself shoved into Tarsi’s old vat and she into mine. Kelvin jockeyed for position with Leila to get locked up on the other side of me. Steel bars were dropped in place outside the thick, transparent doors, preventing them from sliding open.
The abuse and accusations we’d expected and feared from the enforcers never came. Frankly, I don’t know that they could summon the energy. The most they physically could do to us was raise their heavy guns and squeeze the triggers, plenty enough for them to maintain control.
We sat down in our respective vats, our legs weary from the days of hiking, our hands thankfully freed from the ropes.
“Rocket looked surprisingly close to finished,” Kelvin said once we were alone.
“Best guess?” I asked, rubbing my wrists.
He shrugged, then leaned his head back against the vat and closed his eyes. “The payload was in place. I’m guessing propellant is still the holdup. Even if production was halved, I’d guess another week. Maybe less.”
I nodded. Outside, we could hear the popping of target practice, signifying we had interrupted their lunch. The thought made my stomach clench up like an empty fist. I looked up and over at the interface hanging down above Tarsi. It was the wires through which all my training and education had taken place. Some of the material had been scrapped during those first few days of salvage, and the server uplinks had been destroyed in the fire, but the nature of the module and the remnants of that connection made me feel as if every action were being logged somewhere and analyzed.
Tarsi put her hand to the glass beside me, and I matched it with my own. It reminded me of our birthday, which filled me with a powerful depression. Suddenly, all I could think about was needing sleep. Really needing it. I wanted to curl up and stay that way for years and years.
I had guessed that Colony would send for me immediately. Tarsi said it would take a day or two. Kelvin feared it would never happen. At just under three hours, I decided that I had nailed it.
Hickson came himself, his silent disgust from several hours before replaced with boisterous anger—probably from having had some time to think or from firing his gun. He waited for me by the door while two other enforcers let me out and bound my wrists.
“I’ll take him myself,” Hickson said to the others, waving them away.
They both seemed happy to comply; they sank to their stations on either side of the door, their butts in the dirt and their backs to the wall.
“Pathetic,” Hickson said. He gestured toward the command module and shoved me forward. “Couldn’t make it on your own, so you come crawling back to me, right?”
I ignored him and studied the camp. The walk to the command module gave me a better view of the activity than our hike to the vats had. There seemed to be very little activity, and I wondered about their bombfruit supply. “You aren’t looking so good,” I told Hickson, meaning it as real concern for the colony’s health.
He jabbed me in the back with something hard. I heard a metallic click from his gun and imagined him blowing my guts out in the middle of base. Several colonists near the mess tent watched as we walked past, and I wondered if even Hickson could kill in such a public manner. Then I remembered Stevens.
“We’re working ourselves to the bone,” Hickson said. “We’re doing twice the work with half the men, so if we’re hurting, it’s as much your fault as ours.”
He pulled me to a stop before we entered the command module. Myra stood by the open door; he waved her away.
“Do you know why you’re doing this?” I asked him, curious how much of a confidant Colony had made him. “What has Colony told you?”
Hickson waved the gun back and forth across my belly and shook his head in time with it. “Colony tells me what I need to know,” he said.
He stepped close, his skeletal face and pale skin sickly looking past his beard. I remembered the last time he had confronted me in such a manner. How big he had seemed at the time. But now, this boy I had feared—especially during the planning and our long hike—I realized he was just a scared, starving kid like me.
“After your talk,” he said, “one you’ve done nothing to deserve, you’re gonna tell me where the others are.”
I started to shake my head and respond, but he forced the gun against my stomach and leaned in to whisper in my ear: “If you don’t tell me, I’m gonna f*ck your girlfriend in the vat next to you, understandI’ll have her face shoved against the glass and I’ll make you watch, and she’ll love it.”
He stepped back and licked his lips before showing me his teeth. The world disappeared, leaving just his wicked expression in the center of my vision. I imagined bending my knees and launching myself forward, driving my skull through his nose and teeth. I thought about holding that gun and putting it in his mouth and pulling the trigger and real bullets coming out and squeezing until it stopped working. My temperature soared and I forgot why I was there, why anything was anything. I just wanted to kill.
But some part of my brain, some scrap of frontal lobe that was in charge of mitigating risky behavior, short-circuited the rest. I looked away and tried to remember where I was.
And that’s when I realized I had been wrong. Hickson and I were nothing alike. Our bodies might be similarly starved, but our brains were still intact. Intact and different. Whatever disease of hate and fear-mongering he had been born with made him something far worse than I would ever be capable of emulating.
He pushed me into the command module and followed close behind. I staggered forward, between the servers and into the computer room. I started to sit in the center chair.
Hickson smacked me in the back of the head with his open hand and shoved me toward the other one.
“Mine,” he said simply.
I plopped down and rested my bound hands on the counter. So far, this was not the meeting I had expected.
“Leave us,” Colony said, its voice as calm and soothing as ever. Just hearing it massaged away some of my anger toward Hickson. It also terrified me that one of my plans may have been a fool’s errand—that the notion of reasoning with Colony may have been inspired by the hubris of my youth.
Hickson started to complain, “But—”
“I would like to speak with Porter alone,” Colony said.
I smiled.
This was the meeting I had expected.