Son of Sedonia

14

Crossing


MATTEO AWOKE TO thundering white-noise and a crushing pressure all over his body. Though unable to move, he felt a lead burden pulling him forward. Or was it downward? Hot blood tingled against his skin in its direction. It pressed him into something hard, crushing his collar bone, chest, and groin to the point where he thought they might crack. He fought for ragged sips of air from a plastic mask over his face.

His eyes throbbed as they darted over the space around him. Curved bars ran past his head and over his shoulders, holding him against a seat. A harness? His foggy mind drifted to his hands. He tried to raise them...found them pinned at his sides with thick metal cuffs.

Matteo could see flickering, blurry shapes in front of him. Violent pulses of light cast on figures that seemed to be seated and bound like him. Faint human sounds cried out against the background roar. Gotta be engines. Big ones. Observations struggled against the sharp pain in his temples. He pinched his eyes shut.

Then something cut the weight. A gasp filled his lungs with hot wet air and his chest trembled with each wheezing breath after. We’ve stopped. Why are the engines still running? The thought vanished, overcome by strangeness. His body felt...disconnected. As though his insides were floating around. The stunners? Out of nowhere, his stomach lurched. He vomited. But it didn’t move right. Yellow-green liquid left his mouth and gathered into rippling blobs. They drifted out in front of him, suspended in the pale blue glow from small windows to his left and right. Scared voices in the compartment fell dead silent as they watched the liquid orbs touch, combine, and split apart.

“What...the...f*ck?” said Oki, restrained opposite Matteo. The blue light faded, plunging the room into pitch black. The heads of every prisoner craned forward from their harnesses to peer out the window. Stars. Billions of them. The compartment erupted.

“Shit. SHIT! Where the hell are we, man?!”

“They can’t! They didn’t! They just didn’t!”

“Not there! No f*ckin’ way! Anywhere but the goddamn Moon!”

Matteo heard them but didn’t hear them. Where most shut their eyes or stared at the floor, Matteo stayed fixed on the porthole. On a clear night in the Slums, he could see maybe forty of the little white dots in the sky. He had counted them several nights on the roof of Utu’s clinic. So...many. His lips parted as waves of goosebumps spread over his aching skin.

The ship rolled, giving no physical indication to the prisoners. They saw stars cascade past the portholes. Whimpering cries croaked from the T99s. Suddenly light-headed, Matteo’s neck went slack.

“Never gets old,” said Shima, watching the live feed from the aft prisoner compartments. He released the seal on his oxygen mask with a smirk and unbuckled his flight harness. They had removed his Augs to clean, dose, and re-bandage his wounded leg. He might walk with a limp for a few days, they told him, but on the way to the Themis Colony, no walking would be required. It felt good to have a break from gravity tugging on the recombining flesh and muscle.

“Hehe, yeah. Bunch of tough little shits ‘til you shoot ‘em into orbit!” The pilot chuckled.

“F*ck ‘em.” Shima said. The pilot started to laugh again, but saw Shima’s stone expression. Shima took one last look out of the cockpit canopy. The details of the lunar surface grew bigger and sharper with each passing minute. They would soon enter the outermost ring of orbiting satellites, meaning three hours or so before touchdown at Themis. Three hours to just float and think. He couldn’t take it. Shima pulled himself up over the co-pilot’s seat and pushed off to the squad compartment.

The bitter reminder greeted him as he passed through the hatch. Vaughn, the rookie, was the only familiar face. The rest were replacements fresh out of Red Gate...some looked young enough to be freshmen. Vaughn sat in the rear left hand corner of the compartment, strapped snugly in his harness and typing on a virtual keypad in his Neural. Shima drifted over.

“You know, kid...typing the After-Action is the ranking officer’s job. My job—eh?”

The weak-chinned replacement in the seat next to Vaughn sneezed, sending tiny particles jetting through the air. Shima dodged most of them.

“Listen, numbnuts, go...secure the lavatory or something, grown folks are talking.”

“But sir, I was just in there, and it’s fi—”

“Now,” Shima said. The replacement paled and fiddled with the harness. Shima punched the center of it, released the shoulder bars, picked the boy up, and floated him gently down the aisle. Vaughn ignored them, rubbing at his lower lip and staring intently at the Neural display. Shima pulled himself down into the replacement’s seat. As he leaned over to speak, Vaughn started typing again.

“You know my old man was an a*shole?” Shima said. Vaughn furrowed his brow and shot Shima a confused look.

“Oh yeah! Total a*shole. Though knowing me, that might not’ve surprised you.” Shima grinned. Vaughn allowed a small snort of amusement. Shima gave him a brief stare-down before continuing.

“He’d come home and find me and my brothers neck deep in some kind of bullshit around the apartment or on the Beck’s Run Skywalk outside and he’d just lay into us, screamin’ his ass off about this and that and ‘why the f*ck can’t you shitheads just come home from school and keep quiet?’ And when I was younger, I’d get scared of him right away, I mean my old man could be like a pissed off Rottweiler when he got back from a fourteen-hour double in the Outer Ring. But if we didn’t do shit that day, he’d just grumble, fall into his chair in front of the screen, and drink wine coolers till he passed out. Never understood the wine cooler thing, myself.” Shima got a laugh out of Vaughn with that one.

“Right? I mean, what kind of working class hard ass chugs box-wine? Whatever, I digress. So anyway, Mom had left years earlier for some Mesa hotshot she’d met at the skin bar where she worked, so the old man was all we had left...and he got to where he didn’t sweat the small shit anymore. Me and my brothers had to get creative,” Shima tapped at the side of his head, “We’d steal chemicals from school to start fires on the Skywalk, or break all the dishes in the auto-door to our unit. One time we decided to ambush Dad in the elevators from inside the emergency hatch. I was the youngest and the only one small enough to get in there quick enough, so Hashimé helped me up into the shaft and Kaneda kept lookout to radio up when Dad got in on the commuter level. The signal came and up I went...and let me tell you, if you think those things are fast when you’re in ‘em, try riding on one. I heard the doors open and everyone file in...scared shitless. But something snapped and I flipped open the latch and dropped in on like twelve dirty, sweaty teamsters. Before I could shake it off, I felt the hand grip the back of my neck and stand me up. Nobody said a word for thirty floors. The beating didn’t come until we got to the unit. Dad pushed me through the front door and gave me a good one right in the gut. I deserved it. Knew that. But I got up and just f*ckin’ charged full force. First I kicked his knee the way it wasn’t supposed to go and heard a snap. Then when he went down I started in on his ribs. Then his head. The cops found me sitting on the bloody floor next to the old man. Shipped my brothers off to social services and me to Juvi. Best thing that ever happened to me.”

Vaughn’s attempt to hide disgust failed. The replacements had dropped all eavesdropping pretenses and leaned in to listen. Shima, punchline in his back pocket, smiled.

“Oh yeah! Turns out all I needed was structure. Discipline. I ate it up, morning, noon, and night. The drills, the PT, the chores...hell, I even liked the classes! A model inmate, all the way. So much so that by the time I came of age, some of the Ex-Mil CO’s recommended me for this new special program for young adults just like me...” Shima paused and looked around the room.

“Red Gate?” One of the replacements ventured.

“Give the noob a prize!” Shima said. Vaughn had returned his attention to the report. Shima stared at him a moment.

“You did good today, kid. But don’t let it go to your head, ‘cuz things are just getting started. Oh I know we’ve ‘decapitated the leadership’ and all that, but do any of you kids really think that’s it? Everybody retire and go home?”

No one answered.

“Believe you me, there will be more T99s and Right Hand Guards and Kangal Armies...and they won’t forget what happened today,” Shima projected his voice for the whole compartment to hear, “A raid like this might make everybody feel good in the short term, but the war isn’t over. It’ll go on. And on. And on. And on. Until somebody either gives up or gets wiped off the planet. And those who’se job it is to fight have to embrace it. Love it. I know what you’re thinking, but loving it’s different than wishing for it. I dread every single fight. I shake like a full blown Sway addict every time I step in that dropship, but just like when my old man’s fist rammed into my gut, after the first bullet flies, everying changes. I love it. Every minute of it, even though at the same time I can’t wait for it to be over! I love it because I’m a warrior. You guys need to make up your minds what you are. Wind up in the middle and you wind up dead.” Shima pushed up out of the seat and drifted down the aisle for his dramatic exit.

“What about Mason? Dreivan? Babb? All the others...EXOs, T99s, average dwellers? Did they all have as much fun as you? Or were they all just in the middle?” Vaughn asked. Shima spun around and pushed off toward Vaughn. He grabbed the rookie’s harness and cocked a fist back. It both felt and looked less threatening in Zero-G. As they stared at one another, the fire in Shima’s face receded. The sharp features somehow looked childish...sad. Shima lowered his fist and released the harness.

“Things are just getting started, boys. Stay alert, do your jobs, and mark my f*cking words.” With an ounce of his recovered bravado, Shima turned to go. He bumped his leg in the maneuver, sending a knife of pain up and down his right-hand side. The offending seat paid for it with a punch to the cushion. He pushed off faster toward the cockpit.

Vaughn shook his head. He knew what Shima had meant...even agreed with him to some extent now that he’d seen Hell up close. A small part of him beneath the mission, the noise, and the terror was actually enjoying the play of it all. And that part scared him. Especially when the memory of it mingled with the sound of Mason’s death rattles over the comms, and the images of the torn bodies flying apart along the roof edge. ‘Duty,’ ‘honor,’ ‘protecting civilization.’ All the stuff he’d bought wholesale at Red Gate still mattered, but had somehow dimmed like a childhood memory. He mourned it all.

He awoke hours later as the decel-thrusters kicked on, knocking him out of the downward spiral. At least he’d get to see the Moon. Always wanted to...even applied to be a guard on Themis, only they’d sent him a form letter about ‘all positions filled, but we’ll keep your information on file’ or some such. The EXOs were the next best thing...or so he thought then. Not sure anymore.

Regardless, the boy inside him pressed his face to the porthole glass, trying to get a better angle to see the surface as it came up around the ship. Gray desert stretching to a sharp black horizon. He marveled at the size of some of the craters...way bigger than in the textfeeds and documentaries. Detail appeared as he squinted. They’re terraced...man made! A turquoise explosion soundlessly rippled along the edge of one of the terrace ledges, blasting a plume of dust into orbit. Passing scows flew in and sucked up the debris with huge intake systems. Tiny dots on the surface became vehicles. Giant landcrawlers with what looked like UV spotlights scanned the ground in wide indigo swaths.

The slow pull of gravity came in a sudden wave. It was unsettling. Vaughn wasn’t aware how accustomed he’d gotten to weightlessness, and this wasn’t exactly like having weight again. He lifted his arm and let it fall. Shifted in his seat. Tested his feet and legs. Hopefully there would be enough time to adjust before ‘cargo transfer’.

They dipped low into the mouth of a canyon and flew half-way above the ground at cruising speed. Something like a formal highway buzzed with activity below them. Industrial traffic. All positions filled, my ass...you’d need an army to watch all these inmates. The canyon opened wider ahead, crested around the edges by an inward-leaning rock wall some four-hundred feet tall. Natural shelter from cosmic radiation and solar wind.

Just as he got frustrated with being unable to see ahead, the ship turned left to skirt the rim of the canyon. Thankfully his window was on the right. The canyon floor had been gouged into a perfect circle and the Themis Facility main complex sat inside. It was a hollow cylinder, reaching down kilometers into the surface. Lights from millions of portholes and windows lined the inner cylinder walls. The cells. The main control hub protruded out and up from the hole in a gigantic tower, extending bridges to dock stations on the canyon walls. No direct access from cell to dock...smart. Inmates could access the ground level to work, but would have to get from walls-to-tower, tower-to-bridge, then bridge-to-dock to escape.

The ship slowed to a stop beside the airlock gate. Vaughn felt the bulkhead vibrate as the docking clamps slid into place and locked. Harnesses released all over the cabin, and the squad got to work. They were a bunch of kids eager to test their training...just like he had been yesterday. Did all of it really just happen this morning? Damn disorienting. The weird-ass gravity didn’t help either. He blinked past the fuzzy feeling behind his eyes, stood, and lined up for the hatch.