Kill them.
When I got to the caudal stump, Ricci was just clicking the last pellet through the valve. If we’d dumped them during the pitch and ditch, none of it would have happened. But dry waste is light. We’d accumulated ten pellets, only five kilograms, so I hadn’t bothered with them.
But a half-kilo pellet falling from a height can do a lot of damage.
I fired the feed into the middle of the sinus. One whale was thrashing on the slushy mesa surface, half-obscured by the concussive debris. Two more were falling, twisting in agony, their bladders tattered and flapping. Another three would have escaped damage, but they circulated into the path of the oncoming pellets. Each one burst in turn, as if a giant hand had reached down and squeezed the life out of them.
Ricci was in my arms, then. Both of us quaking, falling to our knees. Holding each other and squeezing hard, as if we could break each other’s bones with the force of our own mistakes.
Six whales. Twenty-two people. All dead.
The other eleven whales scattered. One fled east and plunged through the twilight band into night. Its skin and bladders froze and burst, and its sinus skeleton shattered on the jagged ice. Its crew had been one of the most stubborn—none had evacuated. They all died. Ten people.
In total, thirty-two died because Ricci made an unwise decision.
The remaining ten whales re-congregated over a slushy depression near the beanstalk. Ricci had bought the surviving crews a few more hours, so they tried a solution along the lines Ricci had discovered. Ice climbers use drones with controlled explosive capabilities to stabilize their climbing routes. They tried a test; it worked—the whales fled again, but in the wrong direction and re-congregated close to the leading edge of night.
In the end, the others evacuated. All seventy got in their bodybags and called for evac.
By strict accounting, Ricci’s actions led to a positive outcome. I remind her of that whenever I can. She says it doesn’t matter—we don’t play math games with human lives. Dead is dead, and nothing will change that.
And she’s right, because the moment she dumped those pellets, Ricci became the most notorious murderer our planet has ever known.
The other habs insist we hand her over to a conflict resolution panel. They’ve sent negotiators, diplomats—they’ve even sent Jane—but we won’t give her up. To them, that proves we’re dangerous. Criminals. Outlaws.
But we live in the heart of the matter, and we see it a little differently.
Ricci did nothing wrong. It was a desperate situation and she made a desperate call. Any one of us might have done the same thing, if we’d been smart enough to think of it.
We’re a solid band of outlaws, now. Vula, Treasure, Chara, Eddy, Bouche, Eleanora, Ricci, and me. We refuse to play nice with the other habs. They could cut off our feedstock, power, and data, but we’re betting they won’t. If they did, our blood would be on their hands.
So none of us are going anywhere. Why would we leave? The whole planet is ours, with unlimited horizons.
Winter Timeshare
RAY NAYLER
Ray Nayler is the author of the stories “Mutability” and “Do Not Forget Me,” both of which appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Ray’s poetry has seen print in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Weave, Juked, Able Muse, Sentence, Phantom Limb, Badlands, and many other magazines. His detective novel American Graveyards was published in the UK by TTA Press. Ray’s short stories in other genres have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Deathrealm, Crimewave, and the Berkeley Fiction Review, among others. Ray is a Foreign Service Officer, a speaker of Russian and Azerbaijani Turkish, and has lived and worked in the countries of Central Asia and the former Soviet Union for nearly a decade. He is currently press attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Here he tells the bittersweet story of two lovers who are forced to go to very extreme lengths to spend any time together….
The words were scrawled in scarlet, hurried script on a concrete flower box. In the spring, the flower box would be full of tulips. For those who could afford the spring, there would be sunny days and crowds. Right now there was nothing in the concrete box but wet earth.
A city worker in a jumpsuit a few shades darker than the drizzling sky wiped the letters away with a quick swipe of chemcloth, leaving no trace of their message, and moved on.
Whoever wrote those had probably already been caught by the police. Why bother? The risk of a fine, of a notch against you—for what? A pointless protest against a world that would stay just as it was, ugly words or no.
Across a cobblestoned street and defoliated winter gardens, the minarets of the Blue Mosque rose, soft-edged in the drizzle, their tips blurring into the mist. It was chilly in the open-air café, even under the heater. It was a familiar chill, bringing immediately to Regina’s mind years of Istanbul in winter—memories of snow hissing onto the surface of the Bosporus, snow melting on the wings of seagulls. Mornings wrapped close in a blanket, watching the rain on the windowpanes distort the shipping in the straight. The icy, age-smoothed marble of mosque courtyards. And ten thousand cups of black tea in pear-shaped glasses, sign and substance of the city: hot to the touch, bitter on the tongue, a cube of sugar dissolving in their depths, identical to and yet different from one another. This, and so many other deeply pleasant repetitions, comforted her. They were in her past and, now, ahead of her again.
She flexed her tanned, muscular hand. She had spilled her first cup of tea with this clumsy hand. So eager to get to the café, not waiting even to get settled in, still pins and needles and misfires, but wanting that first taste of Istanbul, of its black tea against its chill. The old waiter had shrugged, and brought her another. “Do not worry, beyfendi,” he had said, wiping the tea from the table with a rag. “No charge.” Now she lifted the second glass of tea, carefully, to her lips. Yes, that was it. Now another year’s Istanbul had begun.
And now Regina saw Ilkay, walking toward the café with that uneven step that said she had just woken. Ilkay was scanning the seats for her. Ilkay was blond, this year. Beautiful—an oval face, this year, eyes set wide under high cheekbones, long-limbed. But Regina would know her anywhere. And Ilkay knew her as well, scanning the seats in confusion and concern for a moment and then catching her eye, and smiling.
“Well,” Ilkay said, when they had embraced, and embraced again, kissed cheeks, held one another at arms’ length and examined one another’s faces. “This is a new wrinkle in things.”
“Is it bad?” Regina asked, keeping her voice light and unconcerned, but feeling underneath an eating away, suddenly, at the pure joy of seeing Ilkay again. All things fall forever, worn by change / And given time, even the stones will flow…” a piece of a poem she had read once. The poet’s name, like much else, gone to time.
Ilkay grinned. Even, smallish teeth, a line of pink gums at the top. A different smile from the year before, but underneath, a constancy. “No. It isn’t bad at all. It will be something new, for us.” The waiter had approached, stood quietly to one side. Ilkay turned to him. “Two coffees for me. Bring both together.” She settled into her cane-bottom chair. “I never feel, this first day, as if I can wake up all the way.”