Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The Harsh Light of Morning

Originally published in Tesseracts Eighteen: Wrestling With Gods (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing)

As Margaret Harrow stared into the unforgiving eyes of the mountie outside her prison cell, the Holy Spirit whispered to her, You must abandon your faith in God or you will die.

She hugged herself in the incandescent light that filled the one-room police station. She didn’t know what to think. Yet in a matter of hours, when sunlight streamed through the window across the room and between the bars of her jail cell, she would be reduced to ash.

I cannot, she whispered silently back. I will not.

You must, said the Holy Spirit.

The officer’s face was dark, his brown eyes boring into her from across the tiny R.C.M.P. station. "I saw what you did to those kids."

She squinted her eyes shut and ran her tongue over her sharp teeth. For all the long years since her—encounter—with the departed Mr. Mackenzie, which she shuddered to think of, she had never felt as powerless. The decades now hung heavily on her shoulders, and this year, 1930, might well be her last.

It is time to acknowledge the truth, said the Holy Spirit.

What truth?

hat there is no God.

Never!

The mountie sat in a wooden chair that looked as though it had been at the station since the Boer War. His left leg was crossed over his right, his left hand pinching the brim of his upside-down Stetson as it lay in his lap. The clock spitting its loud ticks and tocks into the silence between him and Margaret showed half past three. In the tiny village of MacDonald, large enough to house the isolated residential school and a train station to take Saskatchewan wheat to the markets of Winnipeg and Toronto, but little more, they were likely the only two not asleep. Surely he didn’t need to guard her? Why, then, was he here, staring at her so? Was it because he was an Indian?

And the small, wooden crucifix that hung above the dark leaded window seemed to pierce her through the forehead. She had always avoided them, at the residential school. Stayed in her classroom in the basement, where she refused to have one put up. The sign had always made her feel weak; when the nuns, half-breeds and savages swarmed about her wearing them, the sight even hurt her as if she had swallowed a clutch of sewing needles. But she had never deserted her Lord. She knew He must be testing her.

She waited for an answer, now, in the warm cell as the hissing radiators blocked out the chill of a Saskatchewan autumn. But none came. Perhaps this was something different. But what? Her faith would remain strong. Only then would she be delivered, she knew.

But now, a doubt gnawed at her. How did she know the voice she had heard, through the years as her thirst for what she called her "Communion" grew insatiable, was that of the Holy Spirit? What if it were—

"I know what you are," said the mountie. "What you can do to people. So don’t ask to leave. I made sure to throw the keys away outside. No one, not even me, will be able to find them until morning."

She looked him up and down. The anger in him was palpable, it hit her like a gust of prairie wind before a storm. His short-cropped hair was black as coal, his skin brown, the line of his nose showing her was one of them, an Indian. Resentment wafted out from him, in ways he probably didn’t even realize, sitting there in his red serge, blue trousers and dust-covered boots. Since the Holy Spirit had begun guiding her, people’s feelings, and sometimes even their thoughts, were as clear as the pages of a diary to her. She was also a shrewd guesser.

"I remember you," she said.

He flinched.

"Bobby," she said. "Robert."

"Not the name I was born with."

She nodded. "But it’s the one we gave you. The one you still use, I’d wager."

He smoothed his necktie. "You can call me Constable Courchene. Or just Officer."

She closed her eyes a moment. "Slow to read, but always a good shot. You brought the school ducks and geese from the marsh."

He said nothing, but swallowed, trying to keep his face a mask, clearly. She smiled. She wasn’t reading his face.

"You were from…Manitoba."

He shifted, turning away from her on his chair. "Winnipeg."

"Yet you came back here, to Saskatchewan." Her mind raced, trying to keep him talking so she could—perhaps—win him over, find another way out of the cell. "This place must have been important to you."

He spat. The act, of an officer doing that in his own station, knocked her back as if a physical push. "Someone has to keep an eye out for those kids. Sure as hell most of them didn’t really run away from the school, like you and the rest of teachers used to say."

"But of course they did. They couldn’t handle the rigours of school life. Not like you—"

"Shut up! Maybe another officer wouldn’t look too hard, and take your word for it. But I know better. And after seeing what you did to that girl tonight—we all will."

The thought twisted within her. His feelings writhed like mud in disturbed water, unseen by him but clear to her. She should have been able to play on that, push him in the direction she needed.

But that cross, above his head, bolted to the wall like a radio antenna, damped her ability to sense what he was feeling, made her weak. Ordinarily, if pressed, she could have wrenched on the wood-and-iron door of her cell and snapped the bolt; she was strong enough, having fed just this night before they caught her. But the sign, especially with Courchene sitting beneath it, sapped all her strength.

Why? she pleaded silently. Why does it hurt me so? I have been faithful.

To what? replied the Holy Spirit.

To you.

Indeed. Which is the problem.

Her fingers traced the long-vanished wound on her neck. She had been a young woman, then. Seventeen. Enough education to teach, and just about to start with a class of bright young boys and girls at MacDonald School—years before Indian Affairs came along and turned it into a place to teach the Indian to be "civilized," dragging the Anglican nuns and church authority with it. By then, of course, it had been clear that the thirst and strength Mackenzie had imbued her with meant she could never venture outside during daylight hours. And that thirst sometimes spoke to her, taught her, showed her visions of another place. She had always believed them glimpses of Heaven, sent by the Holy Spirit. For what she was driven to do—to feed off animals, and even people, like a wood tick—would otherwise be monstrous.

You should know now that none of this was true, said the Holy Spirit.

"Funny you remember that, and not all the times you hit me for speaking Ojibwe," said the mountie.

She snapped her hand away from her neck and glared at him. "It was for your own good."

He cleared his throat. It squeaked a little as he raised his voice. "That? And the times you locked me in that dark little room because I couldn’t read?"

"You never applied yourself. You pretended to be stupid."

His eyes glistened and his right hand caressed the pistol in his holster. "I was neither stupid nor pretending. All the kids knew what went on in that place. Now I see, tonight, how much worse it was for some of them. That girl you attacked—I saw her neck!—ran away while we were dealing with you. But my partner is out looking for her. Even without the bodies she uncovered, you’re going to prison. But we’ll get her story. And people will know."

Margaret clenched the bars of her cell and sucked her breath in so hard it hissed.

The glistening in his eyes became tears. He stood up and opened the flimsy curtains on the east-facing window behind his chair. "But you’re never going to see the inside of a courtroom. Not when that sun comes up."

When he stood, the Holy Spirit spoke to her again. Keep him on his feet. Make him come closer to you.

"Why?" she asked out loud.

"Because you deserve it," said Courchene.

"What? I didn’t hear—"

She meant to coax the voice of God to repeat itself, but again, speaking out loud, she provoked the constable.

"Maybe I should apply a ruler to that hand," he said, raising his voice as he repeated the phrase she had used on students as a matter of course. She shrank back from the terrible purpose in his tone.

He stepped towards her.

That’s it, said the Holy Spirit.

"What?" she said.

"You heard me!" thundered Courchene, taking another step, his hand shaking as he pointed at her. He didn’t seem a towering knight of authority anymore, but instead, a frightened boy quivering awkwardly in a man’s body.

More, said the Holy Spirit.

But she did not understand, and so backed right to the far wall of her tiny cell, wishing she could melt and pass through the wood and stone.

"You, you were always a good boy, dear," she said, hoping that praise at this late stage would still turn his rage from her—the children were always so desperate for a kind word, that was why she and the nuns withheld them, as a rule, to keep the students in line—and allow her to appeal to his mercy.

He has none, for you, said the Holy Spirit; and in her heart she knew it spoke the truth.

He took another half-step toward her, his tall, broad-shouldered frame casting a shadow in the light of the electric bulb fixed in the ceiling. It also, for a moment, blocked her view of the crucifix, and suddenly she felt a leaden weight fall from her limbs.

Now, said the Holy Spirit, you must listen to me, or we will both perish. You are ready to attempt something that may deliver us yet.

She closed her eyes. What must I do? she said silently.

Allow me to take control for a moment.

Her eyelids flew open, her pulse racing. This was it. The test of her faith. The splinter of doubt in her grew too painful to ignore and she realized the truth. This was not the voice of God that had been speaking to her.

She felt jubilation at her discovery, even as the Voice said At last, you see—

Because she knew, with certainty, that it was the Devil who whispered to her. You cannot tempt me, she told it.

The Voice howled something silently within her, in infernal language she could not understand. She fell to her knees and began to pray. She ignored the looming officer over her and beseeched the Lord for deliverance.

It is your faith in your God that keeps you imprisoned, whispered the Voice.

She ignored it.

The sign, that symbol on the wall—here the Voice seemed unable to even call it what it was, a crucifix—means something very powerful to you. It focuses your thoughts and beliefs. But it must mean something very different to this man. Because your human minds seem capable of making the same depiction mean very, very different things. My kind cannot do this, and this clash of faith hurts us.

Margaret did not understand the voice at all. She kept whispering her Our Father aloud.

"That won’t help you," said Courchene. "All the years you made us memorize and repeat your white God’s words, it taught me and my brothers there would be no answer. A lot of kids never made it out of that place. Now there will be no answer for you, either, except the sunrise."

The voice was frantic now. If you stay here we will both burn. You’ve felt the sun’s touch before.

Her words faltered as she came to "…deliver us from evil." She remembered the time she had tried to leave the school in the early evening, years ago; a few seconds and her skin was a painful crimson. It had taken her weeks to recover. And as long as the school authorities let her stay and work in the basement, there was no trouble. She found she was very persuasive, even down to the suggestion to the nuns that yes, indeed, of course she wore a cross around her neck. Oh yes, they would say, staring at her neck, where no necklace lay, I see it now. And they were not lying; they saw what she wanted them to see. But now they had seen too much; Reverend William had caught her in the act of feeding on the little brat who had discovered the other girls' bodies in the locked basement room. He knew what she had done. It was too much, and he had sided with the little savage, calling the police. She could not go back to the school. She must escape.

I can help you, the voice said, and she could not tell whether the agitation she felt belonged to the voice or to her.

God will help me.

A second of silence, then the voice replied: if you do not take the help that is offered, what more can your God do?

She ran her tongue over her sharp teeth. What, indeed?

"What must I do?" she asked.

Courchene gripped his pistol in its holster as if afraid it would jump out of its own accord. "You can sit there in the light, alone."

Then the voice took control of her, just for a moment.

She felt an odd sensation, as of a long, deep, exhalation. The cell and police station faded to grey, become indistinct. Then she realized it was she who was changing. Her body lightened, diffused, lost all shape and spread to fill the cell. She had no eyes nor ears, but she sensed the shock and surprise from Courchene as she turned to mist. The Voice, saying nothing now, pulled her through the bars of the cell, a rolling fog to freedom on the other side. She wailed with exhaustion, being stretched beyond her limits without having permission to break. Her tendrils wisped through the air of the police station. Then the Voice inhaled all of her vaporous being back into her familiar, solid shape, right down to the black buttons on her dress and the leather soles of her shoes. She staggered. She was so thirsty.

Courchene retreated, clumsy thumping steps stumbling on the floorboards, and the crucifix on the wall loomed into view.

Down! snapped the Voice, and she crouched without thinking. Now the officer’s body blocked her view of the symbol again. Her throat was still parched, her tongue thick and pasty, but she felt her strength seep into her. I need…Communion…she thought.

Not here, said the Voice. You will lose everything as long as you can see that, that thing on the wall. Keep your eyes averted. If he has not locked the door there may still be time.

She crawled away from the mountie and when she got to the station’s entrance she clung to the brass doorknob. With a sob she twisted it and wrenched the door open.

Outside, the air was crisp and frost hung in the air. In the late autumn, winter whispered to the prairie grass. The stars filled the darkness above, but the sky to the east had lightened, just a bit. She was free. She just needed to make it to the train station, and she would find a dark, safe place to wait out the day. If aboard the baggage car of a passenger train, so much the better, but for now, she had escaped.

The she felt the constable’s meaty hand clamp down on her shoulder.

"Not so fast," he said, spinning her around and pointing his revolver at her.

Again, cried the voice.

Courchene cocked his pistol. He really meant to shoot her. Immediately, she let herself disperse again, even as the mountie fired, his bullets passing through her misty form leaving no damage but swirls. One, two, three, four, five, six…click, click.

She took her human shape once more, the change coming more easily this time, and grabbed the mountie’s wrist, keeping the gun pointed away from her. "Such a naughty, filthy boy," she said. "Shame on you, to shoot at a woman like that."

He shied away, throwing his free hand in front of his face, as if to ward off a blow. "Don’t!" he cried, his voice breaking. A little boy in a man’s body.

She furrowed her fingers into the knot of his necktie and tore it open. He slapped at her clawlike hand to no avail as she ripped apart the buttons of his collar. The skin of his neck and chest lay exposed. She was so thirsty now the night crowded its blackness in at the edge of her vision. His gun fell from paralyzed fingers and she slid her hand up the back of his neck, gripped the short hair and pulled his head back. Now she would take the Communion he offered, and be strong again.

There were scars on his chest.

She smiled. A sign of his being disciplined, surely, back at the school. "Something to remember your teachers by," she said softly. He tried to winnow his hand to the inside of her arm and push her away, but her grip was like a snake’s lips on a leopard frog.

He spat at her. "None from that place."

She lingered a moment on the thin, white marks that shone in the moonlight on his chest. They were far too regular, even for a beating given in the same place many times.

Don’t think about it, said the voice. Drink.

Courchene struggled to meet her eyes from the awkward tilted-back position of his head. "I did the Sundance."

The marks seemed to quiver and push her back.

Ignore it, said the voice. Drink.

She winced. It was some savage ritual, she realized.

"My father was dead," said the mountie. "But there were still some elders who knew the ways. After I graduated from the academy and joined the Mounties, I followed in the steps of my ancestors." He grimaced. "You’re the first white person to know."

Now her strength deserted her, though her terrible thirst remained.

Attack him, said the Voice, before it is too late!

But she couldn’t. His faith in whatever the scars meant to him was so powerful it melted her grip on him. She let go. The sight of his chest burned a hole through her mind and she tripped as she backed away from him.

Run, said the Voice. The train station!

Courchene stooped to retrieve his weapon. "H-halt!" He shouted.

Margaret picked herself up and fled. The sight of his patterned scars flared before her eyes. I have to get free.

The few trees that lined the dirt roads in MacDonald gave her little cover. After she had run for little over half a minute, shots rang through the chill autumn morning. Dogs in the few surrounding few houses began to bark. She reached the small wooden CN station and found the schedule for the coming day. Half-past eleven, for the passenger train they had likely meant to use to take her to the court in Regina. But at midnight there was a freight train from Vancouver, passing through on its way to Winnipeg. She knew no one in that city, and nobody knew her.

She checked the door. Locked. She doubted she had the strength for another change—and even if she did, what if she were unable to take on solid form again?

God, show me what I must do, she prayed silently.

There was no answer.

Then, You know what to do, said the Voice. It has always been you. We are one.

She shook. All those things she had done, to the children in the school, to those she took her Communion from—which she thirsted for even now—no one’s prodding but her own? Unthinkable.

Yet she had gotten herself free.

Yes, said the Voice.

She stepped down from the platform. Gasping, she crawled on the dirt beneath it, found a way under the station to where the beams blocked all light, where she could wait out the day. They might find her, before night came. But if they did, she would fight them with all her holy strength before being dragged into the light.

Caged

Originally published in Guns and Romances (Crossroad Press)

People say most Canadians don’t like guns, but in Horst Schellenberg’s case, he just hated being shot. And thanks to a .22, his first date with Rene didn’t go exactly as planned.

It started with him running naked across a snowy field in January. His clothes were packed in a duffel bag banging against his legs. That was fine. It was minus thirty, and his ears were still ringing from pounding through his favorite Maiden songs on his drums that afternoon. The newspaper said they’d be bringing Somewhere on Tour to Winnipeg during March. So he was stoked, not just from the thought of seeing Bruce Dickinson leave the mic to battle a huge version of cyborg-Eddie onstage—and, fuck, would that be mint—but about getting to hear Nicko McBrain hammer away on drums all night. He wasn’t Horst’s favorite drummer in the world—rest in peace, Bonzo—but man, he was good. Top five, for sure.

But it looked like that concert would the only bright light of the winter. Horst was flunking Grade 12 and it looked like the ass-end of 1987 was going to see him repeating it just so he could fucking graduate. Sure he could drop out, but then what? His folks were already breathing down his neck, and on top of that, his pack leader Mitch was all, “Don’t drop out, you don’t want to be stuck in a dead-end city job your whole life.” Christ.

But tonight he wasn’t going to worry about bio, trig, or Tess of the Douchebags. He was going to see Rene. In the duffel was a new black T-shirt, unripped jeans and leather jacket—you wanted to look good when you went to see a guy.

But his car, an old Chevy that had seen better days, had conked out on the highway. Looked like the fucking alternator had finally bit it. He should have checked it earlier and replaced it, probably—he was acing auto shop, for fuck’s sake—but parts weren’t cheap and it was either that or a new snare drum for his set.

Fortunately, Horst had options, so he changed form. A Canadian winter was nothing new to a dire wolf.

The territory was familiar; he’d been hunting along the outskirts of Winnipeg all winter. That was actually how he’d met Rene. Horst had been shifting after he’d fed (it was a cow he’d brought down; mule deer were just too fast for a wolf evolved to hunt mammoths), and when he’d come back to get his clothes from where he’d cached them in the bush, there was Rene, watching him from the back door. There had been a moment, in the bright light of the moon, when he had expected Rene to run, pull out a rifle or call the cops. But he just stood on the concrete back step of his family’s house, his brown eyes half-laughing at him as he looked him up and down. He had light brown skin and his straight, black hair was bound in a long braid that snaked over his shoulder. He looked nineteen, so just a year older than Horst.

“Hey, you still got blood on your face,” he’d said.

Horst was too busy covering his crotch with his hands to say more than, “Uh, thanks,” and hustle back into the bushes.

But the bigger deal, he realized later, was not only was Rene not scared of him, he’d clearly seen something like Horst before—and he wasn’t one of Horst’s pack or any other he knew about. Plus, Horst already had at least one ex thanks to his, ah, condition. Not that he ever told Jamie Hawryshko about what he could do; but when you’re already hiding from the world you’re into guys, and the one person you don’t hide that from you still keep your other big secret from—well, it didn’t last. And Mitch was very big on secrecy. As in you told anyone, you were roadkill. But Rene—he knew already.

So, of course Horst went back to see him a few times. The third time—and Rene could always somehow tell exactly where he was lurking in the trees, too afraid to lope right up to his back door—he’d said, “Hey, why don’t you come back next Friday and we’ll go out for a walk?” Horst had changed back to human form (hands over crotch) and said, “Sure. My name’s Horst.”

“I’m Rene.” Then he smiled. “See you around, Mahiinkan.”

Mitch had sometimes used the word; there were elders in the pack who were Ojibwe. Wolf.

Now the snow was thick and hard packed, but even so he broke though a few times and had to swim through the powdery crap to get back on top. Maybe it was being pissed off about that, or the fact his hearing wasn’t back to normal after practicing, but he didn’t even hear the guy with the gun. He was downwind of Horst, so he didn’t smell the oil and gas from his snowmobile either. But he sure as hell felt it when he shot him.

Pafff! went the rifle, and at the same time a needle jabbed into Horst’s left haunch. He kept running. When in wolf form, his instincts weren’t exactly human. Then his muscles started slowing down by themselves. The snowdrifts seem to slip up to the right, and the sky down to the left. The human part of Horst knew he couldn’t outrun this. He twisted around and saw the trank dart dangling from his fur. Fuck. He tried to get his incisors onto it, but missed. Tried again, snap, missed again. He could barely concentrate, but he hunkered down, tried to change. With fingers he might have a chance. He shifted.

One: now he was fucking cold.

Two: the trank dart fell out.

Now I should be good, right? But he couldn’t get up, his legs wouldn’t move, and the moon seemed to be almost below him now, with the northern lights rippling underneath. The crunchy, broken drift seemed to eat him up like a Slurpee. It was so cold he couldn’t feel his skin. What’s that they say about falling asleep in the snow? Oh yeah: don’t.

A fog of being dragged, then the high-pitched whine-growl of a snowmobile. Other stuff, a woozy darkness, then…

Snap!

A searing pain in Horst’s paw bit the world into focus. He howled with all his throat, but no more than a moan came out. The world felt fuzzy and kept spinning, as if he’d just stepped off one of those rides at the Red River Ex. The air was warm and smelled of vinyl and drywall and the dry dust of furnace air.

He felt the long, thin hardness of a metal cage against his face. Damn it, I’ve been locked up. Wait, against his bare skin? Shit, I’ve been shaved. His stomach lurched and his heart rate kicked up to a “Run to the Hills” pace. Fuck, I’m inside.

He was human, naked, in a huge dog cage.

The index finger of his left hand was missing.

Blood spewed all over his skin, the floor of his cage, and the linoleum-covered concrete beneath it.

“Damn it, I thought that might do it,” said a man with a high, nasal voice.

Horst clamped his good hand over his missing finger and felt more than heard a huge roaring in his ears. He scrambled to the farthest corner of the cage away from the voice and the metal rattled like the clang of broken high hats.

Blood seeped between his knuckles and he tried not to hyperventilate. Always keep your head, Mitch said. He usually meant that when trying to take down a moose without getting clocked by its antlers.

A tall, thin man in his late twenties with a wispy red beard and wearing black, dirty ski pants stared at him from the other side of the bars. In one gloved hand he had a huge wire-cutter, smeared red on the snippers. In the other he had Horst’s index finger. “Go ahead,” he said. “Change.”

The fact he wanted him to got Horst’s back up. “Fuck off. Let me go, you psycho.”

The other grinned, as if listening to a horsefly arguing with a windshield. “It’ll stop the bleeding, won’t it? Don’t you guys heal fast?” He looked at Horst’s severed digit then dropped it into a small cooler full of ice on the floor. “Ah well, your choice.”

Horst stared at his finger before the man flipped the lid closed. “What the hell do you want?” Horst said.

The man stood, took a rag out of his back pocket and wiped off the wire cutters. He removed his gloves and tossed them into the corner of the room, along with the rag; the cutters he put on a fold-up plastic table. The walls were drywalled, but apart from that and the veneer of flooring over the cement foundation, the basement was unfinished. Furnace ducts, wiring and joists ran overhead. If he’s trying to soundproof the place he’s doing a shitty job. When he’d taken up drumming, his parents wouldn’t let him bring his set in from the garage until he’d scrounged a bunch of trash-heap mattresses, Cloroxed them all to death, and covered the walls with them (and insulated the basement ceiling—which had been a huge, itchy pain in the ass). The price you pay for being the next Peter Criss. (Who ranked about number three in his top five. As far as Horst was concerned, you hadn’t heard a drum solo until you’d heard the live version of “God of Thunder.”)

Horst’s throat burned to scream for help but he didn’t want to give this asshole the satisfaction.

Then the man said, as if they were having coffee together, “How does it work? There’s no way you should have enough energy to do it, no matter how much you eat.”

Horst blinked. The roaring in his ears still made it hard to hear, much less think. His heart had settled to thumping out big bass beats in time with Ozzy’s “The Ultimate Sin”—though he would have preferred something even slower, like the intro to “Iron Man.” Relax.

“What?” he said.

The man walked over to a table where his .22 lay. “Never mind. There’ll be time, where you’re going, to figure all that out.” He picked up the rifle and fitted it with another tranquilizer dart.

Horst’s mouth went dry at the thought of what he might mean by figure things out. “Hey, uh, wait, I don’t know you, I don’t even know where you live. Just let me out of here. I won’t tell anyone.” Except Mitch, of course, who would come back with his entire pack and nail the bastard. But, at the moment, Horst even believed himself.

He took aim down the sight of the rifle at Horst. “Right.”

“Can I at least have my gitch and my shirt back?”

He chuckled. “You’d be warmer with fur on, wouldn’t you?”

“Fuck off.”

The man put the gun down, but didn’t take his hand off it. “Doesn’t sound like you really want to get out of here.”

“Sorry. Fuck.” Horst’s toes curled around the bars on the bottom of the cage. There wasn’t even a blanket in it. He shivered, more from discomfort than cold.

“You can be knocked out for the trip—or be a wolf. And, for all I know, maybe you’ll even grow that finger back. Or claw. Would you? Like a gecko?”

“It doesn’t work that way.” Horst’s hand throbbed. One thing was sure, he’d never twirl a drumstick with it again. Like that even matters! So far, his life wasn’t flashing in front of his eyes, but he wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

The man kept silent, so Horst said, “It’s only the reptiles that do that.”

The man’s mouth twitched one side of his beard up. “Really?”

As far as Horst knew there weren’t any cold-blooded things that could do what he did. But before tonight he hadn’t known there wasn’t anyone collecting pieces of werewolves, either. “Yeah, there’s some caiman assholes in, like, Cancun. Mayan or something.”

The man scratched his armpit. At least he’s not touching the rifle anymore. “What about mass? I saw you out there on all fours. Easily three hundred pounds—maybe more. But look at you now. One ninety, soaking wet.”

Horst grimaced and held up his scabbing-up hand. “Missing a few grams now.” He didn’t feel inclined to tell this shithead about the energy to change coming up from the earth itself, that it was just the trigger he carried around inside since Mitch had first bitten him.

“And?”

His gone finger knuckle was starting to itch like crazy. The scab was slowly shrinking and covering with skin so pink it was neon. He kept his other hand over it. “This your secret lab?”

The man coughed and then folded his arms. “How’s the shoulder?”

“Don’t you mean my ass, where you shot me?”

He shrugged then turned to a row of big plastic tubs along the wall. Horst felt his right shoulder. There was a part that ached a little inside, but no mark on the skin—not anymore. He’d stuck a needle in there. “What do you need my blood for?” he said.

“Do I look like a doctor to you? The people I can sell this to know how to extract all kinds of strange stuff from, ah, samples. When I told them what I’d seen you do out there last month, they were interested.” He smiled at Horst’s gaping mouth. “You really think no one out here keeps an eye out for wolves? Course, when I saw one melt into a scrawny shit like you I didn’t call Conservation. I had a better idea.” He opened a tub and pulled out a canvas bag at least six feet long. He laid it out on the cement floor in front of Horst’s cage and unzipped it. He tapped the cage, rattling it. “Now, this’ll be a lot easier on me if you don’t change. But you’ll be a lot more comfortable if you do.”

He stood up and went back to the line of tubs and started unpacking another, pulling a big backpack out of one and unzipping it.

More comfortable. Right. That must mean we’re going outside.Shit. Horst tried to clear his throat, but it was too dry. “They aren’t paying you enough.”

The man froze, staring at the wall in front of him. Without turning, he said, “What do you know about it?”

“Think about it. What they want to do, how much it’s really worth?”

Still refusing to look at Horst, he muttered, “Who says they’re paying me?”

Goosebumps rose all over Horst’s bare skin. “Fuck, you have a hell of a hobby then.”

The man turned, eyes glistening and a muscle in his left forearm twitching. “Do you ever get sick?” he said.

Horst huddled his legs in front of him and stared over his knees. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Yeah, I been sick.”

“But when you change. Doesn’t it—” He waved his hand, gripping the front of his ski pants over his chest with the other. “—just, erase whatever is in you?”

Horst paused a second. This is the real reason. “Depends what you’re sick with.”

“Damn it!” said the man, “Don’t play games with me!”

“I’m not, but what do I look like, a doctor? Go to the hospital, and let me go, for fuck’s sake.”

The man was shaking, a barely suppressed rage bubbling out of him. “They don’t have a cure for everything, smartass.”

Horst kept his mouth shut and breathed in through his nose. What did that leave, then? Cancer. Alzheimer’s. Hell, a lot of things, but you could still walk into the hospital and get treated for any of them. But this guy seemed to have a lot of that stuff here at home. Hell, he even had needles for taking blood samples…

Horst touched the shoulder where the needle had gone in. “What do you have that’s so incurable?”

The man turned to his backpack and began throwing a flashlight, bungee cords and a fleece blanket into it. “That’s not your problem, yet.”

Of course, most of the diseases Horst worried about were thanks to the sex-ed unit in guidance class. While everyone else had made herpes jokes or giggled about the right way to use a condom, what had rung through Horst’s mind was the disease no one even seemed to understand, and nobody in the class bothered to ask about, since everyone knew only fags got it.

Horst shifted forward in the cage. “You have it, don’t you?”

“Shut up!” the man said, standing and grabbing the trank rifle from the table. He pointed it at Horst, who put his hands up. He stared at Horst’s hand. “Already healed.” He lowered the barrel and took a few steps closer. Horst’s empty knuckle was still itchy but not in a fuck-I’m-on-fire way. It was nearly done fixing itself. Except his finger wasn’t coming back. Would he even be able to hold his sticks right anymore? Still play? A sour mixture of horror and anger churned through Horst’s gut at the thought.

Then: Hell, Rick Allen’s still in Def Leppard. I might still be able to get out of here. Horst wiggled his hand at the guy. “Take a look.”

He came closer. Horst shifted his weight, as if about to raise his left hand to give him a better view. Then, when the man was two feet away from the cage, he jumped.

Horst threw his weight onto the front part and tipped the cage forward with a shuddering clang. He scrambled upright while his captor tripped backward and landed on his ass. Horst leaned forward on it and brought his feet up again. The bearded man scooted backward, still holding the rifle but off-balance.

The cage crashed forward a second time. Horst strove to get close enough to grab any part of him he could get his hands on.

The man kept his grip on the rifle but was backed up against the table. He shoved the barrel through the bars, right at Horst. Horst deked to the side, grabbed the barrel with both hands, and shoved it hard back at him. The man hadn’t had time to brace the stock against his shoulder and the scope hit him in the face. He swore but didn’t let go. As he tried to get his feet against the cage to push back and get free, Horst pulled hard on the barrel and jerked it right back at him again. Crack, stock right in his nose. He yelled and let go. Horst hauled the rifle as far though the bars of the cage as he could but it got hung up on the body. The man grabbed the stock and that put his hand right where Horst could reach it.

He clamped down on the back of the man’s hand and crushed it against the metal of the cage, pinning him. He might not have the stubby, brutal fingers of a bass player, but a drummer’s hands were nothing to sneeze at, either. And he was mad—and okay, a little scared too, fuck—so he squeezed until things inside the man’s hand started moving where they weren’t supposed to, and he screamed.

“You let me the fuck out of here,” Horst said.

He just nodded and started fumbling for something in his pocket with his other hand.

Then the doorbell rang.

They both froze. Horst didn’t let go of his hand.

After a long few minutes, neither wanting to look away from the staircase leading up from the basement, the bell rang again.

“You expecting someone?” Horst said, annoyed his voice didn’t sound as threatening as he wanted it to.

Then, a muffled voice from outside. “Horst? You in there?” It was Rene. Shit.

For a split-second Horst’s grip weakened and the man yanked himself free.

“No!” Horst yelled.

The man dived for the open plastic tub, threw a bunch of camouflage clothing and ammunition cases out, and pulled a handgun from a foam-lined case. It was a Glock. He checked the magazine and glared at Horst. “How many are there?”

“Don’t!” Horst shouted. “I don’t know.”

“Bullshit. You’re dead, when I get back.” He pounded up the stairs, sidearm up.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Horst grabbed the bars of his cage. “Rene! Run!”

He hoped to hell Rene had heard him. His heart rate was already through the roof, like the staccato thunder of “Red Hot,” the only Crüe song Horst could even stand. It was fast and relentless, and it began to trigger Horst’s deepest instincts.

Horst heard the door opening at the top of the stairs. The man didn’t even threaten Rene first.

Blam!

Horst let out a scream. And his body changed.

Then blam-blam! and “Fuck, what the Christ!”

Horst shuddered into his massive dire wolf form. All the vestiges of his human mind were overlaid with panic at the thought of Rene being wounded or worse.

A deep, cavernous growl surged through the sound of wood splintering and glass shattering as shards of a door rained down the staircase.

Horst gripped the cage door in his teeth and strained his hind feet against the opposite side. The metal tasted tangy on his tongue and began to give as he growled forward, massive shoulders and neck pushing. The metal began to bend, but it was the soldering on the latch that gave. With a snap the door flung open, lock and all.

Horst plunged out of the cage and howled. You motherfucker I’m coming for you.

Then a gasp came from the top of the stairs, just as Horst began to bound over the debris littering the carpeted steps.

Rene stood there, hand clasped over his bloody shoulder, completely naked. Horst paused, ears cocked forward. Why the hell aren’t you wearing any clothes? It’s minus insane out and it’s not like you have any fur—oh. Oh, wow, right, fuck! Rene nodded at him. “You okay?”

Horst wurffed out a quick affirmative, tail wagging until he forced it to stop. Even as a wolf he realized he was acting like a puppy. Rene’s alive. Play it cool.

“Asshole’s around front. I pushed his Ski-Doo over before I rang the bell but I bet that’s where he’s going. Gimme a second here and I’ll be right with you.”

The heavy thud of machinery crunching onto snow came from the other side of the house, then the grind-click of an ignition not quite catching.

Horst tore off, rounding the house just as his captor succeeded in getting the snowmobile started. The man glanced over his shoulder and fired the Glock at the dire wolf surging over the drifts at him. Horst took a bullet in his right shoulder and yelped. But he kept coming, crossing behind to the man’s left, so he couldn’t fire again without turning. Instead of trying to keep the wolf in his sights, he faced forward and gunned the motor. Horst sprang with hind legs powerful enough to throw him onto the back of an Irish elk. The snowmobile shot off over the sparkling white drifts—but not before Horst’s teeth sank into the thick foam-and-wood base of the rear seat. The machine slowed as Horst’s massive body was dragged through the snow behind it.

The man glanced over his shoulder and gaped, inadvertently easing up on the accelerator just long enough to allow Horst to get his good foreleg under him; then, realizing his life depended on it, the man turned his back on the wolf and gunned it. Horst was pulled off his feet again, but his jaws held firm.

Over the whine of the engine and the flurry of snow thrown up from the treads, Horst heard a deep roar from Rene. But then they plunged into the line of trees at the edge of the property, passing through the grasping bare branches and growling down into the ditch alongside the highway.

The fabric and foam of the seat tore the harder Horst held on. The man crouched over his handlebars like a frog, the T-shirt under his ski pants rippling in the burning-cold wind. Horst couldn’t see where he had the Glock.

The engine coughed into a deeper growl and the machine slowed. Horst just had time to scramble his hind legs under him and see they’d come to a gravel road intersecting the highway, blocking the ditch. There was a culvert underneath it to allow water to flow through in the summer, but it was far too small for the snowmobile. The man hauled on the handlebars and took them up to the left, toward the highway. Horst let go of the shredded seat and leaped up behind him, stumbling when his injured foreleg took some his weight and crumpled. The man glanced over his shoulder, screamed, and hit the gas. The machine shot up over the edge of the ditch and Horst clamped his teeth onto the nearest thing available—the man’s shoulder.

After a few seconds flying through the air, the snowmobile landed with a metallic scrape and a thud on the wind-swept asphalt. The man grasped for something in the front of his chest-covering ski-pants—the Glock, of course—while still driving forward. The roar of the engine drowned out all other sound, but from the direction Horst’s snout was pointed, he saw the semi first.

It was barreling down on them from the north. The truck driver hadn’t seen them yet.

Horst’s would-be abductor had the Glock out now and its muzzle flared with a deafening bang so close to his snout the reek of gunpowder shot into his nose. He let go of the man with his teeth and jumped back and away from the snowmobile. He landed heavily on the northbound turning lane, unable to do more than roll as his wounded leg gave out again. At the same time, the semi’s airhorn blared, too late, and the rig smashed into the snowmobile. The smaller machine flew to pieces with a splintering crunch. Plastic and metal and fabric shot through the air, along with the stink of oil and gas and rubber and the scent of blood. Horst glanced down the lane in which he had landed—headlights approaching. He crawled and limped, each ragged step far too slow, as the new vehicle bore down on him. Never look at the headlights, Mitch always said. You don’t want to be nailed like some stupid deer. But it was hard to look away.

Horst tumbled into the ditch and lay panting in the frigid darkness. His ears told him everything that was happening now, and his nose filled him in on the rest.

The car that had been coming toward him braked near where the semi had come to a stop. Car doors opened, shouts of Holy shit, what happened? And Guy tried to cross the highway on his fuckin’ Ski-Doo. Then Oh my God and the sound of retching. The scene was more than a hundred meters south of where Horst lay but his hearing was already starting to recover. You guys heal fast, don’t you?

He heard the sound of the trucker’s voice again. I radioed for help but they’re not gonna be able to put this poor asshole back together.

Horst’s wounded foreleg still wouldn’t bear his weight, and his other foreleg, whose paw still had a claw missing, felt weird. But he struggled through the snowy ditch to the stretch of field through which he had been dragged. If he followed the treadmarks of the snowmobile he’d find his way back and hide his own pawprints at the same time.

Each limping step was painful, and it wasn’t long before an unfamiliar scent put his back up. He paused, checking for cover. Where had he smelled this before? Right outside the house, when he’d encountered Rene—

A massive bear shambled out of the line of trees ahead, carrying a duffel bag and backpack in its teeth. It was so large—bigger than a grizzly—they looked like lunchbags. It dropped them in the snow when it caught scent of Horst, then melted back into human form.

“Got your stuff,” said Rene. “Saved your finger, too.”

Horst shifted back as well, his shoulder knitting itself back into shape as he did. Still ached though. And his empty knuckle remained bare.

Horst retrieved his clothes from his bag and dressed while Rene did the same. The realization that Rene was like him, but something he’d never seen before, kept hitting him like a final beat you don’t get right the first time. Bam. No, bam. Bam-crash. He had a hundred questions drowning in the relief that he—and Rene—weren’t going to die tonight. Mitch had always been vague on details about shifting into other animals. Now Horst had new questions—but they could wait.

“It over?” said Rene, his words a plume of steam in the moonlight.

Horst shuddered. “Semi smashed him up. He’s dead.”

Rene clapped Horst’s shoulder and left it there, a warm, reassuring presence. “Gonna have to find out what he was up to.”

Horst wanted to say something that didn’t sound like his whole life was turning into even more shit, but all he could come up with was “Fuck.”

“Hey,” said Rene. “No one’s in this alone. You know what I mean.”

Horst leaned his head in slowly until their foreheads were touching and then they kissed. “I guess I do.”

Rene smiled. “Next time, let’s go see a movie instead. No offence, but this first date kinda sucked.”

Horst grinned, and he knew it was a stupid, uncool kind of grin. He didn’t care. “Fuck off.” As they continued retracing the snowmobile tracks, he added, “Damn it, my car’s dead.”

“I got cables, you need me to jump you?”

Horst thumped his shoulder into Rene’s. “Second date. Second date.”

“Your call, Mahiinkan.”

“That’s gonna be less funny when I learn the Ojibwe for Big-Ass Bear.”

The trail led to a stretch of bush with a groomed ski trail where their footprints wouldn’t show, and they turned to follow it. Rene put his arm around Horst’s shoulders. “Maybe I’ll teach you.”

Horst decided maybe the rest of the year might not suck too hard, after all.

In Open Air

Originally published in Accessing the Future (Futurefire.net Publishing)

Soraiya Courchene wasn’t sure she’d heard Rotational Captain Genevieve Makwa correctly; but it sounded, as the captain peered at her monitor and held her chin thoughtfully, that she’d said, “Well, here’s something new.”

In four generations aboard, even in the one-thousand-odd days of that that they’d been orbiting the planet, that wasn’t an expression you heard every day. It was the sort of thing reserved for events such as seeing the sun set in open air—something Soraiya would have dearly loved, but knew she would probably not live long enough for.

Soraiya turned to face the captain. She liked her; Captain Makwa usually remembered to look right at her when speaking, and she always welcomed her to the bridge with an old Anishinaabe compliment: “You’re so fat!” Which, coming from the captain with her big smile and dark eyes, never sounded like the whispers from some of the other crew that fluttered at the edge of what Soraiya could hear and couldn’t; and of course the whispers were meant to prick at her hearing loss as well as her weight. Soraiya, at 60, was long since sick of it. Most of the rotational command crew respected her ability to read the old data files, crusted in archaic monolingual constructions rather than in the current blend of the language they shared more with every new generation. But there were always some who thought it was a waste of time to study anything Prelaunch.

Soraiya cleared her throat. The air on the bridge was more stale than usual and it made her want to cough, but she made the sound mainly to get the captan’s attention. Captain Makwa looked up and faced her. Soraiya noticed that she hadn’t been looking at the blue/red/white whorls of the planet below, but rather the sensor array they used for tracking meteorites. “It’s moving,” said the captain.

Soraiya’s heart started to pound. “Evasive?” she asked, her fingers itching to engage the thrusters, which hadn’t been used since they’d manoeuvred into geosynchronous. A thousand-odd days ago.

The captain might have grinned if it were only a matter of positioning their massive hollowed-out asteroid out of the way to avoid a collision. Captain Makwa sometimes cackled at the thought of something so dangerous, but not this time. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “I think it’s coming to look for us.”

She patched over the data stream to Soraiya’s monitor. There it was: not just a tracking signal showing a tiny object headed straight for them, slowly, but a hail. Soraiya recognized the Mandarin text immediately, and the English, somewhat; the third was written in Cyrillic characters, but she had not studied Prelaunch Ukrainian much. The Mandarin had many unfamiliar phonetic characters, and the English dialect before her was very odd.

“What do you think?” asked the captain. Meaning, Do we wake the rest of the command crew two hours early for this? And is it worth alerting all 435 people aboard?

“The ID isn’t one of the other generation ships,” said Soraiya, stalling, afraid of what the rest of the hail signified. “They’re saying they’re here to check on our ‘progress’.” Soraiya felt her throat tighten as she spoke; she knew that meant she was talking more quietly, so she forced herself to speak up, which always meant she ended up shouting. No use cursing the loss of her hearing aids; they’d been repurposed into a stethoscope when she was thirty-two, and not all the headsets on the bridge still worked. She called up a sidebar display to check some of their oldest records, and the Prelaunch dating system. She swallowed. “It says they left Earth 28 days ago.”

Captain Makwa sucked on her teeth. Soraiya always thought that made her look older than her 46 years. “They got here faster than light. I’d say that was new.”

Things might have been simpler if the captain’s rotational duty hadn’t ended before the new ship got close enough to dock. For the first time in two generations, the ship might have to halt its gravity-simulating rotation to allow the FTL craft from Earth to couple. The entire population of the asteroid they all called Home was abuzz.

Soraiya spent her off hours with friends chatting by one of the crowded observation decks, huge transparent panels beneath their feet allowing them to watch the planet as it passed by like clockwork. The population of the ship, renamed Home generations ago, had (eventually) unanimously agreed the planet they had journeyed so long to explore should be called They Are To Be Respected. The deep blues of seawater sworled into the white of clouds, the crimson and indigo vegetation seeming like swaths from a painter’s brush this far out. The planet rose and set while they watched. Before the hail from the Earth craft Soraiya had enjoyed the spark and argument of discussions over ecosystems, flora and fauna, the wonder of the smells their molecular scanners had detected at ground level and clumsily replicated in their labs. Like most aboard Home, Soraiya couldn’t bear the thought of intruding on the planet’s surface. The early days of Home’s journey, they had grown up learning, were filled with the incomplete attitude that you had to take what you needed and if you didn’t have enough, take more or take from someone else. That had worked, somewhat, as they were still mining the asteroid they travelled in for resources to sustain the journey; but when their ancestors (some of them) had begun fighting over them, there had been trouble. Murder. Strife. And, briefly, worse. But they had eventually changed their attitude, adopted a way of life that allowed them to survive in the frigid emptiness of space, and sometimes it took generations to see the best decision. Theirs was not the only way to do it, perhaps; but then they were the only generation ship that had been able to complete the journey.

They would not rush a human visit to the surface of They Are To Be Respected. Even their satellites stayed at a high enough orbit that (they hoped) indigenous life would never see them. That was, of course, at total odds with the Prelaunch goals, which Soraiya now found herself poring over, wondering less how the FTL craft had made the journey than why.

And while she was a firm believer in leaving They Are To Be Respected untouched and unsettled while they undertook a long study of it—how much of that was bound up in simply not wanting to leave Home, for all of them?—she felt more than curiosity to walk in its wildly coloured forests, rather than the clean but manufactured halls of Home, and to feel on her face the wash of sea spray in the wind, not just the comfortable, stale climate they depended on.

Now the conversations raged over what the new arrivals would look like, why they talked so differently, what news they had from Earth. The younger generation was most excited by this last part. The middle-aged and older, like Soraiya, had suddenly eager audiences for stories handed down. But in her few moments alone Soraiya stared out at They Are To Be Respected and wondered whether their practices of studying the planet from afar for the next generation were about to change.

Soraiya’s rotation was staggered from the captain’s, the better to transition from one command crew to the next, and she was relieved to note Dr. Mak’s shift did as well. She trusted his judgment, given his experience with their sporadic epidemics. But the new captain for this 40-day shift was Kenneth Rodriguez, one of the growing number of the younger generation who didn’t hold with leaving the planet below untouched while they studied it. He didn’t go so far as to suggest colonizing it, not yet, that was too radical a notion; but many felt a pull from They Are To Be Respected that went beyond mere gravity. Rodriguez’s fervour to meet with the new arrivals seemed to go beyond simple curiosity, she thought.

“Can you make sense of what they’re saying?” he barked at her in front of the rest of the bridge, assuming she just needed higher volume to understand him. You could tell someone a hundred times that wasn’t how your hearing loss worked; that you could hear quiet and loud sounds just fine, in fact very well—it was hearing anything against conversational hubbub of more than four people at once, or the white noise of their forced air system sometimes, that was impossible.

She put up a hand to signal for him to wait—and for everyone else to shut up. They almost never did, so she’d probably end up shouting. The signal from the FTL craft was strong, the words reasonably clear; it was the pronunciation and dialect that sounded foreign. It reminded her of the rigid simplicity of the old English text from early Postlaunch times, without the added Xhosa, Anishinaabe, Kirundi and Spanish metaphors and constructions they all took for granted now. It was like watching one of the uncorrupted old movies, but without subtitles. So she relied more on the automatic transcription of the incoming messages on her screen. “They’re asking permission to dock.”

“Do they need us to stop rotation?”

She sent the question to them, in Chinese. They’d long since adopted the non-strictly-phonetic characters of the Mandarin script aboard Home, adapting it to new idioms to accommodate 70 languages. As a writing system it was far better than Prelaunch English, and it had taken nearly a generation to replace all the signage and labelling they’d Launched with.

The monitors flashed with the reply back, in Mandarin, something like Our ships must be at rest for us to dock. Soraiya wondered if their pilots lacked the skill or their craft the fuel to do it otherwise. Now that it was up close, they could all see the FTL vessel was barely bigger than one of their unused dropships. How had these people crossed so much space so quickly in a craft like that? She knew the engineers aboard Home were burning to know. But she seemed to be one of the few worried about what these people wanted from them.

“Very well then,” said Captain Rodriguez. “Let’s prepare for zero-G.”

The signal went throughout Home, and everyone who was awake—which was all except the newborns and young children, given the excitement over seeing people from Earth—scurried to carry out emergency measures rarely used. Loose items were stowed; sick bay patients and the infirm were assisted to secure beds and chairs; children corralled; and many just grabbed on to bolted-down handrails, unable to tear themselves away from the newsfeed from the bridge.

In twenty minutes they were ready and Home’s thrusters slowed its rotation until they lost all sensation of weight; the following three hours as the FTL craft manoeuvred, coupled, and achieved hard seal seemed to last forever and yet take no time at all.

Once the Home technicians gave the thumbs-up on the lock between the two craft, the captain asked Soraiya to let the new arrivals know they would be beginning rotation again. Soraiya did; there was a long pause before the other crew responded, in the affirmative. As Home resumed rotation, the pull of gravity returned. Soraiya wondered, fleetingly, if this were how it felt to enter a planet’s atmosphere and feel its welcoming strength. She knew it wasn’t; but the desire to feel it put a lump in her throat.

Captain Rodriguez now turned to Dr. Mak. “How long?”

“Depends on what they’re carrying,” came the doctor’s answer. “Could be a few days, could be weeks. We may have to figure out how to feed them while they’re quarantined, given the size of their ship.”

Soraiya eased her grip on the armrests of her workstation. Why had she been clenching them? She breathed out slowly. Now the newcomers were here and would be dealing with the captain directly, her part in this was likely done.

For the first few days, she was right about that. The captain took linguists when he went to meet with the strangers separated by the airlock, since they could barely understand the versions of English and Mandarin the visitors spoke. And scanning them for disease, despite their apparent protestations they were “clean” (was that really what they were saying?) proved difficult, as the equipment Dr. Mak used for this had never been fitted to the airlock before, and the process took much longer than it should have. “Probably not taking long enough,” the doctor confided to her in her bunk room after the third day of quarantine. “But everyone wants to welcome them aboard. And they keep asking for our research.”

At that Soraiya’s stomach went cold. She offered him more tea. “Why do you think that is?”

He shrugged. “They seem in a great hurry.”

So, it seemed, was Captain Rodriguez. He called her to a meeting on the fourth day of quarantine when she had been rereading the last signals they’d received from the four other generation ships. The one that had been ahead of them, the three behind them, each separated by hundreds of days of travel. For safety, the Prelaunch thinking had been; but while the ships did not then share in the same disasters on the journey by being too close, it meant they were nearly powerless to come to another ship’s aid when communication ceased. She thought perhaps there would be something in those communiqués that would shed light on this new arrival; but if there was, she was missing it.

Captain Rodriguez asked her to join him at the airlock. She had to tear her eyes away from the faces she saw through the porthole on the door. There were three people she could see there, from the shoulders up, in white and grey uniforms. A man and a woman glanced at her when she looked in on them. The other seemed to be a man with his back to the portal, communicating with the other ship.

One of Home’s linguists, Enrique Hoffman, was with the captain. “Officer Courchene,” he said with a nod. “I’m having trouble making out what they’re saying, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.”

She smiled. “What do you think they are saying?”

“They keep asking about fuel, I think, in addition to some other things about food and questions about us.”

“Captain, if you would be so kind as to type a message to them?” she said.

“Right.” He sent a text in Mandarin to the people in the airlock.

The man who’d been facing away from them turned as the woman alerted him to Captain Rodriguez’s message. He began addressing the P.A. link in the airlock, and his voice came through clearly on the Home side. She ignored the sound, the decibel level falling within the range she could barely hear, what most people used for a conversational tone. Instead she read the stranger’s lips through the porthole. The accent and constructions were odd, but that wasn’t the problem. Listening to his pronunciations were what seemed to be causing Hoffman trouble. The shape of the stranger’s consonants were sharper, and his distorted vowels muted, however, when you watched the words he shaped. Soraiya had been reading lips to help her carry on a conversation since before she could read, with or without her long-since recycled hearing aids.

Making out what the man on the other side was saying still wasn’t easy. “It’s like a mix of Prelaunch English and Portuguese,” she said. “He does want to fuel his ship, they’ve used up more than they expected and he wants to know…how much of, of certain elements we’ve found on They Are To Be Respected.”

“Of course,” said Captain Rodriguez. Soraiya tore her eyes from the stranger’s face and looked at the rotational captain’s. His bearing was upright, he seemed almost to vibrate in his well-worn uniform, and while his mouth was set his eyes shone. “They think we have begun to colonize the planet. Perhaps they think we are merely an outpost.”

Soraiya nodded. She hadn’t seen any words to that effect from the visitor but she felt the captain had guessed correctly.

“How long did Dr. Mak say the quarantine should last?”

“Twenty-one days,” said Hoffman. “He wanted to be able to scan for—”

“Let’s see if we can shorten that.”

Soraiya’s eyes widened. “Sir, what about the risk?”

“I feel the risk to them may be greater. Their life support may depend on that fuel, and I’m not sure we have what they need on Home.”

There was more to the captain’s words than he was saying. But she realized, he also knew she was watching him.

When the quarantine was ended five days early the newcomers were welcomed into a celebration the likes of which had not been seen aboard Home for a generation. The eight strangers were treated to a feast of all the foods Home could muster; and their stores of rice, dried fruit, nuts, legumes, bread, chicken, pork, and precious spices, even salt, were opened. Two of them, a man with ruddy skin and short, space-black hair and a handlebar moustache, and a woman with brown-black hair, light brown skin and freckles, seemed somehow different from the other six, four men and two women. Soraiya noticed the six seemed to defer to the man and woman, and let them speak for the group more often than not. How long did these people serve as rotational captains, she wondered? If the journey from Earth had been so short, how would such behaviour become the norm? She wanted to ask Past Captain Makwa about it, but she was sitting too far away.

In the raucous gathering with a view to the observation deck, everyone sat on mats and shared plates and bowls with the newcomers, who clearly seemed at turns amused, awed, surprised, and confused, as They Are To Be Respected rose and set.

Soraiya could not hear anything against the conversation all around her; and the spikes of laughter or whoops of excitement hit right in the high-decibel, high-pitch range she heard quite well, and they seemed to erupt out of nowhere, to her; and the sound hurt.

The Earth captain had many questions for Captain Rodriguez, and Soraiya noticed him asking something about meeting in private, away from the noise. She couldn’t hear the rotational captain’s response, and only caught the nod of his head; his face was directed at the stranger’s. But a few minutes later, both stood as if to go get something to drink. But after they got to the edge of the huge room, they kept walking.

Soraiya managed to catch Past Captain Makwa’s eye, receiving a big smile in return, which faded when Soraiya stood and seemed unwilling to speak. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, it was bad enough feeling like she was missing everything said by people when she wasn’t watching them. But then she noticed two of the other visitors had left their mats, and another was carefully rising and working his way through the crowd. The remaining four, including the woman who seemed to be a co-captain, remained, laughing and trying to speak with the inhabitants of Home.

Makwa and Soraiya moved to the exit and once in the hallway, closed the door.

“You seem worried,” said Makwa.

Soraiya nodded. “I think the visitors want something from They Are to Be Respected.”

“Fuel, eh? I don’t know what their ship runs on but I hear they were asking for our data from the molecular scanners.”

“Do any of our dropships still work?” A practice drill was one thing, but Soraiya had never thought about whether it would actually be possible to use one of the vehicles.

Makwa sucked her teeth. “One, for sure. When I was younger my dad worked on the modifications they made, before we got here. There might be a couple, but a lot of them had parts he’d said we needed to add thrusters to maintain orbit.”

“I think we should take a look.”

“Should I call someone?” Soraiya knew that meant alerting Home’s authorities. But then Captain Rodriguez would receive the feed as well. And she didn’t want to look foolish. Doubt gnawed at her.

Makwa put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk, eh? Just see.”

Soraiya nodded.

Together they followed the labyrinthine hallways that lined the outer shell of Home, leading to the dropship bays. Only one had not been abandoned and repurposed for farming. And as soon as they got there, they found the door locked.

Soraiya tried her passcode; her clearance as current command crew was high enough to override.

As the door slid open, two of the strangers noticed them and leapt at them. Soraiya pushed Makwa back and blocked the entrance. They seized her and dragged her through. The door closed and Past Captain Makwa was left outside. Soraiya knew she had clearance to open the door as well; but she hoped her friend would instead sound the alarm and bring help.

The man and woman who gripped her arms roughly didn’t give her time to worry about that, instead hauling her through to the hangar, where she beheld a terrible sight. Captain Rodriguez lay splayed on the floor, eyes staring at some unseen corner of the room. Unfamiliar packs of equipment with the same logo as the Earth people’s uniforms lay nearby.

“What did you do?” she shouted, pulling against her captors.

The leader of the others put his hands up in a placating gesture—though the expression on his face was hard—and gestured to Captain Rodriguez as he spoke. She couldn’t fathom some of the words and expressions he used, but one of them seemed to mean “asleep for a time.”

Soraiya was about to retort when the shipwide klaxon blared. She winced at the sudden noise and strained to cover her ears. The two strangers pulled her to the open hatch of the dropship. The captain raised a circular device that glowed violet at its periphery and shouted above the sound of the alarm, indicating Captain Rodriguez again. What would his crew do to the inhabitants of Home, she wondered? Surely Makwa had gotten word to the rest of the crew in time?

The captain signalled to the two holding her and they dragged her aboard the dropship in its launch blister. A fourth person was already at its helm, trying to understand the ancient controls. The captain tapped at the insignia on Soraiya’s uniform and then at the pilot’s seat. She set her jaw. They all trained on the ship’s system, once every 365 days. So while the old writing and displays seemed odd, she knew the routine and they were reasonably sure the ship would still work.

She shook her head.

The captain nodded curtly to one of her captors, who released her arm roughly and disappeared out of the craft. A moment later he returned, dragging Captain Rodriguez’s body. The crewman put his hand on the helpless man’s throat and squeezed, then looked to his captain. The Earth captain turned back to Soraiya and stared at her.

What had Rodriguez hoped to do? Show off the dropship? Take them to the surface, against everything they had practised since arriving—take nothing, send only drones to the planet, leave as much untouched as possible? So they had meant to continue for at least a generation, until they began to understand more about They Are To Be Respected. But some burned with curiosity to go down themselves. Soraiya felt that same wild hope flare up as she struggled to decide what to do, how to save the captain without compromising what Home was here to do.

There was no other way. “All right!” she shouted, tugging herself to the pilot’s seat but keeping her eyes on the captain’s face. After a long few seconds, he looked to his crewman and gave an order; the man released Captain Rodriguez’s throat.

He gave a order to one of his companions and the man wrote a message in Mandarin on his communicator and showed it to her: We need elements from the planet to make—and here there was a new character Soraiya had never seen—for fuel. Is this ship in proper working order? If it has been sabotaged, you will be held responsible. The threat was clear.

She replied via the communicator: The dropship is in perfect working order.

The captain nodded curtly. Two of his crew went to retrieve the equipment they had brought to the hangar.

Soraiya felt her ears burn as she sat, for the first time in her life taking control of the dropship knowing it was not a drill—the first person on Home, ever, to do so—and her heart thumped deep in her chest. She was really doing it. She was going down to the planet. She prayed this was the right thing to do. It was reckless. But they would kill Captain Rodriguez if she didn’t. But she was so, so curious. But they didn’t know enough, yet, about the planet.

She clasped the seat harness with shaking hands. “Secure crew!” she shouted, as per routine, and flicked the dropship’s systems to life.

Normally a Home crew oversaw the opening of the launch blister doors, but that could be done remotely from the dropship under emergency protocols. She knew the contingencies.

She pulled a headset on as the captain and the others strapped themselves in. She delayed opening the exterior doors, her hand hovering above the controls and watching the Earth captain, until he secured Captain Rodriguez as well. Then she engaged, ignoring the amplified chatter in her headset from the Earth woman who had elected to be copilot. The outer doors slid open, as they had with every routine practice. Soraiya felt the same thrill she always did, that there was nothing but the emptiness of space beyond. She shook her head and instead of miming the movements over the controls, she placed her hands on the grips and set the dropship free. Out they tumbled, gently spiralling away from Home, the gravity falling away rom their bodies.

It took her longer than during the drills to snap the manouevring thrusters to life. She doublechecked all the systems. Yes, Past Captain Makwa was right. There had been some changes, even to this ship. She breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps this was the only right thing, or perhaps the best of bad choices she could make.

The Earth copilot had given up asking her questions through the headset. Soraiya saw a message from the woman flash on her screen in Mandarin. Can you land this and get us back to our ship.

Soraiya glanced at the copilot, whose cheeks were flat and glistened with nervous sweat. What was she afraid of? Her captain? Death? Or was it something they’d left behind on Earth? Soraiya replied, The ship is in perfect working order.

The descent was unlike anything she had ever experienced. The copilot was an able assistant, given she was still trying to adapt to the archaic interfaces and controls, but since there was no time to type out their communication with each other she and Soraiya were essentially acting alone. The vibrating roar of atmosphere against the armoured hull felt like an interminable grind of stone on stone, as if They Are To Be Respected meant to crush them for their intrusion. Soraiya whispered a brief prayer. Do what you must. I will protect you.

She could not spare a look away from her console to see whether Captain Rodriguez was all right, but she hoped he was. She hoped the rest of the inhabitants of Home were, as well.

The harder part, of course, was landing.

The purple-pink of the landscape, the white froth of clouds, and deep blue of the oceans rushed up to greet them frighteningly fast, and Soraiya deployed the chutes at the appropriate altitude, noting the prevailing wind at this part of the southern hemisphere matched what their satellites and scanners had indicated. As their speed decreased and the atmosphere pushed them around, she panicked. The air was so thick; it wasn’t like manouevring an exovehicle around Home at all. Keep calm, she told herself even as her knuckles whitened and the sweat on her palms made her grip on the controls slip. Your people did not survive generations in space for you to die like this.

The impossibly high branches of pink and red trees reached up as if to grab them. The copilot yelled something through the headset until Soraiya tore it off. “Let me do this!” she shouted back. The dropship yawed as Soraiya guided what was left in the thrusters toward an opening in the forest, a deep purple swath of grass or moss. She hoped it was soft.

THUNK the craft landed with an impact that threw them against the webbing of their harnesses.

Then it was quiet.

Soraiya blinked and unbuckled herself. The Earth captain was already free of his harness and barred the way out. He barked something at her; the way her ears were ringing from the concussion of their landing, she read his lips instead. Something about suits. Protection. She shook her head. “It’s fine. We already know we can breathe down here.” With difficulty, according to their estimates and rigorous simulations.

He pulled out the circular weapon as his crew unbuckled themselves and stood. Captain Rodriguez remained in his seat but he blinked and raised his head. He grimaced as if suffering a migraine. “What—”

The Earth captain spat out another order, gesturing for Soraiya to open the door and holding his weapon ready. Trembling, she nodded. Part of her—a large part—wished he would kill her with it, so it would not be she who defiled They Are To Be Respected. But that was an evasion. She had brought them down here. She could have deliberately scuttled the dropship by fumbling the atmo entry, burned them all up before getting anywhere near the surface. Part of her hungered to step outside, and see it, breathe it, drink it in. She revelled in the pull of real gravity—they had recalibrated the rotation aboard Home upon arrival, to match what a person would feel on They Are To Be Respected, so that the younger generations would grow up ready when they decided to make planetfall. As it was, Soraiya’s joints gave her some grief. But she would take the first steps on the planet. It was more than she had ever dared dream. It felt wrong. But thrilling.

The Earth captain spoke sharply again, to her and then to his companions. They picked up packs of equipment they had brought with them.

Soraiya stepped into the small airlock and secured it. Then she opened the outer door.

The warm wind sworled in around her, playing with her hair. It was unlike the blasting air currents in the long hallways and curved corridors aboard Home; it was so random and fresh and wild. She hesitated for a moment. I am still aboard the dropship, she thought. That was both an excuse to stay and an impetus to leave. She stepped out and down onto the surface.

The red vegetation was a dizzying variety of tall red and purple stalks, with leaflike petals adoring the tops, the breeze whistling through them at a high enough pitch Soraiya heard it well. What other sounds are there here? she wondered, aching for the first time in thousands of days for her hearing aids.

She began to sneeze at something in the air, even as she marvelled at the touch of sunlight on her face. The Earth captain and his crew marched out of the dropship. Captain Rodriguez stumbled down the ramp after them. They began unpacking equipment and their captain directed them to different points of the clearing. As they took readings and called to each other on what they found, Soraiya helped Captain Rodriguez stay on his feet.

“They, they said they needed to fuel their craft to return to Earth. I said we didn’t have any of what they asked for not already tied to life support.” He blinked and sneezed as well. “Of course, there is plenty on They Are To Be Respected.”

They left much unspoken about his motives. Soraiya’s stomach was still in knots over what they had done, what they were doing right now, the sight of the Earth people already plotting and marking and measuring.

“This dropship, it’s the same as the other ones?” he asked.

Soraiya nodded. “Only difference is that it was able to get us down here.” She wondered what the Earth captain’s reaction would be, when they told him.

He marched over to them, holding out a communicator. It showed a message from Past Captain Makwa. “Earth crew have taken control of bridge. Demand safe return of Earth captain and fuel, then they will leave.”

“No one will leave,” said Soraiya to the Earth captain.

He said something, the sharp confusion clear on his face.

Soraiya gestured for the communicator, and after a moment he handed it to her. She wrote a message in Mandarin, hoping he would understand. “Our dropships are meant only to bring down, not to launch back up. We needed their thrusters for Home. And we decided that we would only land on They Are To Be Respected when They, and we, were ready. If your crew wishes to come down here, they will have to build a new dropship.”

She passed it back to him. He read it. She sneezed again, several times. Her eyes had begun to feel sticky from whatever was in the air. The Earth people didn’t seem to be as bothered by it.

The Earth captain’s face went darker as he read. Then he began shouting at her. He threw the communicator down and grabbed the front of her handed-down uniform, shaking her. Captain Rodriguez pulled one of his arms away. “What did you think?” he shouted at him, as Soraiya covered her ears. “That we would let you just come and take things away?”

The other Earth people were running to intervene, she couldn’t tell if they were shouting at her or their captain.

But she didn’t care. She stood on the surface of They Are To Be Respected. They had rations to last seven days. Beyond that, who knew? Soraiya knew some of the information Home had collected in its hundreds of days of study from orbit might bear fruit, so to speak. But she suspected they would not have enough time to learn. That might suit the Earth people, she thought darkly; they seemed to like to get things over with so quickly.

The Earth captain was pulled away from her by his crew, one of whom was shouting at him and the others demanding answers or explanations from her and Captain Rodriguez. Through the snot and sneezing and tears clogging her nose and eyes, Soraiya smiled. She would finally see the sun set in open air.