Providence - Max Barry Page 0,71

screen. She remembered Anders lying in his own vomit, months before, looking up at her and saying, I like the way your face is arranged. So this was it. He had finally found a way to kill himself, in the most spectacularly pointless way possible. She began to unstrap but it seemed to take forever and while she struggled the hive rushed toward her, growing exponentially, eager to help Anders get what he wanted. She leaned out and grabbed his wrist. He knocked her away. By this time, the hive was filling the screen. Maybe he wouldn’t hit it, she thought. He would just shoot by, close enough to lose their pursuers. Then he punched the board and the jet lurched into the hive.

Her ears filled with screaming metal. She was flung in one direction and then the other. Wind was everywhere, the growl opening into a throaty roar. They were breached in a dozen places. Her eyes streamed. But she saw white dots vanishing from the screens. They had struck the hive and it had torn them up but also created a thousand tiny pieces of deadly shrapnel to tear apart the salamanders.

He was trying to drag the jet around but there grew a terrible shaking. The planet had them, she realized. They had flown too close and the jet was doing its best but wasn’t designed for this and the shaking was turbulence. Her brain rattled. A high whistling grew behind her, and she felt joy, because as terrifying as that sound was, it meant atmosphere. It meant she had escaped the void. She was falling toward an orange-and-purple planet at terrible speed, but the universe wouldn’t eat her. She opened her mouth to scream or laugh or something. She didn’t know. It was a good moment to do, well, anything. Last drinks, ladies and gentlemen. Last drinks. One more couldn’t hurt. The jet’s engines thundered, the wind screamed, and she fell, fell, fell.

10

[Jackson]

THE CREW

She hadn’t been to Arlington since she was a cadet. In the meantime, it had doubled in size, sprouting offices and testing fields and blocky beige buildings. All thanks to war funding, she guessed. Her escort, a young CDO with soft blond hair and no facial expressions, reeled off building names as they sped by, two of which she recognized as belonging to officers from Fornina Sirius. If she’d died out there, maybe there would’ve been a Jolene Jackson wing. Or an annex. Maybe a squash court.

The car stopped. Her escort bounced out to be on hand as she exited. She was in full dress and a passing pair of privates stopped to salute, which she returned. The lobby was very corporate, very glass. Among an ocean of black tile rose a titanium sculpture of a Surplex mining drone. The staff sergeant on desk knew who she was before she could open her mouth. “Sir, the admiral will be with you a few moments. I can take you to a room where you can wait.”

She felt eyes on her as she crossed to the elevator. She felt different on base. Outside, in the real world, voyaging into the unknown and facing an unimaginable horror and surviving, that made her a hero. Not here. On base, people knew, even if they didn’t. They sensed something a little funky about a person who crawled back home, alive, leaving thousands of bodies behind. If she was feeling charitable, she would call it superstition, the belief of the military mind that when death brushed by a person, it left something behind, something contagious. More realistically, she would say they were smart enough to realize that the only way that many people died was if there had been a monumental screwup, and there was a good chance it was hers.

The Colossus room was eight floors up. She accepted a steaming coffee from the staff sergeant, who had taken over from her escort as silently and seamlessly as if one had morphed into the other, and lurked near a window that offered a view over bunkhouse roofs and wet fields. She could see cadets rolling around the track, running drills or looking for their car keys or whatever the hell they were doing.

She heard a door but didn’t realize it was Admiral Nettle until he was standing beside her, gazing out at the