Chapter Four: The Latest News

The great hall of Xanadu, windowless and nearly a kilometer below the surface, was filled with moss-encrusted fountains, mosaic patios flanked with marble statues, and bioluminescent plants. A young man, medium of build with too-soft skin, but otherwise well formed and crowned with bronze curls, sat naked in a warm bubbling pool. His head lay back on a brocade pillow, his eyes were closed. A trio of nubile creatures attended him with food, drink and the latest news. They had pointed ears, prominent eye-teeth, and were each of them stunning to behold.

“Iron ore production has declined over the last year. But new deposits have been discovered, and an increase is projected next two years,” the dark-haired minx read from a link-pad. “Ore and metal stocks are sufficient that industrial facilities shouldn’t actually experience any shortages. That about covers the industry report. Moving on to agriculture…”

“Oh, don’t bother me with the food unless people are starving or my own dinner is going to be late,” the golden-haired man interrupted. “Get on to the good stuff.”

The dark-haired one rolled her eyes with a smile and thumbed forward to the military report. That was always what the Emperor wanted to hear. He smiled as she read the latest training reports. “The games last cycle as you know were a great success. The Hunt overcame the Elite corps at great cost. Both units have returned to full strength, and morale is high. Only two lines from the hunt, and three from the Swinehost were put down. Even those were simply the bottom of the list. They actually performed quite admirably, but of course, the corps must have their sacrifices.”

He sat up to hear intelligence reports about neighboring kingdoms, and the tribal lands. “The Swinehost in Erikson put down a small uprising,” she continued, trying to ignore the emperor’s hand on her leg. “The local magistrate reports it was really nothing more than a small riot. A drunken worker’s brawl that happened to choose the armory as a target.” The emperor smiled and waved away the rest of that report.

“And there is the matter of the airship,” she went on. “The latest reports indicate that it moved from the coast inland toward the Looking Glass region. Their landing craft descended again, but was caught in the storm when it changed direction. We haven’t had any word since then. It is believed that the owls following the ship were caught in the storm as well.”

The emperor looked thoughtful for a moment. The woman with the knee-length tail fed him a strawberry which he chewed absentmindedly. “Any indication of satellite communications as yet?”

She shook her head, “Nothing outside their GPS, and weather report downloads.”

“What units do we have in the area?” he asked hopefully.

“There is an otter team a few kilometers from their last known location, and the main body of the Harri has just left Petra. They’ll pass through Geoduck, and be in the area before the cycle is out.”

“Good. If the lander doesn’t turn up after the storm, have all the owls and otter teams in the area search for them. If the lander has crashed, or if they’ve landed in any settled areas, order them to jam all the radio frequencies used by their aircraft and shoot the airship down.” He reached for the woman covered in fine golden fur. “Now lets have some proper fun.”

Chapter Three: Through the Looking Glass

Around the side of the lake, four twilighters huddled inside the dismembered fuselage of the v-lander. A cold dread grew amongst them; they felt unlucky to be alive. Their two friends lay dead in the cockpit, another suffered a fractured arm, and all attempts to contact their airship, high above the storm, had failed. Jakob and Jenny were helping Felix into a sling while Tanner wrestled with his link headset.

“Any luck at all?” Jakob asked.

“It’s not working,” Tanner concentrated to steady his voice.

“What? Why not? It… it’s supposed to work!” Jenny moaned.

Tanner shook his head, taking off his headset. “I don’t know. Maybe the relays all got fried when we got hit by lighting, or something.”

“They were shielded for that,” Felix pointed out between clenched teeth.

“Maybe there was power surge during the crash or something.” Tanner dropped into a seat and let the dead link fall beside him. Jakob looked around, feeling helpless. The cabin itself had remained intact, but the cockpit was smashed and all the communication links were inoperable. They managed to pry the hatch to the cargo area open, and discovered that the tail of the aircraft had been torn open. More than half of their survival gear was strewn down the rutted debris path that stretched back into the stormy darkness. The storm. How long will it last? The erratic weather patterns on night side were one of the reasons all the colonies and outposts there had been abandoned. The wind howled outside and seemed to penetrate the metal corpse of the v-lander.

“OK,” Jenny drew in a breath to brace herself, “I know we discussed a lot of possible emergencies when we started this trip, but tell me again, what our current… situation is…”

Jakob opened up his pad, which of course had no GPS or satellite uplink, and scrolled open the map, “Well, we were about 2600 kilometers off from our approved flight plan when we were struck by lightning, and we weren’t due back in Novgorad for another 160 hours. As far as we know, the airship is still on autopilot in a holding pattern above the storm, so that should be easy enough for a rescue party to find. But there’s no way for them to know exactly where the v-lander is. Hell, we don’t even know exactly where we are.”

“Except that we’re in the Kerguelen basin,” Tanner added, “which means without being able to relay a message to our airship, we’ve got no way to call for help.”

They numbly took stock of the gear and supplies they could get to within the cabin, and then went to work on what they could salvage from the cargo area. They managed to scrounge some cold weather gear, one tent with broken poles, and a heater. There was food and water, but not enough for more than two periods, 80 hours, at a stretch. Sealing themselves back inside the cabin, they tried to eat, and tried to sleep.

Though restless at first, they finally settled into the complete darkness of exhaustion. Swallowed into the dreamlessness that only an ordeal of mortal terror can give you. A few hours later, or maybe it was a dozen, banging on the hull wrenched them awake. They stared around for a few moments, numb and uncomprehending at first. Then Jakob realized he was hearing a voice.

Muffled by the hull and the wind outside, it came through, “..ello? ello?” Is anyone in there?”

“I…” Jakob’s voice cracked, too softly to be heard. “Hallo! We’re hear!” he finally managed.

They stirred and struggled. Jakob and Tanner started moving up the slanted deck toward the outer hatch. Felix made no sound as he woke, but clutched his arm and closed his eyes against more pain.

“Can a rescue party be here already? How long were we asleep?” Tanner asked, unbelieving.

“I don’t know, I guess they must be,” Jakob replied.

They had started to struggle with the hatch, when they heard the voice from outside again:

“We have you surrounded and we are armed. Open the hatch slowly and keep your hands out where I can see them.”

Jakob and Tanner looked at each other in disbelief.

“I don’t think that’s a rescue party,” said Jakob.

Tanner shook his head, “Did you notice that accent? What is that?”

Jakob raised his voice to the outsider, “We aren’t armed! We just crashed here! We have an injured man inside!” He waited, but heard no reply. “We’re going to open the hatch now!”

The two men heaved aside the hatch as slowly as they could, trying to raise their hands as they did so. They peered out into the night with unaccustomed eyes, trying to pick the stranger out of the lightly falling snow. The light from the cabin fell short of whomever stood out in the darkness. Caliban was rising behind the clouds, giving glimpses of its pale blue glow, but they squinted aimlessly into the dark landscape.

“How many of you are there?” the voice out the dark asked.

“There are si… four. There are four of us. There were six, but two of our friends were killed in the crash. Are you the rescue party?”

“You’re Twilighters?”

“What?” they gaped, looked at each other, and then back to the shape, slowly resolving out of the snow and darkness. There was a riffle barrel pointed at them.

“You’re from the Twilight Rim, correct? What are you doing here?” she asked. A strange female figure stepped out of the gloom and into small glow cast by the cabin lights, with a long hunting riffle pointed at them. She was wearing a long oiled leather coat, edged out in white fur, and a strange mask with eye-pieces that looked like a cross between a gas mask, and an Egyptian death mask. There were two huge shapes moving behind her, giant wolves moving silently through the snow.

“I asked what you’re doing here,” she repeated.

“We came,” Tanner stuttered in the cold, “to see the Terra-forming ruins… and the light of Caliban.” It sounded ridiculous under the circumstances, though it had once seemed like a romantic idea. They felt foolish under the gaze of that rifle, and the monstrous wolves.

The strange woman nodded her head toward the pale blue glow in the thinning clouds, without taking her eyes from them. “There it is.” She watched the two men with a cold stare. To her eyes, they were poorly dressed for the weather in their odd-looking parkas. Their pants and boots were far too slight to be effective. The taller, lankier one had pointed features, and grizzled black hair. The slightly shorter one had blonde hair and bright green eyes. Both of them had smooth, hairless faces. Even their necks, peeking through their half open parkas, were smooth. The woman blinked away her distraction at the strange sight.

They stood in uncomfortable silence, until another voice, deep and gravelly erupted beside the two shivering men. “I smell fear. Confusion.” Another huge wolf had circled around the wrecked vertical lander, to approach them from behind. They gasped and fell back toward the open hatch, hands still raised. “I do not think they lie,” the huge wolf said, “Easy to kill if they are.”

“What, wha… Did that wolf just talk?!” Tanner exclaimed.

The woman lowered the riffle and glanced toward the talking wolf, “Otters?” she asked the wolf simply.

“Not yet. Soon. Storm is lifting.”

The two men standing in the hatchway stared round-eyed at the talking animal.

“You’ve never seen a talking dog before?” the woman asked. The wolf simply stared at them. It was huge, almost shoulder height, and grizzled white. There was something about the shape of the face, a shorter snout, the set of the eyes and forehead. It was unlike any dog or wolf they had ever seen, in or out of wildlife preserves, books, vids, or imagination.

“Seen one!?” Jakob said. “No one’s seen one for hundreds of years! I thought they were extinct.” Jakob’s mind reeled. He’d read about talking pets in early colonial histories, but such biological oddities had been outlawed centuries ago. No one had seen one, to his knowledge, in all that time either. Or so he’d thought.

“Extinct. Not funny,” graveled the wolf.

Jenny’s voice came weakened by fear from the hatchway, “Guys? What’s going on? Felix is in a lot of pain. He needs help.”

The strange woman cocked her head at the new face in the hatchway. Jenny was hugging a parka around her small frame, her short red hair fluttering out the edges of the hood, and her pale features were bewildered and pinked by the cold. The armed woman didn’t seem to regard her as a threat. Her rifle barrel didn’t leave the two men.

“Who is that?” Jenny barked, catching sight of the stranger. “Are you with the rescue party?”

The woman said nothing. She just stared at them, examining them.

“Human as you,” the wolf said to his human companion. “Every bit.”

“I am the rescue party,” the woman said as she shouldered her rifle and strode up to the hatch.

Inside, she pulled off the mask, revealing long brown wavy hair, fair skin, and full lips. The four survivors gapped at her, not knowing what to make of her, fearful of the huge wolves that waited just outside.

“Your injured companion,” the woman said, “how bad is he? Can he walk?”

“Um, yeah, I think he can walk.” Jenny said. “His arm is broken. I’m not sure how bad it is.”

The stranger looked him over. Felix had dark skin, and shoulder-length dark hair, he looked reasonably well built, and otherwise healthy. He reclined in one of the vertical lander’s seats, clutching an arm in a field dressed sling.

“Hi,” Felix said weakly, looking her over. “That’s gotta be the strangest EMT getup I’ve ever seen.”

Jakob was relieved to hear that Felix’s sense of humor was still intact, but the newcomer ignored the comment.

“I need you to stand and walk,” she said. “We need to get weather gear on him, and the rest of you. Do you have anything better than those parkas? How about leggings?”

“Um, yeah,” said Tanner, moving over to their hastily gathered pile of supplies.

“We need to move quickly,” she said.

“Wait, I don’t understand,” Jakob looked at her suddenly. “You can’t be here to rescue us. We didn’t send out any distress signals, and we aren’t due back to Novgorad for another 4 periods. Were you already here?”

“You’ll have more time for questions later,” the woman said, helping Felix to his feet. “Right now, we need to get you away from here. The crash site won’t be safe once the storm lifts.”

“I don’t understand,” Jenny broke in, “What’s the danger?”

“Where will you be taking us? And who are you?” Tanner asked, and questions started to erupt from all of them.

“You don’t have time for all these questions,” the woman said forcefully. “The Imperial Guard has a patrol in this area, and they’ll kill Twilighters on sight, no questions asked. You have to get yourselves together and get out that door if you want me to get you out of here. I won’t wait around for the Harii myself.”

“Imperial guards? What Imperial guards?” they asked, looking at each other. Imperial guards. Empire, Jakob thought to himself, words out of ancient Earth. There weren’t any Empires on Twilight. But there weren’t supposed to be any more talking animals either.

“There is a cave, a little over a kilometer from here,” The stranger said. “I’ll explain everything to you there.”

“Talking wolves, strange Eskimo women, and murderous imperial guards,” Felix laughed a little. “Either we somehow ended up on another planet, or we’re dead.”

Outside, they strapped Felix onto the woman’s dog sled. The four bewildered Twilighters watched in awe as the huge talking wolves strapped themselves into the harnesses. Their strange hands looked like oddly distorted paws with short, padded fingers, a longish palm, and a long thin thumb. Once they returned to all-fours, the thumb barely touched the ground, and the fingers curled up to look like ordinary paws.

It unnerved the Twilighters, watching the strange wolf-like creatures at the work. But the dark alien landscape around them offered no more comforting a view. The dark blue sky was nearly obscured by black clouds, allowing only glimpses of the pale glow of Caliban. The clouds spread their shadows over the dimly illuminated landscape, leaving more myseries than vistas. The lightly falling snow made a haze of things, all the more frightening for being hard to see. There were outcroppings covered in strange, bush-like growths with thick stubby tubular branches. They were chalky white, or maybe just covered in snow and ice. Under the right circumstances, the sight might have filled them all with wonder. But now it seemed hostile, a living thing waiting to consume them.

As the stranger and her dogs led them away from their wrecked aircraft, Jakob had a sinking feeling, like the ground would come loose beneath his feet any moment, and he would be left freewheeling in cold space. They traveled downhill and a sulfurous fog grew about them as they descended. The snow faded, and the dim light of Caliban grew just a little. The fog felt warm somehow. A lake materialized from the mist and they turned to follow its edge. It steamed, brilliantly hued in blues and greens. The strange white clumps of bushes continued to grow up from the water here and there, with dark red feathery plumes waving from the ends of the stubby white branches.

“Where are we,” Jakob asked numbly.

Their strange guide spoke over her shoulder, “We are almost through the Looking Glass.”

Chapter One: Black Box

“People don’t go to the night-side for a reason…”

The engines of the Vertical-Lander whined and fell; the wings shook and pitched, spiraling out of control, falling out of the sky. Jakob helplessly gripped the armrests of his seat, and watched his equally helpless friends, clutching each other. But instead of his whole life flashing before his eyes, it was mostly the words of his primary school teacher. “People don’t go to the night-side for a reason,” he had said.

As a child, Jakob had loved to explore. He loved maps. Most of all he loved the blank spaces on them. The mysterious voids between roads, cities and familiar landmarks cried out to him of forgotten or undiscovered spaces. He stared endlessly at maps of abandoned places. Whole cities, he knew, were carved out of the rock underground. Not just in the twilight rim, where people lived now, but all over their world. Beneath the sun-blistered rock of the continent called Icarus, on the sun-side of Twilight, and under the cold stone of the night-side islands, lay dozens of the early colonies. There were even some ruins on his home island of Amsterdam. The underground structures that weren’t used by industry or for storage were carefully sealed off, of course, but there were plenty of terraforming structures above ground. The crumbled concrete and carbon fiber buildings were a maze of ceiling-less passages, and mysterious spaces all overgrown by grass, vines and trees.

And Jakob wondered about those places on the night-side too. The night-side, the site of the first landing on Twilight, where the oldest ruins on Twilight lay, and where you could look up and see the stars from which their ancestors came. So he’d ask about it in school whenever he got the chance. “It’s not just the cold,” his teacher had said. “The average temperature is actually only a little below what we might consider comfortable. It’s the volatile and unpredictable weather.” He aimed his ever-roving laser pointer at the globe to indicate the night-side pole of their tidally locked planet. The holograph spun about and with a blink of the teacher’s eye highlighted the splatter of islands and ice, swept by storms. “Tidal forces actually deepen the seas at the night-side pole, just as they do on the sun-side. But the downdraft of warm air cycling from the other side of the planet meets the cold water and ice, causing a great deal of evaporation, producing major storms, including a lot of hail. Add to that the effects of ocean currents, the effects of thermal activity, the drastic changes in tide caused by Caliban… ”

Jakob really couldn’t remember the rest of that lecture. Those first words just echoed in his mind over and over again. “People don't go to night-side for a reason.” He had reminded his friend Gordon about all that when they planned their trip around the world. But strapped helplessly into his seat, with fingers dug into the arm rests while the V-lander lurched and spiraled out of control in the storm, he wasn't angry about it. Maybe just a little. Or maybe it was just that he wished Jenny would stop screaming. It certainly wasn't helping anything. Snow and ice blasted the windows. It sounded like sand. He just barely heard Felix, Gordon and Sheila yelling over the noise, voices desperate, trying to regain control of the aircraft, but it seemed hopeless.

They had even planned for this; crashing into the icy whey of the arctic sea, or on some snow swept tundra. They had life craft, shelters, and survival gear in the V-lander, and more in the silver airship that drifted thousands of meters overhead. Enough food, water and supplements to last two months. More if they could glean anything from the environment. But the precautions had seemed more like planning for a campout, and Jakob feebly wondered if dying in the crash wouldn't be better.

Gordon had talked Jakob and the others into it back in grad school. It seemed like a million years ago. He had this crazy idea bout taking an airship around the world on the circadian axis. He could have suggested flying a starship into the corona of the sun, or into the lower atmosphere of Caliban, the gas giant of their solar system, and it would have sounded nearly as outrageous. Over bottles of wine, maps and computer models, and glossy pictures of airships and jets and the latest high-tech equipment, it seemed like nothing more that an expensive dream.

But Gordon wasn’t just a rich kid with adventure lust. He was an heir to one of the biggest aeronautics companies on the planet. Jacob was used to ostentatious displays from people like Gordon, but the silver airship that loomed over them in that hangar left him dumbstruck. And when he invited them all to look inside at the custom equipment and the pair of V-Lander jets that attached to it’s belly; all for their so-far very hypothetical journey, Jakob knew he was serious.

“The greatest adventure on this planet in hundreds of years!” he’d said. A flight around the world, the way no one else really saw it. The people of Twilight lived in a narrow band of perpetual twilight, just below the horizon line of the giant red sun. They were shielded by the curve of the planet from the bulk of solar radiation, but still close enough to feel the warmth of it's glow, always on the horizon, where the arcs of solar flares danced above the treetops.

Gordon’s friends also knew that it was a thinly disguised business trip. Gordon wanted to make a name for himself, instead of just having his place in daddy’s company handed to him. So he came up with a scheme to develop a new kind of airship-cruise. Day and Night. Something no other travel company in their tidally locked world could boast. Experience life like Ancient Earth, tour the ruins of the terra-forming colonial era now almost half a millennium old, and see the light of the gas-giant Caliban amongst a brilliant canopy of stars in a dark sky.

Gordon’s friendships were as carefully groomed as his business ideas. As a colonial historian, Jakob could find their way around the terra-forming ruins. Jenny had studied engineering and architecture, so she could address the integrity of the ruins, and select locations for way stations and lodges. Tanner was a meteorologist with some background in geology as well. Felix, and Gordon’s own girlfriend Sheila were both pilots and aeronautical engineers. It would have been distasteful but for the fact that somehow, Gordon managed to have genuine affection for them all. He would show up with an armful of beer and sausage with the blueprints of some ancient spaceport and have them all talking. The engineers, the pilots, the historian and the businessman; the unlikeliest of friends. It was easy to joke about it then. “We’ll probably get ourselves killed,” Jakob had joked.

The V-Lander began to shake violently. Jakob’s muscles ached from bracing himself. He heard yelling over the noise, “Pull up! Pull UP! HANG ON!” The earth-shattering, mind-numbing impact yanked him against the restraints like a rag doll. A confusion of pain and violence followed. There was wind and cold and what felt like a shower of sand, and then a kind of blackness.

The sound seemed to die away, too distant to hear. He became acutely aware of his right hand, gripping the armrest of his seat. He would be OK if he could just hang on to that one place. He crawled into those fingers and existed only there, split into those five fingers, barely held together by a thin, stretched palm. He was still there when the broken craft came to rest in the cold. The muted roar of chaos still overwhelmed him like too much breath in his ears.

Slowly at first, the beeping of alarms called him out of the fog. His eyes began to focus again, but he still didn’t understand what he was looking at. His neck hurt. His whole body hurt. The lights were flickering, and there were sparks. The cabin was littered with snow. It was gritty on his face. It wasn’t just snow. Chalky rock. There was a smell of sulfur mixed with the smell of burning plastic.

Then he could hear his companions; groaning, struggling. Felix was extracting himself from the cockpit. His face was ruined with pain. The scene was all wrong. He squinted at it, confused, as he struggled to free himself from his own restraints. The control panel was too close to the hatch. The windscreen was smashed in, and the cockpit was littered with snow and more of that strange white rock, mixed with blood. Felix was pulling himself from behind the pilot’s seat. He staggered out and braced himself on a seat, clutching his arm to his side. Jakob stood up, and fell over. He was dizzy and the V-Lander sat at a horrible angle.

“OK?, Oh-Kay?” Felix panted, looking confused.

“Felix?” Jenny’s voice wavered.

“’M’ OK.” Tanner stammered. “Your arm?”

“Broken, I think,” Felix grimaced.

Jakob had recovered himself, “Gordon and Sheila?” he asked, glancing at the cockpit. Felix shook his head, his lips tight, his chin falling slightly. Jenny let a low wail escape. Jakob looked into the cockpit, not wanting to believe. There, in the confusion, he managed to pick out their hands. Gordon’s lay half buried in the snow on the control panel, awkwardly bent. Sheila’s hung over the armrest of the pilot’s seat, strangely perfect and unharmed. He thought about them. He thought about how he had walked in on them fucking in the shower that morning. They had just laughed and kept going. He picked up his toothbrush, and smiled at them as he walked out the door. Jakob stood there, staring at the cockpit, staring at their hands, and remembering them in the shower that morning, trapped between those moments; trapped between their lives and their deaths.