The sun was setting, and the candles were lit ahead of the failing light, tracing murky shadows along the floorboards. Dust danced as the last, bright spires of sunlight disappeared from the sky, and Jade took the time to look out the window toward the forest looming nearby.

“Grandmother… Grandmother, you’re confusing me… none of this seems relevant.” The white stallion shuffled his hooves, looking to his ailing elder carefully. She looked asleep, unhearing and in the middle of a dream, but he knew better. “You say they’re coming back. What do you mean back? How did they find us in the first place? Why?”

Itching. The voice.

To understand my story; the man; the machine; the choice… you must first understand where he came from. Then, my child, you will be ready for their return.

Chapter 9

“What does this look like to you?”

“A rabbit?”

“Nah, man. It’s a fucking space rabbit.”

“I’m… skeptical.”

A loud groan sounded from the paneling above and Robin winced, turning away from the touchpad lying on the bar. Satan’s Grandma needed a chiropractor.

“How about this one?” Dexton queried, squinting carefully at the screen between them.

“Dex, it’s a squirrel,” Robin sighed, slipping from his stool and pacing around the bar to grab a drink.

“From space!” the excited copilot exclaimed, flourishing his arm over the touchpad—which did, in fact, display the picture of a squirrel gathering nuts. “C’mon Robby! Where’s your sense of wonder?”

Robin opened the bottom cabinets under the bar—where the “good stuff” was, according to Simon—and slithered a hand around the bottles of BluBalls’, Roddinet Whiskey and Budweiser, finally closing his fingers around a chilled can of Slime. “I’ve seen half the animals you’ve pulled up so far at the zoo,” he grumbled, pulling the tab on his drink with a familiar click and hiss, “So excuse me for not expressing the proper ‘amazement’.”

“Yeah,” Dex mocked, nursing his own can of the thick, green cola, “Y’ever see this in a zoo?” He flipped the pad around, pushing it across the polished tabletop and into Robin’s field of view. A light flickered overhead and Robin heard Kaleb yell something from the deck below.

Robin took one look at the screen and grimaced. “It’s a lion, Dexton…”

“AHA!” the copilot crowed, pointing triumphantly at the brown and gold feline—“Clearly a lion.” “Since when do lions have wings and an anthro—uh—anthropedic tail!”

“Arthropodic, Dex, and I don—well hello there…”

The lion had wings… and what appeared to be an armored tail tipped with a scorpion-like barb…

Nope. Robin had never seen “that” in a zoo.

“Told ya,” Dex groused, pulling the screen back to his side of the bar. Robin took a moment to reflect on how childish that sounded, but ignored it. Dexton went to Outer City Trades School—or, at least, he said he did—and had never spent a night in Old Metro. He’d been asleep in the cab while Robin was making his final delivery down at Jenna’s: slept through the entire ride back to the hangar.

He was innocent.

“God I could use a Roddinet right now.”

Sort of…

After getting back to his—Sage’s—room on the Exxy, Robin had finally gotten to sleep around five that morning, staring up at the glowing, painted dots above the bed—stars he missed every night, shrouded in the smog and the bright fluorescence of New Metro. Ableman woke him up two-and-a-half hours later.

“Supplies are here, Fairweather. Up and at ‘em.”

The rest of his morning was spent directing workmen—Innies, all of them—helping move crates of food, toiletries, equipment, and burying himself in the wiring of the Processing Chamber.

Insulation had been chewed from the main power lines, along with optics and transmission, but only one or two connections were broken. Apparently they had rats. When Robin brought it up to Kaleb afterward, offering to go pick up some traps in the Inner City, the Australian Mountain just laughed… and so did Samuel… and Simon.

Thinking about it now, Robin supposed it was pretty funny. There he was, a cameraman on the greatest hunting show in the Western Republics, presented with the most advanced traps and snares money could buy, and he wanted to go haggling for spring-snaps.

Idiot…

Nevertheless, the rats worried him. Problems with the wiring on a different planet could ruin their entire week; month; however long it would take to organize a rescue. He didn’t doubt that they would survive a month stranded on 1128—the place was a fertile beyond belief. It was a matter of responsibility: Kaleb asked him to fix it, and Robin didn’t want to disappoint him. Being marooned due to short-circuit would be the ultimate failure on his part, and he was unsure of what Mr. Burnow would do.

“You are fully insured by the Channel now, after all. I did the paperwork last night,” Nowell had chuckled conspiratorially, standing over Robin as he lay half inside the bowels of one of Sheila’s COM consoles. “On a distant world; surrounded by nothing but wilderness; anything could happen.”

Robin knew he was joking, or, at least, he was pretty sure…

He thought about Sage—walking away into the jungle, disappearing forever—and felt… odd. Sunken in. The feeling passed, but only after another hour of patching insulation and checking system connections, and soon he was humming an old song his roommate used to sing while they drank together:

“Oh! No! Don’tcha cut the red wire—the blue; the red; the yellow; the red...”

Kaleb disappeared after the rat incident, apparently to sterilize the holding area. When Robin asked about it—“Why doesn’t he just let Channel cleaners do it?”—he was rewarded with the tale of TB – 323 by Samuel, a trip on which, on the return flight, every single catch died en-route because of shoddy cleaning by the crew the Channel contracted.

“We lost quite a bit of funding from the NM Zoo after that,” Ableman had said after explaining the trip to the cameraman, idly jotting the kitchen inventory on a rigid, old-fashioned clipboard. “Kaleb doesn’t trust anyone to sterilize the hold anymore—‘cept himself, of course. Made an embarrassment out of him, and he took it rather personal.”

Sheila rumbled, and Dexton’s touchpad rattled against the countertop again.

“There goes the curb,” the copilot laughed nervously, swigging the last of his soda. “We should probably head up to the flight deck, eh?” Robin nodded, rising to his feet. He glanced toward at the timepiece above the bar. 4:15: it was almost time for lift-off. He would have to take a look at the camera equipment the workers piled in his room once they made orbit.

Securing the touchpad to the rec-room bulkhead, the two men crossed the room. The west pressure door slid open, and they descended a small flight of stairs that connected to the main corridor. Footsteps clicked on tempered metal, and Robin and his new—quiet, for once; almost distressingly so—friend passed through the holding bay. The odd, brown stains had faded with cleaning, but the cameraman still felt his boots stick briefly as he walked through them.

The hall narrowed once more and Nowell joined the procession—a grinning wraith in a fluttering, black duster. He appeared from the maintenance shaft to the left: the rusted, metal rungs leading down to Engineering. Robin briefly wondered why he was down there, but quickly dismissed it.

“You Innie-shits ready for a rush?” Nowell sneered, gold eyes glinting excitedly.

“I’m from West Beverly, Mr. Nowell,” Dex whined, stopping to shoot the Channel Rep a nervous look. “Robin’s the Innie, here.”

Nice, Dex. Thanks.

“S’the matter with you, Duwain? Afraid you’ll crush us on exfil’?” Simon countered. “You damage this ship and Abe’ll have your head… and I’ll have your job.” Dex blanched and opened his mouth to retort, but Simon just waved a thin, white palm over his face. “Let’s just go before Kaleb gets antsy.”

They walked in silence a moment, bland metal walls flowing by as they made their way toward the end of the corridor and the flight deck. About halfway there, Robin chose to break the silence—the obsidian tube rocking on his belt reminding him of something important.

“I never thanked you for the money you gave me yesterday.”

Dexton looked at the Channel Rep in surprise and made to say something, but quickly shut his mouth when Robin glared at him.

“No, you didn’t,” Nowell mused, not stopping. “What of it?”

“Well… thanks?”

“Did you spend all of it?”

“Yeah,” Robin answered, hesitant. Why? Was he not supposed to? Oh God was it really stolen?

“Good,” Simon chuckled, pale lips twisting into a cruel grin. “The money either went to you or to my bitch ex-wife. Glad you got some use out of it. Now shut the fuck up and get in your seat.”

Seat? Oh... they were there.

The flight deck was surprisingly small: a cramped chamber of lights and switches and monitors, all available moving space filled by six swivel chairs—only one of which was occupied. Light streamed in from a pair of thick, bulbous windows, puffing out in an insectoid fashion to reveal the dust and irradiated grass of Airman’s Field. They were lurching forward at a good clip, pulled by a small tug-sled to their designated takeoff zone.

“You put everything away up there?” Samuel asked good-naturedly, swiveling to look at the three of them as they took their seats. I nodded in the affirmative, and the pilot beamed. “Good! I’d hate to see any a’ our emergency drinks lost in the jump.” He spun back around, humming and mumbling the words to a song as he pressed buttons, seemingly at random.

Robin took a seat near the back, neglecting to strap himself into the simple, webbed restraints, and Simon took the open chair to his right. Dexton stood nearby, fidgeting nervously as Abe—“I don’t wanna be your friend. I just wanna be your lovah…”—sang to himself. He looked to Robin, anxious sweat shining with liquid patina on his forehead. The cameraman, unsure of what to do, gave him a reassuring smile curled his fingers into the universal “okay” gesture. Dex smiled back, albeit hesitantly and nodded, shuffling to the open seat next to his uncle.

Fairweather smiled: Dexton may have been a bit of a clumsy eccentric, but he took care of him, and he definitely deserved Robin’s support. Besides, it wasn’t like he was going to be flying them by himself, right?

“You ready to take her up yourself?” Abe suddenly boomed, slapping the nervous copilot on the back as he slid into place beside him.

Robin blanched. “Oh God we’re going to die…”

Dexton mumbled something unintelligible and started to shake, prompting Samuel to giggle—a bit girlishly—as he began flipping switches in earnest. Robin felt the ship’s treads jump forward on its own power, tug-sled swerving off with a muffled blare. They must have just entered in their takeoff zone. “I was like that my first time, too,” Abe chuckled. “I’ll be doing most of the flying; don’t worry.”

Everyone in the cockpit visibly relaxed.

“Thank you, Ableman,” Nowell sighed, loosening his straps a bit so he could better destroy his spinal column. “I actually felt fear for a moment, there.” Duwain sunk lower in his chair—with relief or embarrassment, Robin didn’t know. He contemplated speaking up on the copilot’s behalf, but the man’s uncle beat him to it.

“I doubt that’s a new experience for ya,” Abe smirked. “I met your last wife, remember?”

“F—nnk.”

“Aight, boys!” shouted Kaleb, tromping into the room—snowy mountain-head hatless, wearing a red-flecked undershirt and a grin—and causing Simon to choke mid-curse. Abe snorted and turned his attention back to what appeared to be a pre-flight checklist. “Crunch time, now. We only got seventeen minutes to make orbit ‘fore we’re grounded.”

Robin slouched, trying to make himself unnoticeable as Kaleb passed, taking the right-most seat behind Dexton.

“Just let me finish these last few checks,” Samuel said, pressing a green keypad to his left. The window’s darkened significantly, blocking the sun in preparation for breaking atmosphere. “Tell the greenhorns one of your ‘fabulous’ stories or something to pass the time if you’re so impatient.”

“Ah, shut up Dutchy,” Kaleb snorted, joking. “I’ll do what I want.” The hunter swiveled his chair, facing Robin, jaunty smirk twitching up the corners of his mouth. “Well, Fairweather? Want me to spin ya a merry tale?”

Shit…

“That’s alright, Sir, I’m—ah—I’m good,” Robin stammered. A story would be nice but he just wanted to remain unnoticed, and therefore employed, until they made it to 1128. “I-I mean if you want to tell a story I’m all ears, Sir, but… y’see… that is—”

“Don’t call me ‘Sir’, kid,” Burnow grunted, leaning forward and giving Robin a neutral stare. The cameraman winced, fumbling with his words.

“Oh, uh, sorry Mr. Burn—”

“Kaleb. My name is Kaleb.”

“Okay… Kaleb. A—uh—A story would be nice?” Robin closed his eyes, waiting for… something.

“Tha’s right. It would be wouldn’t it,” Kaleb smiled, winking. The hunter shifted in his seat. “How about it, Simey? Want to help me with the time you almost got your skinny ass eaten?”

Simon smirked: “You mean the one where I caught your little ‘wonder-cat’?”

The ship lurched forward, again, guided into the blast zone by Abe’s steady hand. “You were the bait, Nowell,” the pilot chuckled, flipping a small switch on the front console. Mag-engines hummed to life, and, slowly, Sheila lifted away from the scorched, radiated earth of Airman’s Field.

“Yeah, but I caught it didn’t I?”

“Shut up and let me start why don’t you?” the eldest crewmember snorted, tugging at his left ear and glancing out the viewport. Simon smirked in Abe’s direction, but kept his mouth shut. Satisfied, Kaleb settled back in his seat, stealing one last look outside before speaking again. “So we had been on this planet—34, was it?” Simon grunted in affirmation and Kaleb continued. “Yeah, and we’d been trying to catch this critter—prairie cat the science boys called it, though it looked more like a wild boar to me—for the better part of a week, and I was getting a might annoyed with the blight’ah.”

“Understatement of the year,” Samuel tittered, still facing the console. “You threatened to find its mother and rape it with your satanic ‘didgeridoo’.”

Robin laughed quietly to himself, spurred onward by the hunter’s sheepish expression. Kaleb gently patted the back of Abe’s seat, an embarrassment coloring his creased cheeks. “I was—uh—I was in a bad place.” He paused, shaking his head tiredly before carrying on. “Thing ate all the bait we left out: you’d look away for a second, and when you turned back the trap’d be sprung and empty. We went through three zap-cages, four bear-traps, a thermal trip-wire, and my gun.

“Got it in the flank with my elephant cannon on the third day—‘s blood was a nice silvery color—and it just kept running. I didn’t even get to see what it looked like.”

“The probes never got any good pictures of one,” Simon explained. “None of us had a real good idea of what the ‘prairie cat’ looked like—was before any a’ the Republic Animal Research Preserves made a requisition on that planet—probably why the research team pegged it as feline in the first place. We only found it because it started hanging around the Exxy on our third checkpoint. Was a bit frightening, really.”

“Right, so Sage got this brilliant idea: why not use Nowell as bait?”

“For the last time, he wasn’t being serious, Kaleb,” Simon growled, “He was sloshed!”

“It worked, did’n it?” Samuel offered, hands still dancing across the console as lights flickered on and off. “Oh, and ya may want to start getting yourselves secure.”

“You were lucky to be in the damned ship!” the now agitated Channel Rep exclaimed. “That thing almost killed me!”

“Oh shut up, ya baby.” Burnow brushed Nowell’s outburst aside like so much dust from his shoulder. “Dexton! Pay attention to your Uncle, not me.” The copilot, who had been listening avidly—mouth, though hanging slightly ajar, still silent—blanched and swiveled back to the front while everyone buckled their harnesses.

Robin had to stand briefly to get at the crash webbing beneath him, but once free the harness was fairly easy to slip over his shoulders. Once they were all settled, Kaleb, chair locked facing forward now, continued.

“The plan was to hide on the ridge above the Exxy an’ shoot at it when it went for Simon. Had Abe tell ‘im to dig a hole out front—as a trap or something—while Sage and I watched.”

Simon grumbled, and was ignored.

“It was around 1900 hours, the sun was going down, and Simey’d almost finished digging this big ‘ol pit when Sage an’ I decided that the beast wasn’t coming. Stupid thing wasn’t nocturnal, and the sun had gone down two hours previously, so I decided we would just have to try again the next day. Sage an’ I started climbing back down into the valley when we heard ‘im start yelling: Simon spotted the blight’ah at the edge of the flood-lamps—lucky him—and ran into the ship.”

“I almost made it, too,” Nowell sighed, bad mood cast away for a moment. “We really should invest in making the exxy-trap automatic.”

“Ah, but then the robots win,” Kaleb groused, “Your turn now, anyway—you always tell this part best.”

“Right.” The lanky channel man shook his head and sat up straighter. “So I was digging all day, pissed off at Kaleb—because digging holes just happened to be in my contract,” he glared at the back of the hunter’s chair. “The contract I wrote.”

Abe and his nephew giggled and Robin smiled, prompting their own baleful glares from the spurned Channel Rep. Eventually, Nowell cracked a sick grin of his own, and, eyes gleaming at the memory, he continued.

“So it was getting dark, and Kaleb an’ Sage were still out. I was unaware of their plan to use me as bait, and by that point the hole I dug was around six feet deep—rocky soil: don’t judge me! What I mean is, if I’d known I wouldn’t have dug myself so far down. Last I checked I’m like five-eight? I was lucky I was actually climbing out when I saw the ugly pig-bitch edging in ‘out the darkness—about twenty yards away.”

The Australian mountain rumbled discontentedly, and Simon smirked: “I’m going to call the animal that nearly gutted me a bitch if I want to, Kaleb. You and your elderly, shareholding ass have nothing on that… now where was I?”

“I think you were getting to the part where you squealed like a little… bitch?” Samuel smoothly said, pulling even further back on the steering column and tilting the exfiltrator at an even steeper angle. All Robin could see through the windows was yellow-tinged sky, and he barely caught the tinny voice on the console intercom buzz something about trajectory.

“Abe…” Simon started, looking at the pilot with a mixture of hate and grudging respect. “Sleep with one eye open.”

The pilot simply wolf-whistled, prompting stifled laughter from everyone on the flight deck… except Nowell of course.

“As I was saying,” the representative sighed, “the prairie cat charged me when I was half-way out of the hole—I was going to go take a piss, actually—and I was just able to get out of the pit when it slashed at me with its sharp tusks. Missed me, but I felt the air puff where my spine used to be. I sprinted toward the ship, and I guess the beast tripped itself on the edge a’ my hole because I was able to put some distance between myself and it before I got to the exxy-trap… and yes, I was screaming. Who wouldn’t if they were being chased by a murderous pig-lion the size of a mag-taxi?”

Unbidden images from yesterday’s science briefing flitted through Robin’s head: screeching gryphons, radiation manipulating horses, and bipedal bulls the size of an apartment building. The cameraman felt a small chill.

Yes… yes he would probably scream.

“Launch in eighteen… seventeen…”

“Ableman! Shut off that voice, will ya?”

“… sixteen… fift—” the droning voice of the automated lift-off relay receded, and the rumbling from below increased in volume.

“Thank you,” Kaleb sighed. “Hate that unnatural thing. I wish we could just get clearance from the tower.” The hunter snorted. “I miss Corby calling us on the HAM.”

“Who?” Simon asked, clearly annoyed at the interruption in his tale.

“Before your time,” Abe casually stated. His calloused, workman’s fingers danced across a retractable keyboard at the center console: displays flashed into being—maps and readouts of windspeed, pitch, and yaw—and the revving magnetic engines settled into a dull hum. “Retracting treads.”

Robin felt the ship dip, still angled above the horizon, as the exfiltrator’s massive steel treads receded into the belly of the magnetically suspended craft. His stomach wobbled a bit, and the cameraman grimaced. “Well, go on then,” he pushed, previous hesitancy forgotten. “How’d you escape?”

Nowell smiled, and Robin was briefly sick again: those immaculate, white teeth… seemed wrong—”Are those canines sharpened?”

“I’m glad somebody cares,” the channel man sneered. “Damned shame we didn’t have you before, Fairweather. Sage was a ditzy prick.” Robin noticed Samuel tense at the controls and suddenly felt very self-conscious. He wondered at the level of care Abe appeared to display at the mention of the old cameraman—“He’s dead. So what? We’re all dead, aren’t we?”—but neither he nor the pilot said a thing, and soon they were traveling upwards and outwards, leaving the blighted fields of aerial experimentation behind.

“So I made it to the exxy-trap, crankin’ the elevator as fast as I could, and all the while that cat was bearing down on me. I got the platform about halfway closed when it decided to try and hop on.”

The viewport showed nothing but roiling, yellow smog. Robin saw no buildings, no spires, no mountain of garbage: only sickly smoke lit by the seeping brightness of Sheila’s floodlights. “Breaking the inner layer in five,” Abe droned, both hands on the yoke of the steering column. Dexton, who had been silent for longer than Robin thought possible for the excitable copilot, flipped off the exterior lights, plunging the crew into ammonia-tinted darkness.

“Nearly broke my arm trying to wrench the wheel around one last time. It’s funny, really: you never know how strong you can be until you’re close to death.”

White light bled through the yellow, and suddenly they were free—free and blue! Everything was so amazingly, beautifully, obscenely blue, and Robin could do little besides gape at the color.

“That’s the sky… the real fucking sky! Oh God… I’m… I'm God...” Robin couldn’t think straight, and Simon’s story slowly washed over him as they kept blasting through the bright, blue air.

“… worst part was its eyes: how wild and barren they were. Pitch black; all pupil. Swear to God…”

The blue fluctuated, as if alive. Light to dark to light, thinning out along the edges as the inky black of the mesosphere began to leak through. Blue receded, and Robin was sorry to see it go.

“… swung its tusks at me, half-in-half-out of the lift, snorting and squealing up a storm. I lost my grip on the turn-wheel around then, and, in the moment before the platform snapped down, I made a leap for the edge of the hull above. I burned my hands pretty badly on the laser-locks, but I managed to hang there long enough for the lift to fall on the beast’s lower-half: crushed its hind legs like toothpicks.”

“Screamed like a dying elephant,” Kaleb added from his seat further up. “Sage got nearly two hours of footage before it passed out.”

“Hell, the footage from the holding bay cameras alone brought ratings up three whole points!” Simon went on, gesticulating vaguely with his right hand. “The tusks are hanging in my bunk-room—right above the inside doors—if you wanna take a look.” He cast Robin a sideways glance and the cameraman tilted his head.

“Maybe after I check on the camera equipment.”

Samuel sat up a bit straighter in his chair, and, depressing a plate on the armrest, swiveled to face the rest of them. “All right, boys,” he wheezed. Frowning, the pilot coughed into the crook of his arm and continued, deep baritone much clearer now. “Sorry. We are now in orbit around the planet and will be staying that way until we’re given clearance for a ‘hole’. Should be an hour or two, and I’ve turned on the artificial gravity until then so you’re free to go, but keep an ear out for us—we’ll be callin’ you back for the show.”

Everyone got up—save for Dexton, who was left to learn how to better pilot the ship from his uncle—and went their separate ways: Kaleb down the hallway to the room draped in an animal skin and Nowell to the rec-room. Robin considered going to his own “Video Professional’s Suite”—he had a couple recorder manuals to read, and Miss March as his silent company—but instead felt himself drawn to the viewport.

He could see his planet—the ruddy browns, verdant greens, dull yellows, and vibrant blues—and it was beautiful. Samuel glanced at him and smiled nudging his side with a free arm:

“Pretty nice, eh?”

Robin simply nodded, watching as smog-choked earth and sea rolled by underneath them. It was so colorful—really, it was...

“Pretty nice,” the cameraman breathed.

He had work to do, but for now he was just going to stand there: watching his planet flow by.

Watching the Blue.

A high-pitched whine shattered Robin’s concentration, and he looked up. The timepiece claimed that two hours had passed, but the cameraman hardly believed it—clocks were lying fucks out of atmosphere, apparently.

A tinny, yet familiar, voice filtered into his room:

“Hey, Fairweather! It’s me, Dex!”

“What do you want?” Robin half-shouted, trying his best to hide the irritation he was feeling—he was almost finished with the diagnostic on the second mag-cam, and was loathe to be interrupted. When no response came, Robin looked around the room. Seeing what appeared to be a wall-mounted intercom by the bed, he stood up and, tiptoeing carefully around scattered optic arrays, screws, and aluminum plating, approached it.

“Yeah?” he tried again, thumb depressing the red “talk” button.

“There ya are!” the voice replied, sounding distracted. “I’m finally getting the hang of this flying thing!”

“It’s on autopilot, Dexton.” Samuel could be faintly heard in the background.

“What? You’re kidding! You mean to tell me I’ve been holding this fucking thing steady for no reason at all?!”

There was a faint click, and another voice entered the circuit: “You pressed ‘open broadcast’, idiot. We can all hear you.” Nowell said, an emblematic sneer evident in his tone.

“Damn it!—I.. I mean—aaugh…”

Another whine tore through the room, and Robin shook his head, moving to return to his work. Another dull click over the COM stopped him, however.

“Hello, this is your Captain speaking. Head on up to flight: we’ve been given clearance to cross, and gravity will be off in three minutes so secure any loose items ye’ve got lying around.” Samuel said, joviality projecting quite nicely over the intercom. “See you in a few!”

Sighing quietly, Robin began to briskly trot around the room, picking up bits of machinery, wires, and glass and putting it all in one of the camera cases. He then picked up the partially disassembled mag-cam and hung it next to its smaller, hand-held counterpart in their special closet racks. Nowell had stopped by briefly and mentioned them while he was working earlier. Apparently the old cameraman built them when he was first hired nearly fifteen years ago.

They were damned useful, to be sure.

Finished, Robin sauntered out of his dormitory, passed Kaleb’s door and the communal toilet between their respective bunkrooms, and turned right into the cockpit. Everyone else was already there, either strapped into their seats or in the process of doing so. Satan’s Grandma was facing away from the planet’s surface, and Robin was graced with the view of all of space stretching out before him: twinkling stars, and endless, cloying black as far as the eye could see. As he approached his seat, primed by the nearly colorless void, he noticed a ruddy tinge gracing Nowell’s pale cheeks and smirked.

“Drinking already?” he asked, sliding into his seat next to the imbibed channel rep. “We aren’t even anyplace exotic or dangerous yet.” Robin knew he might have been pushing his luck, there. But he felt good, and, at that moment, he didn’t want to worry about luck.

He had his quarter, after all.

“Shut it, Fairweather,” Nowell grinned—something good-natured gone wrong—and fiddled with his restraints. “Learn to talk like a man of your pay-grade.”

A high-pitched whine from below and the sudden absence of gravity quickly ended their conversation, and Robin quickly buckled himself down before he could float away. His stomach looped inside of him, and he felt a little nauseous, but otherwise antigravity was a pleasant experience.

Smile nearly splitting his skull, Dexton spun in his chair up front, catching bits of flimsy and a rocking, plastic hula girl as she danced through the air. Robin hadn’t noticed that particular article earlier, and seeing it now—trapped inside Dex’s nimble fingers—he couldn’t help but laugh.

“Got it… yes… fine, Station One…” Samuel sat hunched over the console, one hand pressing the headset he was wearing deeper into his wizened ear-canal; the other, typing what looked like spatial coordinates. “Yeah, yeah: see you in a month, Charlie,” he finished. Removing the headset, he leaned back in his seat with a happy sigh and spoke again, this time to the rest of the crew. “You greenhorns ready for a show?”

Robin nodded, his counterpart jittering in his seat at the copilot’s chair.

“Why don’t you press the button, Dex?” the Flying Dutchman asked good-naturedly. He reached under the console and removed a small, hand-held depressor—like the handle of an overseer crowd-seeder, but with a big, red button at its tip.

Dexton looked at the trigger like a sablehound drooling over a full book of surf-stamps, eyes flickering from Abe’s hand to his face to his hand. “R-Really? You’ll let me make the hole?”

“Yep. Go ahead.”

“Thank… Thank you, Uncle Abe…”

The conversation was confusing Robin to no end, and, as Dexton took the depressor from Samuel’s hand, he watched carefully.

“Are they talking about nuclear displacement? There’s no way this model of exfiltrator is rigged with that kind of—”

Copilot Duwain Dexton III pushed the button and the ship rocked backwards, a spout of white rocketing out into the black.

“—firepower… holy fuck!”

A warhead—a small, custom atomic warhead—was streaking out into space, set to detonate ten miles outside of earth’s orbit according to the spatial coordinates Abe had just set on the main console. Robin stared, open-mouthed, as the searing bridge-builder continued its journey. He’d only ever read about this kind of thing in books back at the university! He never thought he’d actually get the chance to witness it in person.

Oh God it was so fresh in his mind:

“To dig a hole is to form a bridge between the surface and the deep. That is what we aim to do here at NASA, but just a little bit differently…”

A minute passed in silence… two…

White light, radiating from an unbearably bright, central explosion, suddenly burnt across the void, spreading outward like so much oil over water. Space charred for miles around, shimmering and wobbling on a liquid mirror: a mirror that was a hole that was a bridge.

Invented decades ago, nuclear displacement allowed for fast, though rather expensive travel from point “A”—namely Earth—to point “B”—just about anywhere else. A mixture of the right chemical cocktail—Robin had no idea what cocktail that was; he wasn’t a fucking chemist—and explosive force could put a ship with the right kind of equipment across the galaxy in a little less than twenty minutes.

It was going to revolutionize travel as humanity knew it… but it came nearly a century too late. Mankind had become disinterested in the heavens after the Great Famine in the first half of the 22nd Century: population was down, the sky was piss-yellow, and life was grounded.

At least the Channel found a use for it… Robin could definitely be thankful for that.

“Shit, we got a dud!” Samuel hissed, quickly lining the ship up with the slowly expanding cosmic mirror. “Rift won’t last more than five minutes at the rate it’s decelerating…”

Thrusters flashed and nudged, and Robin felt the exxy drift in line with their destination.

“Hurry along, Dutchy,” Kaleb warned—the first time Robin heard him speak since they’d come back to the flight deck. “The Requisition’ah only gives us eight a’ these per season.” His accent had gotten thicker. Odd.

“Punch it, Dex,” Ableman yelled, still working the thrusters keeping Sheila steady in vacuum. His nephew, riding high on nuclear displacement, smiled an anxious, sweat-drenched smile, and grabbed the throttle.

“Hold onto your butts!”

The copilot’s arm shot forward, and ten miles became nine, eight, seven…

Robin was pressed into his seat, eyes forced open, stomach dropped into his testicles, heart racing, sprinting, screaming through the void and they were going to die oh lord oh lord no not yet he was only twenty-nine and the Earth was still pulling him back, back, back!

When they hit, Robin could only remember the last thing Dexton had said, and he wondered why it was so damned familiar.

They named our world for themselves after the cross, a tradition of theirs, like the Summer Sun Celebration. The hunter gave the new crewmembers the honor, and they ‘flipped’ for it with this...

Her horn flashed, and a thin, metallic disk appeared before him. He held out a hoof, and it fell, landing upon the soft skin of his innui. It was cold, but not particularly heavy, and Jade could just make out the impression of an eagle clutching a talon-full of arrows and what looked like the branch of a tree.

"Is... it this the coin from the story? I..."

He named us ‘Aristotle’s Dream’ for our sun. It is significant in a way that I don’t understand.

“Which one of them was it? Who won the toss?”

Robin. My savior.

Author's Note

"John dies in the end."

—A Nice Person