Zach Croft: 2053
Zach’s lungs were on fire.
As he sprinted down the cracked cement sidewalk, the soles of his feet throbbed with each brutal impact. He looked over his shoulder, praying that his pursuer was no longer behind him.
But she was.
To make matters worse, the woman was gaining on him quickly. Her strides covered far more ground than his own, and her arms pumped with a precision that put Zach’s movements to shame. Zach’s body screamed at him to stop, to collapse on the ground and succumb to whatever came next, but his mind wouldn’t let him give up. It was as if autopilot had kicked in and refused to relinquish control.
Zach veered suddenly as the sidewalk forked in three directions, hoping to lose his pursuer and give himself a fighting chance. He considered taking a shortcut through the grass but knew it wouldn’t make a difference. She was too fast.
Zach glanced over his shoulder again. The woman’s intense blue eyes locked onto him, and she began to run even faster.
Eight feet.
His legs lost all feeling. His hips swung like broken hinges, and his throat felt as though it was full of volcanic ash. He just wanted it to stop.
Six feet.
Four feet.
The woman reached for Zach, clawing for his shoulder. Dodging her hand, he swerved to the side and nearly tripped over his feet, barely remaining upright.
Then, just as the woman was about to grab Zach’s shirt, he passed a sprawling oak tree and skidded to a stop. He slammed his palm down on his stopwatch.
5:46, ten seconds better than last week.
As Zach dropped to the bench of a nearby picnic table, the woman steadied herself against the tree. “Water,” she said, making a claw with her hand. Zach tossed her his bottle and watched as she took a long sip. “I could have beaten you,” she said, then tossed the container back. “You got lucky this time.”
“Same excuse, different day,” Zach said. She had said that every day for months, maybe even years. He did admire her unwillingness to admit defeat, though—it was one of the many things that made Cora Keaton special.
Zach untied his maroon Harvard sweater from around his waist and set it on the bench. Despite graduating from the astronomy program nearly nine years prior, he still carried the beat-up old thing everywhere he went. It was sort of a good luck charm for him.
Cora laid her hand flat, flipping through pages on an unseen notepad. “January 23rd, 2053. I beat you by twenty-six seconds.”
“You threw a branch at me.”
Cora waved his comment off. “Ah, it fell on you.”
“From your hand.”
Cora gave a breathy smile and turned away. “Yeah, yeah. How much longer do we have?”
Zach checked his watch. “An hour, but we better leave time.” It was only eight in the morning, but the temperature had already soared into the eighties. Sweat streamed down their faces and soaked their clothes.
As much as Zach despised the sweltering Pasadena heat, coming to the park had been part of his routine for ages. Work at OSE started late, and Zach wasn’t one to sleep in. Frankly, he had enough trouble sleeping at all. That left two options: he could kill time getting breakfast—coffee, bagel, whatever—or try to burn off the pent-up energy through running.
“You ready for your meeting with Carver?” Cora asked with her hands on her hips.
Zach shrugged and glanced at the ground. “Honestly? I don’t know why he even keeps me around anymore.”
“Just make sure you get your point across.”
“It’s not even my meeting. It’s the MagRes team. He won’t be listening to me.”
“Then make him listen.”
Zach gave a frustrated smile. “It won’t be enough. It doesn’t matter what I tell him. His mind is made up.”
“Make him listen,” Cora repeated firmly.
“Fine, sure.” Zach grabbed his sweater and headed for his truck. “The meeting’s at the MagRes center. Don’t wait for me. It might be a while.”
You’re wrong. You’re all wrong. And we’re gonna fucking die because of it.
Zach couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The team was just telling Carver what he wanted to hear! Why couldn’t he see that? Zach loved Carver—the man had taught Zach everything he knew—but damn, did confirmation bias do a job on him.
“Despite the recent setbacks, MagRes is still the best chance we have to beat this thing,” one of the short, balding men at the front of the conference room said. Mumbles of agreement rippled through the room.
But Zach stayed silent.
They weren’t just “setbacks.” The program was a complete failure. OSE was wasting their time—anyone with a basic grasp of reality could see that. But reality didn’t fit the narrative OSE had bought into, so instead, they were pinning the planet’s future on faulty assumptions and convenient half-truths.
“We’ve revised our projections to account for the recent anomalies in the data,” the greasy man continued. “After eliminating the outliers, we can see that the magnetosphere’s strength is still trending upward, but not at the rate we’d like to see.”
Holding his chin between his index finger and thumb, Carver nodded. “So, what do you propose?”
“Exactly what we’ve been doing. Just on a larger scale.”
Carver tilted his head, not a single strand of his thick, black hair falling out of line. “This sounds… expensive.”
“Somewhat,” the man admitted. “If we can look at the next slide…” The man explained how they would need an additional fifteen percent funding over the next six months to achieve the levels of recovery in the magnetosphere they had originally predicted. Which was actually lower than their predictions from the previous year. They were going backward.
When the presentation was finished, Carver sat silently for a moment as he considered the proposal. Then he fanned his fingers out on the conference table. “Okay. You’ve got it. Anything you need. This is our home we’re talking about.”
Zach silently fumed. Yes, their home. A home that wouldn’t be there in a year. A home that’d be no more than a burnt hunk of space rock if OSE continued to twiddle its thumbs. Clearly, Zach’s title of Head Astronomer meant nothing to the Organization. He’d repeatedly told them that repairing the magnetosphere wasn’t working, but his words seemed to carry no weight.
“I’ll email you the details, Mr. Carver,” the balding man said with a nod. He checked his watch. “It’s about lunchtime. Anyone up for Chinese?”
A few men at the table grumbled in agreement as they stood, fixed their suits, and walked out. Carver stayed put, one arm resting against the side of his chair and the other on the table. Once everyone was gone, he gave a knowing look to Zach. “Lay it on me.”
“What?”
“I’m not blind, Zach,” Carver said. He rolled out from the table and wheeled his chair to Zach’s side. “There wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows in your eyes during that presentation.”
Zach adjusted in his chair, gritting his teeth. “This isn’t working, Nic. You know it.”
Carver sighed. “The team says it is.”
“That may have been true a few years ago. But the math has changed since then.”
“Your math has changed since then. Theirs is the same.”
“And they’re wrong.”
“Or maybe you made a mistake.”
Zach looked Carver dead in his bright green eyes. “We’re not too far gone, but we will be soon. If you allow me to allocate some funding to Exodus, I can—”
“There’s no room in the budget for that.”
“You just materialized an extra fifteen percent for them like that.” Zach snapped his fingers. “Why can’t you do it again for this?”
“MagRes needs the money more than ever.”
“And we need to get the hell off this planet.”
Carver scoffed and pushed himself up. “How do you suppose we do that, Zach? With no irogen. Are you suggesting we go back to Mars and mine some more?”
Zach got a sick feeling in his stomach at the mention of Mars. “If we have to.”
“So, you want to set up another mining colony? Another Prescott?” Carver waved his hands through the air as if parting the sea. “A new colony would cost billions. And a new space station to get there?”
“We have the Gateway.”
“A biohazard. We’d need a new one.” Carver clicked his tongue. “That’s a few dozen billion more down the drain. Then you’d need a facility to mine the fuel. A processing plant. Cargo runs back and forth. Supply ships. Oh, and a crew. After what happened in Prescott? Good luck finding a thousand people to sign up for that.”
Zach clenched his jaw. “We can make it work this time.”
“Oh! Right.” Carver wagged his finger as if remembering one more thing. “Time. We’d need time. Years, probably. Which, according to your excellent calculations, we don’t have. Am I right?” It wasn’t an honest question. It was condescending.
Zach bristled. “Right.”
“Great. So, we’re on the same page, then. It’s a non-starter.” Carver patted Zach on the shoulder as he passed. “Good try, though. Good try.”
“I told you not to wait for me,” Zach snapped as he stepped into the parking lot, blocking the sun from his eyes with his hand.
Cora pulled out a sun umbrella to cover both of them. Twenty years ago, it would have seemed stupid to be holding an open umbrella with no rain on the forecast that day. But with less and less protection from UV rays, sunburns did one hell of a job on people. “That good?” she asked.
“Yes, that good.” Why was this parking lot so damn long? Why did they park on the opposite side of it? Why did Zach do anything anymore? “A lot of people are going to die, Cora.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“What do you think? I’m gonna keep trying until it kills me. Or the solar flares do.”
“Sounds like a winning plan—”
A deafening boom silenced Cora, tearing through the hot morning air like a tank round through concrete. Zach and Cora threw their hands over their heads and ran beneath a nearby tree. A gust of wind blew through the parking lot, rustling the tree leaves and sending a crow perched in the branches into flight. Zach couldn’t help but wonder if another country had finally nuked America.
Through the fluttering leaves, flickers of orange confirmed the worst of Zach’s fears. The ball of fire torpedoed through the atmosphere, leaving behind trails of smoke and flame that made it look like some demonic jellyfish. Unable to move, Zach watched it burst through a cotton ball cloud. The fluffy white mass evaporated immediately.
As the flaming object drew closer to the ground, the fire began to peel away, revealing a metal shell in the orange haze. The back of the object coughed thick, black smog.
And at that moment, Zach realized it wasn’t a nuke. Or a meteor. Or a ballistic missile.
It was a dropship.
Zach’s truck pulled up in front of the Organization of Space Exploration’s complex and came to an abrupt stop. He threw open the door and jumped out, moving aside as several police cars rolled past him. A tower of thin smoke billowed skyward from the launch bay behind the building. Crowds poured out through the building’s main entrance and huddled in the far corner of the courtyard. Security guards holding yellow lightsticks stood on stone ledges bordering the mob, guiding the waves of employees away from the building and into the parking lot.
Zach took his identification badge from his waist and pinned it to his chest, right in view. Then, he dissolved into the crowd, weaving his way upstream toward the main building. As he approached the front door, a guard stepped in his way.
“It’s best if you follow the evac.” The officer glanced at his board member name tag. “Sir.”
“Can’t I go in?”
“Not until we figure out what the hell is going on.”
A figure traversing the lobby nearby caught Zach’s eye. “Jason!” Zach called. He raised his hand to wave. “Jason, come here.”
Jason maintained his purposeful stride. “I gotta go, Zach. Can’t talk.”
“Then I’ll walk with you.”
“Nope. Follow the evac.”
Zach groaned, realizing that Jason wouldn’t budge without good reason. “I’ll call Carver down here. He’ll give me the go-ahead.”
With that, Jason stopped. “No. Don’t bother him.” Jason looked at the ceiling in exasperation, his hand on his security badge, then shot a slight nod to the guard restricting Zach. “Let him in.”
The guard shrugged. “You’re the boss,” he said and allowed Zach in.
Jason placed a hand on Zach’s back, gesturing across the lobby. “By all means… walk with me.”
As they crossed the silver letters engraved in the lobby wall—spelling out THE ORGANIZATION OF SPACE EXPLORATION—Zach pressed Jason for answers. “What do we know so far?”
“Well…” Jason said earnestly. “There are no research flights scheduled for today. StarSet doesn’t have any, either, so that’s a dead-end. By the looks of it, the ship is from the Gateway.”
The Gateway? That didn’t make any sense. “How is that possible?”
“We don’t know. Its dropships have autopilot, so it could have theoretically flown here on its own. But I have no clue how it might have launched. There’s nobody on the station.”
Zach nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. Nobody? he thought. Yes, nobody… Nobody.
As if reading his mind, Jason continued. “I mean, there shouldn’t be anyone on the station. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t.”
Zach’s stomach turned over slowly as he considered the implications of what Jason said. “Who?”
“Another country, maybe? They could have docked to it and deployed their own crew, which would be a major problem for us. Or, maybe the Gateway just malfunctioned and launched the ship by itself. Either way, it’s not good.”
A minute later, they reached the doors to the launch bay. A row of guards with assault rifles formed an impenetrable wall across the entrance, suggesting nobody was getting in.
Or out.
Jason took a left and headed up a staircase to the Observation Deck. Zach followed.
“What happens if there’s someone on the ship?” Zach asked.
“If there is? They’re going to jail.” Jason’s hand glided along the railing as he climbed the steps two at a time.
They reached the top of the stairs and entered the sprawling sun-lit Observation Deck. Against one wall, lines of monitors showed data feeds and security cameras. The other comprised a slanted window looking a hundred feet down into the launch bay. Through it, Zach saw the massive dropship on one of the eight landing pads.
It was the shape of a simple cylinder, with dark rectangular plates making up the outer layer. On the nose, the heat shield panels formed a honeycomb pattern. The fire of re-entry had completely blackened the surface.
“Unknown dropship, please identify yourself,” one of the communications workers droned into a headset.
“Any response?” Jason asked.
“None yet, sir,” the man responded. “The antenna looks damaged, so our messages might not be getting through.”
“Keep trying.” Jason hiked up the flaps of his jacket and hooked his thumbs on the edge of his pockets. “Can you find out when reinforcements are coming?”
“How about now?” another worker said, motioning out the window as she crossed to the printer. Down in the launch bay, a group of fully armored SWAT officers fanned out in formation, their assault rifles trained on the ship.
The SWAT captain’s voice burst through the radio. “Tell them to come out with their hands up.”
The comms technician relayed the message to the dropship, despite making it clear that whoever was inside was not listening. Along the edges of the launch bay, other guards secured any exits the passenger—or passengers—could use to escape, essentially turning the facility into one big containment unit.
After a few moments of tense silence, the front airlock of the ship let off a hiss of steam. The bottom edge separated, and a gap opened between the blast door and the ground.
“Identify yourself!” the SWAT captain called out.
The airlock drew open, and the steam settled. As it faded away, a backlit figure morphed into view. Zach could just make out the man’s dazed expression, the way his jaw fell slack when he saw the barrels pointed at him.
With his eyes trained on the man, Zach’s face went pale, as if he had seen a ghost.
Because he had.
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